If the CEOs believe it is true, it won't matter that it is true. Reducing headcount and ending hiring is going to be their priority.

I say any company over 50 employees needs to be charged an extra AI tax for eliminating positions, above and beyond the unemployment taxes they already pay on layoffs.

I hope that you either find peace, or that otherwise that your inevitable suicide is painless.

Remember back in the early days when they were pretending that they weren't an illegal taxi service, but rather were just normal people "sharing a ride" to where they wanted to go anyway, and so called it "rideshare" to avoid prosecution?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

My level of pessimism about things like regrowing limbs has declined a lot in recent years. I mean, there's literally a treatment to regrow whole teeth in human clinical trials right now in Japan, after having past clinical trials with mice and ferrets.

In the past, "medicine" was primarily small molecules, or at best preexisting proteins. But we've entered an era where we can create arbitrary proteins to target other proteins, or to control gene expression, or all sorts of other things; the level of complexity open to us today is vastly higher than it used to be. And at the same time, our level of understanding about the machinery of bodily development has also been taking off. So it will no longer come across as such a huge shock to me if we get to the point where we can regrow body parts lost to accidents, to cancer, etc etc.

Whether someone is "curable" or not doesn't affect the GP's point. A friend of mine has ALS. He faced nonstop pressure from doctors to choose to kill himself. Believe it or not, just because you've been diagnosed with an incurable disease doesn't make you suddenly wish to not be alive. He kept pushing back (often withholding what he wanted to say, which is "If I was YOU, I'd want to die too."), and also fighting doctors on his treatment (for example, their resistance to cough machines, which have basically stopped him from drowning in his own mucus), implementing extreme backup systems for his life support equipment (he's a nuclear safety engineer), and the nonstop struggle to get his nurses to do their jobs right and to pay attention to the warning sirens (he has a life-threatening experience once every couple months thanks to them, sometimes to the point of him passing out from lack of air).

But he's gotten to see his daughter grow up, and she's grown up with a father. He's been alive for something like 12 years since his diagnosis, a decade fully paralyzed, and is hoping to outlive the doctor who told him he was going to die within a year and kept pushing him to die. He's basically online 24/7 thanks to an eye tracker, recently resumed work as an advisor to a nuclear startup, and is constantly designing (in CAD**) and "building" things (his father and paid labour function as his hands; he views the world outside his room through security cameras).

He misses food and getting to build things himself, and has drifted apart from old friends due to not being able to "meet up", but compared to not being alive, there was just no choice. Yet so many people pressured him over the years to kill himself. And he finds it maddening how many ALS patients give in to this pressure from their doctors, believing that it's impossible to live a decent life with ALS, and choose to die even though they don't really want to.

And - this must be stressed - medical institutions have an incentive to encourage ALS patients to die. Because long-term care for ALS patients is very expensive; there must be someone on-call 24/7. So while they present it as "just looking after your best interests", it's really their interest for patients to choose to die.

(1 in every 400 people will develop ALS during their lifetime, so this is not some sort of rare occurrence) (as a side note, for a disease this common, it's surprising how little funding goes into finding a cure)

** Precision mouse control is difficult for him, so he often designs shapes in text, sometimes with python scripts if I remember correctly

Sorry, I worded (or recalled) that a little wrong. She didn't originally request MAID. She was seeing a counsellor for depression, partly due to being unable to pay her rent, and the counsellor suggested MAID as a possible solution for her. That's where it seemed to go off the rails.

Most of the concern these days isn't some old notion of it being a "sin". It's concern over abuse. That is, are there children in the picture that are trying to convince an elderly person to get MAID? Or is the system incentivized to offer MAID to people who are no longer paying into the system? In one case in Canada, a woman who was getting therapy for depression because she couldn't pay rent was *offered* MAID as a solution to her problems. I think this crosses an ethical line. There's a difference between someone requesting it, and it being offered as a solution. These are difficult ethical issues, and there's no simple right/wrong answers.

Yes, and this is the main problem that needs oversight. Most people are OK with MAID if a person is in pain and won't get better, and is lucid enough to understand the decision they're making. But you're correct that a system that has an incentive to offer it to a person who isn't paying into the system and is just a cost... that's an ethical problem. There was a woman in Canada who was approved for MAID, and her reason was that she was poor and couldn't pay her rent. There's just too many cases like this in Canada, which is why the inquiry recommended improvements. I'm just saying that anyone else who wants to try this should learn from our mistakes in Canada.

