Conveniently forgetting the little detail that Hawaii is a remote island and the reason they get any tourism at all is because of air travel, which is currently impossible without fossil fuels. Same thing for ships. If anything Hawaiians are the ones who should pay, profiting from a form of tourism with high environmental impact.

Or even better, stop pointing fingers and try to do something productive.

Note: suing oil companies for doing something illegal, like causing an oil spill is fine, but what did they do that is illegal here?

If it was the case what was the motivation? I don't think it helped sell more USB devices, win over its competitors, etc...

I don't remember USB 1, 2, 3 being a problem from the consumer point of view. The low-speed/full-speed distinction never really made a difference to consumers, some devices were faster than other, but what protocol they used was just internal stuff. USB2 meant high-speed, I don't remember ever seeing a reputable USB2 products that didn't support it. Again, some USB2 product are faster than others, but the "USB" part was well understood. Same thing for USB3 / SuperSpeed. The actual numbers didn't matter much in practice, bigger number = faster was essentially true.

It became a mess after that, but speed usually isn't the problem, few people really need speeds above USB3 (5 Gbps). The concerns typically are: "will my external dock work?" and "how fast can I charge my device, if at all?", and a number of GBps and Watts won't tell you that. The number of Watts could tell you about charging, in theory, but it is not clear at all in practice.

As for BS cables, it is hard to stop knockoff manufacturers from using the thinnest wires available and claim they can do 100W, as well as other crap. All standards are affected: MicroUSB, USB-C, HDMI, lightning, etc... Yes, even Apple with their captive market fell to it.

But to be fair, it isn't that bad. If you buy reputable brands from reputable suppliers, it tends to work quite well, and USB-C adoption went remarkably well for how complex this "do everything" standard is.

Sure, it doesn't attack ships at sea.

But other than that Sci-Hub is totally a "piracy site", it lets you download copyrighted work without permission, which is what is generally understood as online piracy. And the fact you do it to avoid paying makes it even clearer. The courts generally agree too as it was lawfully banned in several countries.

It doesn't mean it doesn't have a good cause. I love Sci-Hub and want it to stay too, but it doesn't mean it is not piracy. In fact, that is the problem, that the "enablement of science" has to go through piracy, with all the problems that go with it, including blockages and as the article says, the risk of getting outdated articles. Maybe the laws and academic practices have to be changed to make a usable "non-pirate" version of Sci-Hub possible.

The guy looked up information online, he could have done that any number of ways. He could have used a regular search engine, maybe even a phone book and a paper encyclopedia if these things still exist. In fact, I suspect ChatGPT wasn't optimal, it tends to be annoying with any search that can be linked to criminal activity, it also tends to hallucinate when looking for places and businesses, for example, it may invent a gun shop where there is none. It is also terrible for privacy, and for committing crimes, it tends to be very important.

He probably used ChatGPT out of habit, and probably would have done a better job without it.

Not necessarily. We are able to simulate the physical world with less than perfect accuracy and get useful results, like throwing rocks on target. Other animals can simulate the world too, birds for instance are pretty good with aerodynamics, that's how they are able to fly.

There are arguments about how this is the key to human-like intelligence. Our big brains evolved as physics simulators, so that we can do things like throw rocks on target. Incidentally, what we have not evolve to do is deal with subatomic particles, that's why we have so much trouble getting our head around quantum physics, it is not like throwing rocks!

You can buy ethically sourced eggs or you can raise chicken and treat them well. If the push is strong enough, even factory farmers will start to care, and governments might get involved. More and more people care, and I think the situation for the chicken is slowly improving after years of degradation.

At 100 MB/s, it would take about 100h, or 4 days, to fill such a drive. MTBF is typically in the hundreds of thousands of hours. Realistically, it is often less, but that's the order of magnitude, so that's at least 1000x the time to fill the drive.

It doesn't mean it is not a problem. In a RAID array, it means there is a significant chance for another drive to fail during rebuild, especially since the rebuild may put them to more stress than usual and drives in the same RAID array are more likely to fail at around the same time, especially if they are all the same model, bought and installed together. Of course, RAID does not exclude backups, but even with good backups, restoration will leave the system unavailable for days.

This is a solvable problem of course, and I expect big customers for these drives to know what they are doing. But the fact that hard disk drives become bigger more than they are getting faster makes the time to fill an entire drive an important consideration. Of course, SSDs are often the solution, but if you want lots of cheap, reasonably accessible storage, HDDs are still the way to go.

It looks like you can make any job be best by choosing the right metrics.

