NASA has been able to make rockets that don't blow up since the 1960's.

Why can't the Australians do it? Was that knowledge filed away in a locked cabinet somewhere, or has rocket science made no strides in the past half century? Why isn't rocket design a "trivial" problem in engineering?

If they took the same approach to computer science, the Australians would still be trying to refine silicon from sand.

He's wrong about the Facebook part. The SocialFixer extension for Firefox does a huge amount of stuff for the Facebook experience and it's still active and usable. I couldn't use FB without it. You'll see like 10 'suggested' items blocked and minimized, and then actual friends' posts. It's so helpful. I'm reminded of what a garbage dump FB is when I occasionally use the app on my phone, which is the full unfiltered experience the way they want you to see it. It's all ads and suggested posts. SocialFixer allows me to continue using Facebook as a place to connect with friends and groups with shared interests, as it was in the earlier days.

Growing up in the Midwest, we were very much aware that nuclear war could end humanity's existence with scarcely more than a half hour of warning. Climate change is positively tame by comparison.

What these researchers misunderstand is that most people are not so privileged that climate change even makes the list of their concerns. It's not that they don't care, but that they just don't have the time or money to do anything effective.

The average person cannot afford an electric car.

The average person doesn't own a home, but if they did would still be unable to afford solar panels.

The average person can't work from home, because their employer insists they come into the office.

The average person can't live without a car, because America was designed and zoned for car traffic. If every American decided to use public transportation tomorrow, there wouldn't be enough trains or busses for everyone.

The average person can't grow their own food, because they don't own (enough) land. Even if they did, modern agriculture - from fertilizers to harvesting and transportation - depends on diesel fuel.

Given that most governments are owned by the fossil fuel companies, it is rather naive to expect governments to do anything more than token measures to address climate change.

It strikes me as a bit odd that people who are rather astute at predicting climate 50 to 100 years into the future can't predict that, in spite of their polemics, nothing meaningful will be done about climate change. Individuals lack the power, and governments lack the incentive. It seems to me that the old joke about consulting rings true for climate science: if you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem.

Mazda's legacy button layouts plus the dial are really great. I have a 3rd Gen Mazda3 and it's nearly perfect. There is a touch screen but it's never used. The dial turns and also pushes for select, and there are some other buttons around it for getting back out of menus and a home button, and some shortcuts for various things. All within comfortable reach just between the gear selector and parking brake (real mechanical parking brake handle!) without having to raise your arm and glance away from the road to make sure you're finding a button. It's all done by feel.

On the steering wheel is volume, track skip (which works in Spotify for it's normal 15 second skip function forward or backward to skip through commercials) and cruise control. Also a phone answer and hang up button.

About the only complaint I have is the A/C fan speed is two buttons rather than a knob, but at least the temp adjust is a big fat knob. They gave up room for a fan knob in exchange for dual temperature knobs for passenger and driver.

The Gen 4 Mazdas are similar, with better Android Auto / Car Play integration and a nicer screen, and are still fairly new, a lot of low mileage cars still available through CarMax, etc.

If they are going to rely on voice commands I'm done. I don't talk to machines. If it's still usable via buttons, fine.

My wife has a Tesla and the UI experience is awful. Absolutely awful. The only good thing about it is the drivetrain. It's like owning a supercar in terms of acceleration. Other than that, I would consider Teslas to be actively driver-hostile. I avoid driving it as much as possible. I hope they will eventually be considered a quirky novelty relegated to the dustbin of history, while more traditional button interfaces make a comeback.

First of all, the amount of money that gets back to the creator is vanishingly small compared to what's kept by the cartel. While you think you're supporting the creators when you pay your license, you're really just supporting a vast army of middlemen leaching the money out. I'll say that to the apologists in this thread.

Secondly, they'll hit you up for a license even if you're just playing over the air radio. A radio station that's already paid a license and is playing advertising to pay for it. They will blatantly double dip. This happened to me when I owned a cafe / art gallery a long time ago.

