Dr. Aubrey De Grey has been pursuing a "cure" for aging for decades. First through SENS Institute, and now with LEV Foundation. He believes that the key to rejuvenation is the repair of seven distinct kinds of damage that represent aging: cell loss, cell senescence, extracellular protein cross-linking, nuclear DNA mutations, mitochondrial DNA mutations, and the accumulation of “garbage” inside as well as outside cells.

In 2022 he stated that there was a 50% chance that we'll make advances that increase longevity faster that we'll age. An inflection point he calls "Longevity Escape Velocity". I don't think it will happen in my lifetime, sadly, but I do think it will happen in the next 100-200 years.

As opposed to in-person e-commerce? Isn't e-commerce, by definition, virtual?

I cancelled mine when they started advertising on Prime Video unless I paid additional extortion money.

I've never bought anything on their platform and thought, "Damn, I wish this would arrive faster!" What I have thought though is why do I have to wade through a sea of mediocre products from companies named AAXSYZBBTAN skirting trademark delays, all selling the same product from the same manufacturer. Why is Amazon making products and selling them in an attempt to put the vendors who pay for Amazon services out of business. Why after requesting my unshipped product sold on Amazon using FBA, did 60% of my products come back damaged?

Just creating a list of brands to never purchase. Bear with a moment. That was G.M., Honda, Kia, and Hyundai? Okay, got it. Thank you.

That really sucks. The Kia EV6 was close to the top of my list of next vehicles to purchase, but now it's on a different list.

I'm not an off-grid living doomsday prepper type who transacts in cash with the security threads pulled out, but damn, stuff like this makes wonder if I might just be better off using a dumb flip phone. If nothing else, it would probably force me to live more "in the moment".

Then again, it would also force me to go back to terrestrial radio for music in the car. I...I don't think I can do that.

/puts on tinfoil hat

I am seeing a lot of phrases like "cooling EV sales" or "EV sales slump" and I can't help but wonder if maybe it has something to do with the utterly INSANE dealer markups framed as "market adjustments"? When I see people talking about slowing EV sales, no one ever seems to address that particular elephant in the room.

Of course EV sales are slowing. Why would anyone buy a vehicle that's marked up an extra $5-15,000 for no reason? No, I think this is a coordinated effort on the part of dealers because they do not want to transition from ICE to EV for the obvious reason of losing maintenance/repair; a source of revenue they have already spent a significant amount of capital in pursuing. Where I live, there is a very large dealer that specializes in higher-end brands like Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, etc. Drive by their maintenance buildings (there are multiple) and you'll see a sea of BMWs waiting for repair. BMW repair alone appears to take up about an 1/8 of the campus. If BWM were to convert their fleet to EV, that sea would eventually become a pond and the dealer would have an empty building filled with unused equipment they couldn't sell off.

Combine that with the outsized protection and influence that auto dealers have at the state level, and it feels like they not only have vested interest in slowing/stopping EV adoption but the ability to make that happen. I think they are also seeing the writing on the wall in terms of direct-to-consumer sales for the industry. That's probably going to happen in the next 50 years and they are doing everything they can to stop that as well.

TELUS writes that the purpose is to “capture a broad cross-section of participants targeting various combinations of demographics, with the goal of ensuring that our customer's services, and derived products, are equally representative of a diverse set of end-users.”

Really? Cause it sounds more like you are trying to train AI to recognize and work around physical methods of thwarting facial recognition.

Queue the think of the children plea.

A sleezy business that'll sell you junk and that skimps on safety and quality.

Well, that is definitely true. Can't wait to see a car sold by "WANHOMETEKBBB", the exterior of which suspiciously looks exactly like a Honda Accord but is selling for 75% the MSRP.

1. Car Dealerships

I was recently tasked with trying to pull our mishmash of team documentation into a single, cohesive, web-friendly knowledge base. Notion came up among others. Watching the elevator pitch video though, it's a collaboration tool that's essentially a combination of SharePoint, Outlook, Project, and Teams. Looking at the Loop video, it's also a combination of SharePoint, Outlook, Project, and Teams...so I'm not sure why MS is making it other than to cannibalize marketshare from those products.

As an aside, if anyone has a recommendation for a good application that doesn't try to be too much more than a repo for team-based info (contacts, products, how-to's, etc.), I'd love to hear it. I'm currently using SharePoint pages to make a wiki, but it's a bit clunky and I fear I wouldn't get buy-in from some. I've also considered GitHub markdown, but that plus VSC would be too much of a learning curve for some (even though they should be using it). Another team uses Confluence, but that's also a collab tool and I feel like that's just too much noise.

Generative AI has already cemented a place in illustration work, though I would caution anyone thinking of using it for commercial purposes. It's valuable though both as a way to communicate your needs to a human illustrator, and it's awesome for prototyping.

But I haven't seen any evidence that AI is anywhere close to replacing a graphic artist...yet. All it can do is create web graphics. Even if all you're doing is web content, it's still not great at it. A real GD has to go through and correct the results. If you're doing that, you might as well just hire them to do the whole thing correctly from the start.

I think this study just reflects everyone checking out what AI can do as a tool. Most probably found that while amazing, it doesn't add much in practice.

Except for prototyping. It's awesome for that.

I don't want to speak to any of that, but still, they are cool!

I saw the headline and thought this would be about a physicist feeling they had proven the block universe/eternalism.
In which case I'd point out that, of course you had a choice to write the comment, it's just that the choice you made was the one you were always going to make.

Maybe Sapolsky is a neuroscientist/philosopher who is coming at Eternalism from a biological perspective? Let me (and Sabine Hossenfelder) know if he can prove all of time in its infinite divisibility exists simultaneously.

I think this one of those situations where looking at an event through the lens of how people feel about a certain subject can change how that event is interpreted.

Fauci's statement was aired on 2020-03-08. I didn't dig into when it was recorded, but I'm assuming it takes a least a week to edit and air an episode. So very early days in the pandemic, and well before the hospitals were getting overwhelmed with patients (side note, I work in large-scale health care).

At about 10 seconds into this video excerpt of the interview, Fauci states, "The masks are important for someone who's infected to prevent them from infecting someone else."

From my point of view, that brings us to the biggest problem with understanding and reporting on the mask mandate. It was never about keeping the wearer from getting Covid-19, it was only ever about reducing the speed at which the virus spread, so that hospitals could keep up. That's it, and it does work. Even the crappy cloth ones help a little in that effort. Unless all standards are followed and using N95 type masks, they don't prevent anyone from getting a virus, but it will mean the rate at which a virus spreads across a population is slowed.

I can't tell you how many times I heard low-level, undereducated health care workers say in private something like "It should be MY choice!" What??? Your choice to infect other people? Your choice to cripple the US health care system and make your job vastly more difficult? Your choice to send the elderly to the ICU? No, they meant their choice as to whether or not they get infected. Dumb, but sure it's their choice. That's not what the mask mandate was about and the fact that they were saying that indicates they had no idea what the masks were really for.

In order to push their stock price through increased ad revenue, some news organizations chose to intentionally misreport mask use to make it seem like an attack on personal liberty when they should have framed it as a nation coming together to bolster the health and well-being of the citizenry. They did this even as their most vocal talking heads were fearful of contracting the virus and strictly adhering to the mask mandate.

But people want to belong to tribes, regardless of how harmful they are.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but I nearly forgot the area of their biggest deficiency: Management. Please put some of your smart people to work in that role. In fact, do that first and the rest of the issues may solve themselves.