how much is the cheapest TV today compared to the 90s

You can't eat your TV. You can't drive your TV to the grocery store. You can't take your TV into the bank and get a home loan, nor can you take your TV to a home seller and get a reasonable price. You can't hand it to the university and be handed back an education. You can't give your doctor your TV and receive surgical or even preventive care or the meds you need.

Your problem (other than the root one of spewing disingenuous nonsense) is that you're looking at the pricing in the electronics sector and pretending it's representative of the extremely high basic living costs I called out (which of course it is not) — nowhere did I say anything about either the pricing of electronics or the need for a TV to achieve a reasonable cost of living. Nor should you have. But here we are.

"Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate" shouldn't come as a shock to anyone

Older does tend to mean wiser, after all. Well... okay, for some people.

Destroying middle class has predictable consequence of tanking birth rate. News at 11.

"We must have constant inflation or people might, you know, save!"

Then... basics cost (a lot) more and mid- to low-tier wages don't even come close to keeping up

Brutal housing, education, medical, food, vehicle, and fuel costs, crushing taxes on the lower tier workers... gee, sounds like a great circumstance to bring some ever-more-expensive rug rats into.

The "American Dream" is deader than Trump's diaper contents for a large swath of those of an age to be pumping out crotch goblins. But hey: The stock market is doing Great!

Or perhaps it's just that no one wants to hump someone with their pants falling off their butt — or otherwise dressing like a refugee.

Obligatory: get off my lawn.

That’s why you go whole newton and mount two opposing shotguns. By firing in opposite directions at the same instant with shot that scatters and loses most of the damage past a hundred yards the dog can more easily spray down everything in the area without falling over.

That does not undo what the earlier false statement professes. What’s not in the article is the guy is a crank who professes in the tired light hypothesis (if you want details explained to you by an actual scientist) and it really came down to releasing results before proper calibration of jwst data. No serious scientist believes the universe is double the age since the Big Bang, this has been debunked in the previous 8 slashdot articles on the same subject just since 2020. Not to say the universe may not be expanding asymmetrically, but the article is trash and frames it as clickbait that distorts the actual truth.

“right down to the over-a-century-old theory that it's expanding at a constant rate.”

I know reading the article is not really expected, but not reading the summary goes a bit far. If the journalists weren’t so terrible at writing these things they would have used “right down to the over-a-century-old theory that it's expanding symmetrically”.

Every change looks like corruption in the eyes of people who don't like it.

And corruption looks like evolution to some people.

Personally, I'm in favor of words meaning as much of the same thing over time as possible. It enhances communication and understanding. If you need a new meaning, you either need a new word or you need to explain yourself at a bit more length. Lest you "decimate" (cough) the listener's/reader's understanding... you get me?

First off no actual scientist thought it was even a constant for decades at least. It’s more like saying a car went from stopped at a light to some speed x a block later giving it an average acceleration of y. This is the Hubble expansion, simply a current measurement of the receding velocity of far off things in the universe whose rate are correlated to their distance in a rather linear relationship. In fact, most believe there was a period of inflation faster than light early on to account for how balanced and equal disparate sections of the universe are, despite no time for equilibrium to occur since the Big Bang.

Currently, we can’t even agree on this average acceleration because measuring expansion by cosmic markers of stars like cephid variables and measuring it by the cosmic microwave background give conflicting results. This is called the hubble tension and underlines how we don’t have a handle on even gross measurements yet.

In 1998 it was discovered the universe was actually accelerating in its expansion, the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Saul Perlmutter at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Brian Schmidt at the Australian National Lab and Adam Reiss at Johns Hopkins University for their discovery. Until then everyone was hung up on the universe slowing down its expansion, falling back in on itself, expanding forever but never reaching a critical size, or continuing to expand forever but doing so more and more slowly. Turns out it was none of them at all.

It’s not a problem if it’s 10-1 or even 50-1 but the department received something around 300 to 500 applicants and not one was female. 500-1 is a problem. This is true if for no other reason than societal pressure is forcing away a sizable chunk of the brightest people and what we are left with is less than what could have been.

Those are also issues. The main thing is that it’s more of a US problem than a world wide problem. It’s not like the departments were flooded with 10x as many applicants from abroad, rather it’s less than domestic applicants by about 7-1. Instead, something about our society shapes these inequalities to a degree significantly below the world average. I’m a firm believer that to optimize society for the most gain it needs to be fair and equitable for all that exist within that society. For example, excluding women from medical fields for the reason of religious based tradition alone creates a massive gap in healthcare felt by the vast majority of citizens and thus lowers productivity and GDP and the quality of life of virtually everyone directly or indirectly. Removing all these pressures present in preconceived notions that aren’t a good fit with reality would improve everyone’s quality of life, even if you don’t fall neatly into one of those categories most affected.

When I was in grad school, all the engineering and computer science departments had this problem. One year was particularly bad for the computer science department, there were no female US citizen applications. Not one.

LLMs cannot do it. Hallucination is baked-in.

LLMs alone definitely can't do it. LLMs, however, seem (to me, speaking for myself as an ML developer) to be a very likely component in an actual AI. Which, to be clear, is why I use "ML" instead of "AI", as we don't have AI yet. It's going to take other brainlike mechanisms to supervise the hugely flawed knowledge assembly that LLMs generate before we even have a chance to get there. Again, IMO.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong. No sign of that, though. :)

I'll be impressed when one of these ML engines is sophisticated enough to be able to say "I don't know" instead of just making up nonsense by stacking probabilistic sequences; also it needs to be able tell fake news from real news. Although there's an entire swath of humans who can't do that, so it'll be a while I guess. That whole "reality has a liberal bias" truism ought to be a prime training area.

While I certainly understand that the Internet and its various social media cesspools are the most readily available training ground(s), it sure leans into the "artificial stupid" thing.

Isn’t that twitters new video feature?

Its unlikely, but if someone can invent a superconductor that works up to about room temperature or above at reasonable pressure it would be possible to connect the entire worlds electrical grids together and share solar (or any type) power produced on the other side of the planet. Not that we still wouldn’t need storage, but it would completely change the game as overcapacity in areas would be solved by simple transmission instead of being too far away to be economical.