I'm all for supporting the aritsts, but the system as it exists is seriously broken.

I'll add my voice to the chorus of "who cares about pocket, firefox works great" and it's the best platform to load up on anti-tracking, anti-adware, anti-spyware plugins and go surfing.

If firefox as a product degrades enough, someone most likely will come up with a viable replacement. The fact that there hasn't been a huge effort put into one shows that Firefox is still a very viable platform. You can change / disable just about anything that bothers you, and it has robust extension support. Those are the two most important things. Performance is just fine. I'm not exactly looking for top speed when running AdBlockPlus, Ublock, Social Fixer for Facebook, etc. Those are going to slow things down a bit and that's just fine. I mean c'mon, my first experience getting online was with a 300 baud modem, I can't really complain. I have synchronous gigabit fiber at home now, which is astonishing. A little rendering lag from FF is not going to bother me.

In fact, the best thing to do is to use the gaps between cars to absorb speed differences so as to allow ALL traffic to flow more smoothly

I agree with you, and I find that this is easier to do in a manual because the acceleration is instantaneous. I have found that I don't have to accelerate as hard if the response is immediate, versus delayed. I don't have to brake as hard because I start slowing as soon as I back off the gas.

With most automatics, the off-pedal cruising speed is 20 to 25 mph, which means that driving any slower than that requires riding the brake. From behind, a slow, steadily moving automatic appears the same as one which is stopping, or stopped. So they create a situation in which drivers behind a steady 15mph automatic vehicle have a harder time estimating traffic speed - which leads to the inevitable traffic accordion.

Many years ago, when Motorola was in buyout talks with Google, they used Google docs extensively. One can only wonder if Google got a better deal because they were able to read Motorola's internal discussions. I don't know if they used Google docs for the discussions, but I do know there were quite a few people at the company who expressed no concern for the possibility that Google docs could leak proprietary information.

One of my vehicles has an automatic transmission, and the other, a manual. The car with the automatic transmission has about twice the horsepower of the manual, but drives as if it's twice as heavy.

What I've noticed is that when driving the manual in heavy traffic, I use the brakes much less than with the automatic; one pedal both brakes and accelerates. Because I can keep the engine in its power band when crawling along in traffic, I get instant acceleration when traffic speeds up again. But with the automatic, the "delay, downshift, overaccelerate" conniption fit of the automatic transmission often allows other drivers the space to cut in front of me.

The Mazda3 is available as a 6 speed manual if you are still looking for a fun manual car in general.

Funny thing though, now manuals are typically only available with premium trim levels aimed at enthusiasts, whereas before the cheapest version of a car was the version with the manual transmission.

Would a plugin that blocks tracking pixels fix the problem? I use firefox for android with Ublock Origin installed when I browse on the phone. I do use the facebook app when I access it on the phone, as they have made the mobile browser experience fairly terrible in comparison (on purpose.)

So instead of teaching people to write concise, to-the-point emails, we instead let them ramble on and use AI to communicate what they really intended to say.

This doesn't solve the TLDR problem, it only makes it worse by encouraging people to waste time writing emails that others simply won't read.

In other words, information known to most graduates of the physical sciences, but somehow illegal to disseminate outside of the collegiate environment...

I find it rather curious that Britain has not only made certain knowledge illegal, but has managed to convince the press that merely knowing certain things can threaten their very safety.

Thanks I'll check that out.

If a model produces better answers when it is given more time to think, one can presume that it doesn't understand when it has actually found the answer to a problem, but is instead weighing incomplete options against the time remaining.

A truly thinking agent would recognize when it has the solution to a problem, and would be able to signal that it needed more time to complete the answer if it hasn't found the answer and has options yet unexplored. And it would also be able to understand if it had not reached a correct answer after trying all of its possible options. It seems that what passes for deep thinking here is nothing more than tuning time constraints so that the agent gets most of the answers correct, rather than actually building an agent which can recognize when it is right, when it is wrong, and when it needs more time.