I think the Chinese government needs to severely cull the number of EV manufacturers down to four at most: BYD, SAIC, Geely Group and Chery. And give them unlimited resources to make their EV's truly world-class vehicles that comply even with the US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.

But much of what was learned from the iPhone Air will go into the iPhone 18 models arriving in March 2027. This means:

1. The back looks like iPhone 17 Pro but with only two camera sensors.
2. Larger camera plateau will mean most of the electronics will be inside the camera plateau.
3. Will use stainless steel chassis but will be a bit thinner than iPhone 16/16 Plus models from 2024.
4. Wraparound antenna will be stainless steel.
5. Will come in 6.1" and 6.6" screen sizes with just about no bezels, so the 6.1" model will be about the size of the 2017 iPhone X and the 6.6" model feels like a thicker iPhone Air.
6. Full MagSafe support including Qi2.2 support for 25 watt wireless charging.
7. Apple A20 SoC with 12 GB of RAM.
8. New silicon-carbon battery with 3,900 mAh on the 6.1" model and 4,500 mAh on the 6.6" model.
9. C2 radio modem, including mmWave support for US models.
10. N1 (or its successor) I/O chip.
11. Return of better-quality speakers.
12. USB Type C port with up to 40 watts initial charging speed and possible USB 3.2 1x1 5 gigabit/second data transfer speed.

In short, it looks like the current iPhone Pro but with only two camera sensors in back, stainless steel chassis and thinner chassis (but not as thin as iPhone Air). It will be available in multiple colors, including the colors supposed claimed for the iPhone 18 Pro models. Note the rumored haptic touch buttons won't arrive until 2028.

OMG, I'm so stealing that ;)

"Woke" simply means "I'm conservative, and the thing I'm calling 'Woke' is something that I hate". It has no well-defined meaning beyond that. I've heard things as diverse as "the concept of the Metaverse" and "removing copyrighted content so you don't get sued" described as "woke".

No call by push value or P vs NP or complexity theory etc.

So a different set of things that are also useless to the vast majority of people?

Even when Chrome adds support, we'll have to wait ages before we can actually reliably use the format without having to implement fallback logic and fallback formats for legacy browsers.

AVIF is also painfully slow. And if I recall correctly, is outperformed by JPEG XL at moderate and low compression (but - again, if I recall correctly - AVIF wins at highly compressed images). Also, AVIF faces some patent threats. And misses a lot of JPEG XL's interesting features.

A practical issue with a circle is that it is not a circle until it is finished,

That's not the reason at all, AFAIK. The reasoning is, okay, we want people to be able to move from one place to some distance place in the city at the maximum comfortable speed, which is limited by G-forces. You have some guaranteed G-forces from first accelerating and then decelerating. But if it's linear, that's your only G forces. If it's curved, however, you also have radial G-forces.

The Line's train going from one end to the other (170km) nonstop is supposed to do it in 20 minutes, aka with a mean speed of ~510 kph. Let's say a peak of 800 kph. Now if we shape that 170km into a circle, that's 54km diameter, 27km radius. From the centripetal force formula a=v^2/r, that's 222,22...^2 / 27000 ~= 1,83 m/s^2, or a constant ~0,2g to the side. This is on top of the G-forces from your acceleration and deceleration. You can probably deal with ~0,2g in a train if everyone is seated without much discomfort, though it's double what's acceptable for standing passengers. But you can eliminate that if the city is linear (at the cost of increasing the mean distance that the average person has to travel to go from one arbitrary point in the city to another)

That's not to defend this concept. Because the city doesn't need to be 170km long; you can just made it more 2d and have the distances be vastly shorter (at the cost of just needing some extra lateral travel within the city). Honestly, if I were building a "designer" city from the ground up, I'd use a PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system rather than trying to make it super-elongated.

What got me is that I don't see why this isn't readily resolved by active damping, the same systems that many tall towers now use to resist earthquakes or resonant wind forces. Big heavy weight at the top (or in this case the bottom) hooked up to actuators that make it move in an inverse direction to the sway.

Again, this is not to defend this colossal waste of money. I just don't see why there aren't ready solutions for this specific problem.

Agreed - but that said, there are space elevator alternatives, like the Lofstrom Loop / Launch Loop, which at least theoretically can be built with modern materials (and have far better properties anyway - not latitude-constrained, provides dV, vastly higher throughput, far more efficient, stores energy / can add cheap energy at off-peak times, etc). One could always "waste" money on them trying something new :)

The new stuff is under copyright.

So this is Geniza from between the First and Second Temple? Sorry, just had to ask. :)

The kinds of foods that trash your LDL predate the FDA and the United States.

In addition, the part of that money spent on computer centers will be useful even if AI doesn't pan out. It's not like investing in tulip bulbs. If AI doesn't pan out, it will just take a few years longer to pay for itself.

That said, AI will pan out. Even if there's no further development (HAH!) the current AIs will find an immense number of uses. It may well be "growing too fast", but that's not the same as worthless. (But expect well over half of the AI projects that are adopted in the next few years to fail. People don't yet understand the strengths and weaknesses. Unless, of course, AGI is actually developed. Then all bets are off because we REALLY don't understand what that woud result in.)

It's going to take more than one more efficient algorithm. OTOH, there've already been improvements in more than one algorithm. Nobody knows how far that could go, but the best evidence is that it could get a LOT more efficient. (Consider the power usage of a human brain...it uses a lot of power for an organ, but not really all that much.)