What really helped with smoking was first nicotine substitutes like patched, and second vaping.

While many people do regain weight when they come off these drugs, maybe in time we can find ways to prevent that, or find better drugs like this one that either keep the weight off or which they can just take forever and are cheap.

You make it sound like people have a free choice about their lifestyle, but that seems exceedingly unlikely given that a) three quarters of Americans are making these bad choices, despite likely knowing what the good choices are, and b) what we know about modern life and the pressures people face.

About three quarters of Americans are overweight or obese. So at most you can say some people an exceptional ability to regulate their weight effectively without assistance.

People have been arguing for years that people need to do more exercise and eat more healthy food. They have been trying to regulate food producers and advertising to make healthy eating easier and more affordable. These efforts have failed. You can argue that we should try harder, but realistically the chances of it working seem to be quite low. If medication turns out to be the way to force the issue, well I'm not going to begrudge anyone who takes that option.

I was watching a video about this recently, and it's not just Brazil. China has their own, of course, but also Europe is developing one, and so is the UK. Basically everyone wants to get away from Visa and Mastercard.

I think what really pissed off the US is that the Brazilian system only charges 0.33% per transaction, compared to 1-2% for Visa and Mastercard.

Maybe the game box should have a list of when all the licences expire, since apparently a licence is what you are "buying".

Optimius won't do any of that stuff because Musk consistently overestimates how good AI is at vision. He can't even get his cars to stop crashing into stationary objects. A decade ago he promised they would be fully self driving within months, no driver oversight required, and he's still assuming that the huge breakthrough that makes vision actually work is just around the corner and he will be the one to make it.

The method that Musk is attempting has been tried many times before, always ending in failure. You can't just teach an AI to recognize more and more objects until it becomes competent. You can't just teach it more and more facts until it understands the world. The kind of intelligence needed to do seemingly simple tasks like folding clothes is much more general than that.

Seems like an industry problem. It's ridiculous to license a car for a fixed amount of time. Back in the day, a licensed car would be in the game forever, and there was no way to turn it off. The terms have got worse for the consumer, but that was not made clear when buying the game.

For online games they could release the source code of the decade old server, and a patch to allow the use of third party ones. Or a patch to let you play the game offline.

Also remember that this is Europe, so the law on things like this is generally biased towards the weaker party, the consumer. Norms and reasonable expectations count for a lot. Having a button that says "buy" when it's actually just a temporary licence isn't very responsible.

I wonder if it's already happened. I can imagine a law firm creating an LLM based on the writings and court transcripts of a particular judge, and then using it to test out different strategies to see which is likely to be most effective with them.

It's the name of a specific technology that they call "isolates". A lightweight container system designed for this kind of application.

And then the savings can be used to bring down the cost of healthcare, right? Right?!?

It's similar to Apollo 8. Fly around the moon and return on a free return.

They don't have the lander to test, like Apollo 10 did. Presumably there will be another non-landing mission for that, which also includes insertion into lunar orbit, and then leaving again.

This time there may be an unmanned landing first though, as the two landers being developed are going to be capable of fully automated landings and take off. In fact, in the case of Starship, the landing probably has to be automated for the most part.

I'm sure Miller thinks that any qualifications they have were just the result of DEI and not hard work.

You can't reason with people like that. It's like religion, they just invent another story to explain why anything contradictory to their belief is actually confirmation of it.

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.