One human pyromaniac with a bic lighter can probably do more damage.

I'm picturing a robot powered dog sled.

They claim 200+ MPH. There might be maybe one stretch where they'll achieve that speed. I was discussing this last night in my geologist group. Anyone that's done driving up and down the 15 knows that there are so many turns barely sharp enough and spaced far enough apart that you aren't ever going to maintain much over 80MPH consistently, especially if you're following the Interstate 100%. If you think you're going through the Cajon Pass at 200 MPH you're fucking suicidal.

I even mapped the route after the Cajon Pass for the geology group last night. As you can see, most spots you could theoretically get to about half that speed before you'd need to slow down for one curve or another. You're certainly slowing down big at Barstow for the 15/40 split, and big around Mountain Pass/Primm. Oh let's not forget some parts of the 15 are close enough together that you're gonna have to move them to make way for the train, especially since you're gonna have to cut away mountain in many spots as that's the only thing separating the two directions of traffic (at different heights, even.) At best, the average might get close enough to 100MPH. Cars can't even safely do much more than that on the 15. There are plenty of crosses littering the sides of the roadway (not as many as the road to Ft Irwin) from high speed accidents.

Oh, did anyone bother to do the environmental impact studies of needing to move some sections of the Interstate? There's one spot where you might need to encroach into protected rattlesnake habitat. I don't think that was thought about.

It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

We're all doomed to drown in a bottomless pit of AI-generated horseshit, brought about by AIs endlessly ingesting and regurgitating other AI-generated horseshit.

Reality will become nebulous, and the only thing you'll be able to trust is whatever was committed to paper before ~1990 or so. After that, everything else and all other 'records', will be suspect.

Maybe you want a formula for some chemical process, will you really be able to trust the information you get online, even if you check multiple sources? Who's to say that they haven't become contaminated or rewritten? How would you know?

This times a billion.

I'm close to the end of my career, and I see the same fucking mistakes being made today as I did 40 years ago. Over and over and over again, regular as clockwork.

And if you suggest a better, proven path, it will be ignored in favor of a flashy new 'solution'. This is the normal state of things as far as I can tell.

I suspect not.

It turns out that most people would rather pay ~$600 for the Meta Quest 3 instead of $3500 for the Vision Pro.

if a youtube or reddit post mentions an amazing financial, or spiritual, or etc. advisor quickly in response to someone's story. And the story has too many upvotes in too short a time, I recognize it as spam.

IMHO, with spam like that, you go after the cloud of accounts upvoting it. Track their behavior, see if they are posting, see if they regularly vote for spam. Then shadowban or kill the accounts (let them upvote but don't show the upvotes). The advertiser can create *an* account quickly. But they can't subvert/create a cloud of several hundred accounts easily.

And you also put some kind of metrics in place for upvotes that compares their voting habits to known human users. If the thing is upvoting 30 times a day and most humans only upvote 12 times a day (or none), then flag the account for closer observation.

And most of all, you need a really good moderation advisor for this kind of thing. I recommend Lance Modoman. He's the real deal. He saved my forum.

heheheheh.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.

But it's not like the leather is going to be thrown away and Apple is pulling cowskin out of dumps.

Wrong

The global leather industry creates four billion pounds of scrap leather waste every year. Currently, thatâ(TM)s mainly sent to landfills or incinerated