It's quite amazing that something like easily accessible mechanical door releases are not mandated in the US, but are mandated in China. I never thought we'd ever be in this kind of situation where a dictatorship is prioritizing safety over our democracy.

If an American safety official tried to mandate this... one can imagine the appeals to over-regulation and corporate freedom to innovate being infringed. And 50 years after Buckley vs Valeo (it limited direct contributions to politicians, but said unlimited individual spending was allowed, and began the "money is speech" paradigm). And 16 years after Citizens United which allowed unlimited corporate spending on elections.

Gerrymandering (allowing politicians to choose their voters via adept drawing of districts, instead of voters choosing their politicians) and de facto uncontrolled money in politics (see Sheldon Adelson spending 10s to 100's of millions of dollars on political races) is leading this country towards oligarchy and feudalism. The rights and freedom earned through blood and toil are being drained away via complex and secretive election rules.

I've not touched the HVAC settings in my car in 2 years now. It's the same summer, winter, rain snow or shine. As it should be. You know how you're dressed when you get in a car, there's no reason you can't set the desired comfort level before you drive off.

It was 9F / -13 C the other morning when I got to my car. I get in with a winter coat, start the car, wait a couple of minutes, then drive off. Heater air becomes hot after several minutes. After I warm up a bit, I want to turn down the heat, what with wearing the coat in the 9F temperatures. When I take the coat off and hang it up in the back seat for the next leg, I want the heat up higher.

Or... in summer, in 90F / 32 C temperatures, getting back to the car after working outside. People want to cool down fast. Blowing cold air helps that. Once they've cooled down, then they dial back the AC.

Or they just like the feeling of hot or cold air blowing on some part of their body.

People want the ability to vary the temperature in their car. They've had the ability and still do (via touchscreen) since car HVAC was introduced. Thinking up use cases for this scenario is trivially easy.

State legislators are easy to buy and not that expensive, like federal politicians. I'll bet the data brokers don't have an association in California. If they form that, and shell out some cash to legislators, this law will be rolled back.

Just FYI... the words "Jesus" or "Christ" are nowhere in the founding documents (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights).

There's the Newtonian world, which we can experience and intuitively understand with our five senses.
There's the quantum world, which defies intuition, and we cannot directly experience.
There's the information world, which we do experience, but with information being intangible, have difficulty thinking about.

Light. Time. Gravity. We experience them but they are intangible. Information is the same way.

"How to make a bundt cake" is information. Does it exist only in the context of life? Did it always exist, even in the time of dinosaurs?

There's the "Black hole information paradox." It seems to suggest that the universe should be playable both forward in time, and reverse. How does the basic information about particles map to information about bundt cakes?

The Platonic information world - how does that map onto reality? Does that have any relation to life?

Life does two things - create entropy and process and accrue information. What are the implications?

I have no idea. Just some questions I've been trying to formulate.

If they're not making it clear to people at purchase that the advertised price is not the full price, it's straight up bait and switch (the advertised price is the bait; the subscription and additional revenue stream is the price switch).

An LLM is, at is core, a database. It's queried with plain English and responds in kind. It's an amazing tool. But it's a simulacrum in terms of appearing to be a human with intent and deviousness.

I think LLMs are going to be big, real big, because they are a new, more effective way of information dissemination, similar to the relational database debut in the 1970's. An absolutely amazing tool. But pushing the "simulacrum effect" of LLM's to make non-technical people think they are anything but a database is... at best disingenuous.

Initially, there was an intense media flood-the-zone campaign blaming pilot incompetence when the Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302 went down due to the faulty MCAS system on the 737 Max. So much so that I was talking to a casual observer who said it was the pilots' fault.

Big corporations (and lobbying associations) do two things for media: 1) make their jobs easier by giving them pre-written stories (now we have AI generated) making generating content easier; and 2) paying them via advertising. Most people do not understand the political-corporate-media ecosystem.

In Maryland, half the covid deaths came from the vaccinated, and half from the unvaccinated populations.

Half the deaths came from the 90 percent who were vaccinated; half came from the 10 percent that were not.

I leave the math to the reader (out of a hundred people, 10 die. Five from group 1, which has 90 people, and five from group 2, which has 10 people).

Since taxes are required by the government, and go to fund the government, the government should be doing everything it can to make filing easy and accurate.

A good tax filing platform, like a road, is a public good. However, private companies also make tax filing platforms, and one provided by the government is competition to them, and reduces profit. So, it makes sense they would try to eliminate the government option. They can privatize and profit from this public good.

Government is influenced by everyone from individual citizens to large corporations, via money. I have found this page, at Open Secrets, to be very useful in understanding all the ways that legal constructs (businesses, unions, etc) and people can direct money to the government: https://www.opensecrets.org/resources/learn/glossary

They have all the solutions to hard lessons learned written in C for reference, so if they aren't lazy, this shouldn't be too bad.

Reading existing code is hard. Editing it without introducing regressions is harder. That's why IMO there's always a desire to sweep the board clean and start anew. That is more fun, and easier, than figuring out the nuances of the existing code. Programmers often don't want to be maintenance programmers. If you apply this analogy to buildings, it's the desire to raze and rebuild, rather than enhance existing structures.

I can't even opt-out. When I renewed my lease last year they added an addendum that they had the right to charge fees for included utilities. Guess what's a "utility" now? Internet.

All these costs have always been paid in rent. Landlords came up with some kind of a narrative to convince state legislatures to let them add additional ad hoc fees on top of the advertised rent, which they call utility fees (or "RUBS" fees), which are completely unrelated to any tenant's usage of any utility. Despite any narrative, these are just additional fees on top of rent, and are collected as rent. The purpose is to hide the true cost of rent (these fees aren't revealed till it's time to pay, per the narrative). Tenants now and have always paid every landlord expense plus profit. It's corrupt legislatures that are to credit for this. Not every state allows it - some have always banned it (e.g. North Carolina), some have recently outlawed it, and others have had it outlawed.