A metric I would use would be to use a market perspective. The idea is to find people who are qualified for jobs A and B, A pays better, but they are doing B and have no intention of going for A. It means that B should be an overall better job than A by an amount proportional to the difference in pay. With enough such pairs, it should be possible to establish a ranking. My guess is that artistic jobs will rank quite high, as most artists would be better off pay-wise with a boring office job, but they prefer to practice their art instead.

For the "War of the Words way", the difference here is that the plagues that affected the South Americans are very well adapted to infecting humans, immunized or not. It is absolutely not the case for mirror-image bacteria, who would need mirror-image humans to infect.

So yeah, I would go with the "separate worlds" too, or more likely, the "aliens stand no chance and die world".

"gray goo" is a catastrophic scenario where we build self-replicating machines, nanomachines in particular, and we lose control.

Scary in theory, but most knowledgeable people object that making self-replicating machines is hard enough as it is, even in a perfectly controlled environment, that there is essentially no chance that such a machine would be viable out of the lab, especially going against life that had billions of years to evolve.

I guess that viable mirror-image bacteria are easier to make than nanomachines built from scratch, but the same problem will happen out of the lab.
The first problem is: how will this bacteria eat? It can't make use of any of the existing building blocks of life, it has to make everything itself, or, more likely, feed on chemicals purposefully made in a lab. As a result, why would it infect other life forms, as they can't feed on them because it is not the right handedness.
Now, imagine they somehow manage to get a set of enzymes that let them feed on right-handed life and start reproducing seriously. It they can do it, then the opposite can happen too: right-handed bacteria can evolve to feed on left-handed food, and our mirror-image bacteria will have to fight against an entire planet full of very diverse and competitive life forms.
And finally, assuming our new mirror bacteria still manage the impossible feat of being competitive, immune systems can evolve too, and the presence of mirror-image chemicals, should make them a very easy target, so I expect the most likely outcome is for both life forms to coexist relatively peacefully by avoiding each other.

I remember eating in a fine dining restaurant. The menu stated "our dishes have all the allergens, please tell us if you have allergies".

It is the kind of restaurant with a very limited selection, you essentially let the chef decide for you, and you know you won't be disappointed. Not for picky eaters, but for something out of your control like allergies, they can make arrangements.

High speed rail doesn't have to be profitable. Besides select routes, rail in general usually isn't.

However it can bring wealth to the regions it connects, resulting in higher tax revenue, which pays for the subsidies railway operators may get.

Asking someone to do something with precision using plain English is hard. It takes skill on both sides, and it usually involves followup questions and supervision. English is not very precise without being verbose and full of technical terms, which require a lot of expertise, more than mastering a programming language.

What many people don't realize is that programming languages are simple orders of magnitude simpler than any natural language. A beginner can learn the basics of a programming language in a few days, for an experienced programmer, it can be less than an hour. It is one of the easiest part of programming.

Programming is hard, and programming languages make the task easier, not harder. This is because what programming really is is to make a machine do exactly what we intend it to do, and machines are dumb, so programmers have to be extremely precise. With current-day AI, machines are still dumb, just less obviously so. They can do some simple tasks right without precise instructions, but they will screw up at the first slightly unusual thing, and do so without telling you. So if you want the machine to do a good job, you still need precision, and this is best achieved by someone skilled in that task (a programmer), using the right tools (including a programming language).

It is silly, but some people like it, so Hyundai delivered. If you don't like it, you can simply not use that feature.

Some people like their car to feel "alive", like a beast to be tamed more than an effective but soulless machine. And therefore, they enjoy what reasonable people consider an annoyance, and why not? The point is to have fun, not to go from A to B, not even to win a race. And among the "fun" features you can add to a car, fake shifting is, I think, among the safest.

The reason Hollywood does more of the same is that it works! A MCU movie that is competently made is a guaranteed success. People who go to the theater for these movies expect they will have have an enjoyable experience, fit for the big screen, and they usually do, with some highs and lows. These movies are not the reason why people don't go to the theater. If anything, that's the opposite. Moviegoers are risk adverse too, going to the theater is not cheap, they actually have to go out, there is also some commitment to it. If unsure, people can watch movies at home instead, the average screen and sound system are pretty good nowadays compared to what it was a few decades ago, plus there are plenty of movies accessible on demand.

The first Matrix is a good movie, but it was a relatively safe bet, except maybe for the choice of directors. It is an action film with flashy effects, exploring a theme that has been explored before with some success. For me, Dune (2021) was much riskier. Yes, it is an adaptation or a very popular novel, but historically, one that has led to more failure than successes.