I feel bad for entry-level folks -- though continually surprised how many of them outsource so much of their thinking to AI themselves. It seems like most college students cheat with AI, making them less useful as entry-level employees.

I've often wondered if remote screening would put an end to this.

Imagine a paid service where the company serves as your window into the internet and composes your HTML and sends it to you as an image displayed by their app. You could magnify or smallify the image as needed, and the app would send mouse and keyboard events back to the company to be forwarded on your behalf.

It's not a fully formed idea, you would also need to package and send audio, deal with credit card payments, and so on, but for people with fast internet access this might be a doable solution.

(Of note: it's like a VPN, but the HTML compositing on the remote computer is an additional layer. A VPN service could randomize the output portal per session, but that's already a feature of VPNs.)

An advantage of this is that almost all the system configuration fingerprinting would be inaccessible to the wider world, if a breech happens none of your private files are available on the remote computer to be stolen, and a number of security guardrails could be implemented, such as ensuring that mouse events are short, keypress events contain only keypress information, only image information is displayed, and so on

A sophisticated client system might even incorporate multiple user identities per client user, keyed to a specific website. Your internet facing information could be different when visiting Amazon.com, as compared to WalMart.com.

VPNs aren't that expensive, and they're used by people who want the value of an extra level of security.

For most web browsing, this might be an extra level of anonymity for people who would value that extra level.

That last one really chaps my hide. Those mountains of fake drama posts punctuated by the 'negative parallelism' structure (now I have a name for the thing I hate.) It's everywhere and it's infuriating.

All you can do is try to ignore it and focus on your own (AI-free) stuff. Of course anything you post online will then become free AI fodder. It's hard to get away from it.

And you think the fact that carbon dioxide has steadily increased over the past 150 years or as we pump a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a coincidence? You honestly believe that there is zero connection between pumping gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and there being gigatons more carbon dioxide in the air than pre-industrial times? Completely unrelated events?

Yes it makes use of the thumbwheels, but that's missing the point. You have to go to the touch screen first before being able to do ANY of that. Sure, it's fine once you're in that mode for the scrollwheels, but getting there is completely obnoxious when you're also trying to drive.

Go to the screen...menu -> controls -> mirror icon. Adjust one. Fumble with screen to select the other mirror, adjust.

On my Mazda3 and every other car I've owned it's a selector switch and a joystick on the door. Very intuitive and within easy reach without ever looking at it. They've been that way since the 80s when power mirrors came to the masses. My '85 Celica had the same setup.

AC? If it's not in the little controls in the bottom corner you have to flip-up the larger control screen, and do weird pinchy things with your fingers to adjust the vents, looking at the screen while driving. Fumble for the fan speed at the bottom of the screen. Try to slide around to adjust the temperature at the bottom of the screen.

Compare to conventional car with knobs where you can take one glance at where your hand is going and do it by feel.

There are reasons why certain things are the way they are. It's because a company spent a LOT of time doing ergonomic studies and trials. I hate it when people throw out all that work in lieu of something else just because it's different, without a lot of thought and study first. It's putting the cart before the horse.

"OK, what would you do if you couldn't have any buttons, how could you make it suck less?" I feel they're working backwards from 'terrible' to 'only mostly terrible'. Not much of an improvement.

She wanted it, and she actually likes it. I found it ridiculous when I drove it, but she likes all the creature comforts. More power to her, I just avoid it. I think I'm a more of a driver-centric experience sort of person. She likes all the bling and frilly features and does not drive as much as I do.

Everything in this space lately has been a huge turnoff. Modern cars were never so physically capable, safe, and smooth handling, and yet they are absolute garbage in the human interface department. Giant touchscreens and gadgets are the equivalent of chrome and giant tailfins gone amok in the 1950s.

Quite happy with my 2016-era Mazda with a basic infotainment setup, bluetooth to my phone which has everything I need. My truck that I use to haul things occasionally is 26 years old. I have a bluetooth to cassette adapter in that one (a lawful-evil wedding of technology) and yet it works fine.

The wife has a Tesla, and while it has an amazing powertrain, it is just so aggravating to interface with in so many ways. No buttons for the mirrors. No buttons for the wiper. (there's one button on the end of a stalk to activate the wiper+spray automatic thing) If you leave the auto-wiper on it randomly activates and smears the windshield in the driest of weather. The door handles are terrible. The lack of any kind of physical controls for climate and entertainment is terrible. It is super distracting to try to do anything while driving. It calls home to mother and reports on everything you're doing. The auto dimming mirror, like all auto-dimming mirrors, doesn't dim enough nor when you want it to. The adaptive cruise control constantly slams on the brakes on highways with grade level intersections or if you're coming up on a hump on a road that hasn't been graded flat. The insurance is sky high. The tires wear out quickly due to the weight, and are very expensive. Anything saved in gas is made up for in those other things.

You can see where they had all these ideas and just didn't think them through. Whereas traditional auto manufacturers understand a lot of these things and even on their electric offerings still have plenty of physical buttons and not-ridiculous interface peculiarities. I got a ride in a friend's Hyundai Ioniq5 a little ago and it was great. Felt like a regular car with lots of buttons. But they are priced as such that any savings in gas is made up for in the overall cost of ownership of the car. So you're not doing it for that, you're doing it just to have the other features of an electric car or feel better about yourself. I don't feel it's worth it for that. My cars are paid for and the daily driver is absurdly cheap to fuel and maintain, so I'll stick with it until some sanity returns to the modern car market. (unlikely...)

