The fact is, most hospitals will fight cryonics companies tooth and nail until ischemia has caused irreversible (data loss) brain damage. Doctors fear and hate perceived quackery and don't like being told someone else might help this individual they're calling dead. But when cryonics is done right the body is taken at the point of heart stoppage, an artery is opened to remove blood and another one to pump in the fluid, and chemicals are pumped through the body at gradually reducing temperatures to prevent instant freezing within cells, to try and avoid ice formation by pulling water out of cells before freezing, and to gel-freeze the body all at once. I'm not sure about the blood-brain barrier problem.

Cryonics companies come in various forms of being serious and capable. Doctors imagine someone promising to take your loved one's head 3 days after death and dropping it in some LN and calling it good but most companies make a serious effort to get to the body as soon as possible and freeze it as safely as possible.

Most people who understand how cryonics are done and still oppose it do so for one of two reasons. They think technology CANNOT improve to a point it can restore a body, or sour grapes. Or some combination thereof. The first objection comes from a strange confidence that today's limitations are permanent. The second camp are people who recoil from the idea not because it is unworkable, but because they find it emotionally distasteful: the prospect of others escaping death strikes them as unfair or hubristic. Medical intervention is all well and good to these people, but only to the point it can be done immediately and doesn't depend on technologies that haven't yet been developed.

Many hold a hybrid position: publicly insisting that cryopreservation is quackery, while privately wrestling with a discomforting suspicion that it might succeed, and that rejecting it is more comfortable than confronting what that would imply. It is an oddly revealing topic. When one examines the arguments in detail, opposition to cryonics rarely hinges on the engineering challenges themselves. Rather, it hinges on one's temperament: whether one sees the future as a realm of continual possibility, or as a wall at which a human must politely stop and expire. Cryonics forces a person to declare which of those visions he actually holds.

Properly done, the preservation happens immediately after the heart stops -- meaning ischemia is minimized and revival possible from that standpoint -- and includes chemicals that prevent ice crystal formation.

lgbtqrstuv people are free from feeling judged. Slavery is freedom. War is peace.

Whether it is fast food, rent, prices at the pump, or this evolving patchwork of hotel cancellation rules, it ultimately reduces to the same underlying force: pricing power shifting toward the seller whenever consumers have limited alternatives or information asymmetry tilts the playing field. As soon as hotels realised third-party services were exploiting flexible cancellations to arbitrage room rates, they recalibrated their pricing structure to insulate revenue precisely the same way landlords adjust lease terms in tight housing markets, or fuel companies adjust margins when crude prices swing.

Consumers experience these adjustments as policy changes, but businesses experience them as price corrections to protect yield. The mechanisms differ. Non-refundable rates instead of cancellation windows, variable menu pricing instead of dollar menus, etc. but the logic is identical: once a loophole or inefficiency threatens revenue, the industry retools the rules so that the cost lands with the customer rather than the operator. On top of that you have the rising prices, often folded into the new policy because the higher price is thereby disguised. In that sense, the story here is not really about cancellation policies at all; it is about how every sector continually reshuffles the fine print to defend its margins.

I personally used the Hilton system recently and I can say they know they can charge more and be less flexible without losing customers. I'm guessing it's the same for other chains. But it may be that hotels will be more willing to allow late cancellations if a human took the time to make the reservation. i.e. they know for that person 20 different hotels aren't lined up for all but the least expensive to be cancelled.

pleading quilty

Yes: getting cash. Anonymity is a cornerstone of freedom.

All I can tell from this video is they're trying new things which, in this era of technology, is a good thing. It seems like it's missing what in humans would be called reflexes.

How on earth can you "exhaustively" deidentify millions of chat logs that could contain literally any personal details, and presumably all without OpenAI's own employees also sifting through personal information in exactly the way they're claiming would be bad if others did it?

>advocating or implementing extreme policies like... official legal state discrimination on the basis of immutable characteristics
TIL the Democratic party is far right.

When you stop every little possible cause of fires you're not preventing them. You're delaying them and making them much larger when they do happen such that they cause all their problems at once; are harder to control fight and manage; and are more likely to burn into areas that otherwise wouldn't burn.

For sure. And that's why I think it's important to distinguish harm caused despite good intentions and reasonable practices being followed from harm caused because someone did not follow reasonable practices or actively chose to cut corners.

Just my personal opinion, but given the track record in this particular industry, I think there should be demonstrable intent by decision-makers to follow good practices, not merely a lack of evidence of intent to circumvent or cut corners. This is expected in other regulated industries, compliance failures are a big deal, and for good reason. I see no reason why similar standards could not be imposed on those developing and operating autonomous vehicles, and every reason they should be given the inherent risks involved.

Maybe this will be an area where the US simply gets left behind because of the pro-car and litigious culture that seems to dominate discussions there.

Reading online discussions about driving -- admittedly a hazardous pastime if you want any facts to inform a debate -- you routinely see people from the US casually defending practices that are literally illegal and socially shunned in much of the world because they're so obviously dangerous. Combine that with the insanely oversized vehicles that a lot of drivers in the US apparently want to have and the car-centric environments that make alternative ways of getting around much less common and much less available, and that's how you get accident stats that are already far worse than much of the developed world.

But the people who will defend taking a hand off the wheel to pick up their can of drink while chatting with their partner on a call home all while driving their truck at 30mph down a narrow road full of parked cars past a school bus with kids getting out are probably going to object to being told their driving is objectively awful and far more likely to cause a death than the new self-driving technologies we're discussing here. You just don't see that kind of hubris, at least not to anything like the same degree, in most other places, so we might see more acceptance of self-driving vehicles elsewhere too.

IMHO the only sensible answer to is separate responsibility in the sense that a tragedy happened and someone has to try to help the survivors as best they can from responsibility in the sense that someone behaved inappropriately and that resulted in an avoidable tragedy happening in the first place.

It is inevitable that technology like this will result in harm to human beings sooner or later. Maybe one day we'll evolve a system that really is close to 100% safe, but I don't expect to see that in my lifetime. So it's vital to consider intent. Did the people developing the technology try to do things right and prioritise safety?

If they behaved properly and made reasonable decisions, a tragic accident might be just that. There's nothing to be gained from penalising people who were genuinely trying to make things better, made reasonable decisions, and had no intent to do anything wrong. There's still a question of how to look after the survivors who are affected. That should probably be a purely civil matter in law, and since nothing can undo the real damage, the reality is we're mostly talking about financial compensation here.

But if someone did choose to cut corners, or fail to follow approved procedures, or wilfully ignore new information that should have made something safer, particularly in the interests of personal gain or corporate profits, now we're into a whole different area. This is criminal territory, and I suspect it's going to be important for the decision-makers at the technology companies to have some personal skin in the game. There are professional ethics that apply to people like doctors and engineers and pilots, and they are personally responsible for complying with the rules of their profession. Probably there should be something similar for others who are involved with safety-critical technologies, including self-driving vehicles.