In Canada the law wasn't supposed to allow MAID for people with only mental health conditions, but an inquiry determined that the system was approving it for practically anyone who asked. It needs to have proper oversight that the rules are clear and are being followed to maintain public trust.

There are some examples of good writing out there (Andor is the most recent example I can think of). But the last few years has been particularly bad. From what I've heard, there was a short-sighted push to not just hire a whole bunch of diverse young writers, but to *get rid of* the old grey haired ones. The logical consequence is that you lose the necessary mentorship to support those young writers, and teach them the craft. Exhibit A is Disney's big flop: "Wish". This was supposed to be a big 100th anniversary movie for Disney, but the animation and writing was so atrocious that people in the industry couldn't believe Disney's famed animation department would release such an amateur movie. Insiders told the same story: management pushed out all the knowledgeable experienced people and replaced them with fresh new blood.

That tax money was at least spent on useful services, such as launching satellites or moving people to and from the ISS, and which costs *much* less than the same services performed under the NASA space shuttle program. You're laughing at them because they sold you services for cheaper? Doesn't make sense to me. I think you're laughing at them because you don't like their weird CEO. Why not just criticize the CEO, and let the engineers do their thing?

Scott Manley's video points out that there's a downcomer from the header tanks that goes right down that side of the ship, and it could be an overpressure event in that downcomer line.

I once warned a manager at a smallish company that their fantasy of doing manufacturing would never happen partly because of a lack of QC and the lack of anybody with authority to shut a project down if it was not meeting spec. "We need that guy!" the manager said, and I came back, "If you had that guy you'd fire him the first time he told you something you didn't want to hear." Musk is in a pickle right now and I'm sure he really doesn't want to hear that the tank failed an X-ray inspection and the whole craft needs to be taken apart to make sure it's OK, thereby missing the launch window. And I'm sure the QC guy knows that. So as I warned that guy who once asked for my advice, this is what he got.

I don't think there's anything wrong with those sorts of general observations (I mean, who remembers dozens of phone numbers anymore now that we all have smartphones?), but that said this non-peer-reviewed study has an awful lot of problems. I mean, we can focus on the silly, embarassing mistakes (like how their methodology to suppress AI answers on Google was to append "-ai" into the search string, or how the author insisted to the press that AI summaries mentioning the model used were a hallucination, when the paper itself says what model was used). Or the style things, like how deeply unprofessional the paper is (such as the "how to read this paper"), how hyped up the language is, or the (nonfunctional) ploy to try to trick LLMs summarizing the paper. Or we can focus on the more serious stuff, like how the sample size of the critical Section 4 was a mere 9 people, all self-selected, so basically zero statistical significance; that there's so much EEG data that false positives are basically guaranteed and they talk almost nothing about their FDR correction to control for it; that essay writers were given far too little time for the task and put under time pressure, thus assuring that LLM users will be basically doing copy-paste rather than engaging with the material; that they misunderstand dDTF implications; the significant blinding failure with the teachers rating the essays being able to tell which essays were AI generated (combined with the known bias where content believed to be created by AI gets rated lower), with no normalization for what they believed to be AI, and so on.

But honestly, I'd say my biggest issue is with the general concept. They frame everything as "cognitive debt", that is, any decline in brain activity is treated as adverse. The alternative viewpoint - that this represents an increase in *cognitive efficiency* by removing extraneous load and allowing the brain to focus on core analysis - is not once considered.

To be fair, I've briefly talked with the lead author, and she took the critiques very well and was already familiar with some of them (for example, she knew her sample size was far too small), and was frustrated with some of the press coverage hyping it up like "LLMs cause brain damage!!!", which wasn't at all what she was trying to convey. Let's remember that preprints like this haven't yet gone through peer review, and - in this case - I'm sure she'll improve the work with time.

It's not the message. But if you want to put a message in your movie, it needs to be *shown* instead of *told*. Show me something that gets me thinking about it, and let me come to my own conclusion. Of course that's much harder to write than just telling the audience what you want them to think. That's why we need good writers.