The real issue is that the packaging process used to create vaccines in quantity is a process where you mix a tank of mRNA with a tank of other stuff and get a tank of lipid nanoparticles. Getting different mRNA in each dose means you only get one patient's vaccine per time you start and stop the machine. There's also a step where one copy of mRNA is used to make a macroscopic quantity of copies in a bioreactor that needs to be flushed in between different sequences, but can just run when making enough of the same thing for a large population. It's likely that the cost for each different sequence will come down if it's worth designing and building equipment that switches every dose, but there's an intermediate time between proving that the treatment is useful and being able to provide it in a cost-effective way.

It's clearly all the superfans who hear that there's a new album and immediately drive into their local record store. (Rather than doing the sensible, calm thing and entering the store on foot.)

No, their argument is "because Democrat bias".

I don't want my tax money going to politicized institutions, period. I don't want my tax money supporting one side *or* the other, government support should be politically neutral.

The airwaves are a public resource, the government is supposed to manage that resource for the public good.

"One sided" is not the public good. About half the country is conservative, there used to be rules about political bias, it was abolished in 1987, and this has led to the sorry state of affairs we have now.

MSM is unending, incessant propaganda. Rage bait intended to persuade rather than inform.

If it's not going to use the public resource for the public good, then the MSM shouldn't be using that public resource.

(Of note: Fox news is an internet/cable channel, and does not require a broadcast license.)

Since invariably, you still need to carry a physical ID for the most serious of applications, according to the article, it's completely pointless.

There are several breakthroughs on the near horizon that will help.

First up is Commonwealth Fusion, based on a technology breakthrough in 2011 is planning to have net gain sometime in 2027 (delayed from "latter part of 2026"), and is so certain of the results that they are building a commercial fusion plant in Virginia... and have already purchased (IIRC) the land and are in the permitting stage. (More info.

Second up is Tesla Robotics, which is putting the transformer model into a physical robot, so that it can do physically what the LLM chatbot can do with words. For all the discussion about AI and whether it's intelligent or any good or whatnot, it's obvious that AI systems are *useful* at glueing words together. Robots will give us access to lots of cheap labor, and part of that will be robots that to cleanup work for humans. Picking up garbage on roadways, going through landfills and sorting, grabbing bits of rope and plastic from shorelines comes to mind(*).

And finally, Verdox, has figured out a way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere electrochemically. Their system works in the manner of an oxygen concentrator that you may have seen people wheeling around (except it's electrochemical and not physical). They claim their system is efficient at extracting CO2 at atmospheric pressure, which is wildly more efficient than distillation, which is our current method.

I figure in about 50 years we should be well on our way to fixing these civilizational problems. Robots powered by AI and cheap energy, running around doing all the cleanup work that humans don't want to do.

(Cue the climate alarmists who run around and screech about "it's not enough!" and "it'll be too late by then".)

(Note that Tesla has designed its own AI processor chip and is building a semiconductor fab plant that will be able to make them in bulk. Their combination of robotics and AI processing chip will be wildly valuable in the future.)

With their COVID vaccine, the first time was the highest dose they knew would have only acceptable side effects, and they reduced it for the next iteration when they saw how effective it was. (If you remember the myocarditis rare side effect, that was only seen with the first version.) I would guess that the next step is backing off on the dosage to reduce the side effects now that they have results on effectiveness, which will also let them make a better case for younger people at less risk from the flu.

You enjoy your horse dewormer, I'll take the mRNA gene-editing.

What he (Dolgov) is saying is a belief that stems from rationalization. It *seems* like it's a proof because that's how he's phrasing it, but in the final analysis he's a biased observer expressing an opinion and bolstering it with a rationalization.

It's what we get every time we ask an expert for advice about something they don't directly know. Ask a physicist about dark energy, or a doctor about your unusual symptom, or a nutritionist about what you eat, or an economist about whether the Fed should lower rates... you'll get a reasonable sounding answer backed by rationalization.

We don't have proof that a computer can self-drive using only cameras (and not "computer can do what a brain does", which is a much wider problem set), but we have abundant statistical evidence that it can.

Tesla claims claims (mid 2026) that self driving has about 1/7 of the collisions of human driving. Fully deployed FSD would reduce driving fatalities by 90%.

While not a proof in the inductive-logic sense, it's probably good enough to become general consensus. Given the enormous amount of data they train on (10 billion miles driven?), I suspect the p-value is astronomically small.

And of note, I recently purchased a Tesla with self driving. The system requires you to be attentive while it's active, but I can say with complete honesty that full self driving is here now.

And it works. It'll go into a crowded parking lot and back itself into a parking space, it'll correctly navigate lane closures and safety cone situations, and just yesterday it correctly stopped for a road worker holding a stop sign, waited, and then proceeded when he turned the sign to "slow".

The reason I got the car is because a friend kept badgering me about... of all things... getting old. Our population is aging, and old people driving is a constant source of problems. Having a way for them to get around without being a danger to others seems like a good thing.

Oh, and coming off a day hike or a day of physical labor or something and being really tired it's nice to be able to hit the "start self driving" and have the thing take me completely home because I'm really beat and not very attentive.