Also, $70K is the median *household* income. The median individual income in Omaha is $41.6K. As gtall said, factor in taxes, healthcare, rent etc... then factor an extra $500-$1000 to register and title your new car, another $1000 annually for vehicle maintenance (except it'll be more than that because for $20K you're buying a used car), and factor in whatever you're spending on gas...

And this isn't possible. The chances of this plan coming to pass are precisely zero. It's a fantasy. Whether it's actually a good idea or not-- that's completely irrelevant.

The real-world effect of this proposal is that it makes the Democrats look like a bunch of loopy socialists. Since we're heading into some *very* important and *very* tightly-contested elections, this is a tone-deaf and deeply irresponsible move on Bernie's part. (If it was anyone other than Bernie, I'd suspect that he was a deep-cover Republican operative trying to discredit the opposition).

Taken by itself, that observation ("this phenomenon arises from individual behaviour rather than collectively emerging due to pedestrian-pedestrian or pedestrian-boundary interactions") doesn't quite rule out the hypothesis. I'd need to know more.

For example, I don't know how big the "circles" are. If the pedestrians are found to walk in relatively small circles, then they are effectively "patrolling" a small area of space and they know that any new pedestrians (or other threats) are necessarily going to emerge from outside of that area; they're going to keep their attention oriented primarily outside the circle and are going to keep their right side facing outside. So the very first pedestrian to enter the space will instinctively start circling counter-clockwise, even if there are no other pedestrians to influence his behavior. On the other hand, if the "circling" behavior consists of walking the perimeter of a large room, then you'd expect the pedestrian to circle clockwise, and the "self-defense" idea wouldn't fit.

Again, I don't know if the data supports, contradicts, or is neutral to the "dominant side is for self-defense" idea, I'd need to read the actual article in depth (sadly I don't have time to do that this morning). So it's just a bit of speculation on my part.

I think we instinctively turn our dominant side towards the side we think represents a greater security threat. If you're walking alongside a wall, for instance, you will usually feel safer with your left side facing the wall and your right side facing open space. If you're walking in a circle and you think there are more threats from outside the circle than from inside the circle, you'll want to walk counterclockwise so you dominant arm is sticking out of the circle. (Assuming here that the crowd is mostly right-handed).

I don't know if their data supports that idea, but it's a testable idea.

Three observations about your post:

1) The idea that quantum tunnelling plays an important role in brain function is interesting but speculative. If you look at the existing literature on neuroscience and the neural basis of learning, you'll see that 99.999% of it simply makes no reference to "quantum tunnelling".
2) There are many systems which can technically be called "non-deterministic", but for which non-deterministic part just isn't important. The opening of a sodium channel in a cardiac cell is ultimately non-deterministic and probabilistic (you certainly can't project the trajectory of every ion), but the errors tend to cancel out and just aren't important for predicting how the cell behaves. To paraphrase Isaac Asimov: We can't predict the behavior of individual atoms, but we know that if we have a closed container full of helium atoms and we double the temperature, the pressure will exactly double.
3) If we *did* make the discovery that "quantum tunnelling" (or other probabilistic, non-deterministic behavior) is somehow essential for brain function... and that's a VERY big if... there is no reason to think that this behavior couldn't be emulated by a machine.

I'm honestly curious to know what this perception of yours is based on. Do you work in audio production or a related field? Why do you feel that Logic is "a tool for amateurs", despite the fact that professionals use it?

That's simply not true. It may not be the DAW with the biggest market share, but there are a ton of working professionals (including some rather famous ones) who like the workflow of Logic and use it as their primary DAW.

"It's a possible solution to a problem we have no idea how to fix"... that's accurate, and is probably the most charitable way to describe UBI. Except I would have phrased it as "a farfetched but technically feasible solution".

What you're ultimately talking about is a centrally planned economy... actual communism, in other words. It's an idea that did not make sense in the past but might make sense in some distant and hypothetical Star Trek-like future, where enormous production capacity for all sorts of goods and services is available through AI and through humanoid robots. But it requires a government which is capable of directing that production capacity towards socially useful ends, confiscating a large part of the output, and redistributing that output, all presumably in some democratically determined manner.

To point out a few of the obvious hurdles:
* This sort of central planning is something that has never been successfully achieved in human history. Indeed, it's fair to say that every attempt has failed spectacularly.
* "UBI" as envisioned in TFA would barely scrape the surface of the problem-- they're talking about $12,000 per citizen per year, which is far, far below the current poverty line, and even the current income needed for physical survival. And even that level of "income" would require a doubling of tax revenues.
* The central planning would have to take place on a worldwide scale, not simply a national scale. If we imagine (for the sake of argument) that the US miraculously transitioned to a centrally planned economy, this would provide no long-term stability if the rest of the world is sinking into chaos. The US would simply be inundated by refugees from the other 7 1/2 billion people who are looking for their $12K/year.

...I was rather hoping that the "color-changing car" would offer something beyond shades of gray. (Even "white" or "black" are not really options with e-ink).

E-ink displays are expensive and fragile. I can't imagine any possible use case for this product. Well, there is one: ads.

This is the perfect example of a problem that you *can't* solve by throwing money at it.

I had an issue with a relatively new MacBook Pro not long ago, where 2 out of the 3 USB-C ports stopped working. I took it to a repair shop and they said it was basically impossible to repair the ports without replacing the motherboard, and that it would be much more cost-effective to replace the whole laptop.

Ports go wrong all the time. I've had three charging ports fail on iPhones (fortunately, those ports are fixable at an independent shop for about $50, although the Apple "geniuses" will quote you $300-400). If you make it impossible to swap them out, that's a pretty big design flaw, IMO.

The research paper itself has a problem: It sets out to prove a hypothesis which is obvious and self-evident, and doesn't need empirical proof. (See e.g. "Politics and the English Language", by George Orwell). This seems to be a common problem with psychological research.

But the "Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale" is kind of neat. I could imagine a version of the scale being useful for screening job applicants, or as a section of the GMAT.

I agree with most of your post, but this sentence contains a rather large assumption which is almost certainly false: you are saying that the 36% didn't vote because they "don't care about the outcome".

There are a number of possible reasons for not voting, but I think "it's all the same to me who wins" probably ranks rather low among those reasons. One of the most common reasons (and this is backed up by surveys) is the perception that your vote doesn't affect the outcome. If you don't live in a swing state, that is a perfectly rational reason not to vote. Unfortunately, we can't fix this problem without making major changes to the electoral system.

Then there are all the *other* reasons people don't vote-- they didn't register to vote in time, they don't have the right ID, they lack transportation, they were busy working (that's a common one since US elections are held on Tuesdays), and so forth and so on.

If you want to start fixing the problem of non-participation, you have to know the underlying reasons.

Yes, I've considered that angle. But I think the best approach is a simple one: NONE of the language in the final product, not even a sentence or a half-sentence, should be AI-generated. AI sources should be treated the same way as any other written source: If you quote it without attribution, it's plagiarism.

Under these hypothetical rules, a writer could still use AI for preliminary research, in the same way that they might use wikipedia (and with the same caveats).

The idea of "just using a little AI help" for the actual writing is too much of a slippery slope. (I've talked to professional writers who have used that phrase, so I know). How much is "a little help"? If it's only a little bit of help, you haven't saved much time. If it's more than a little, we're back to square one.

There are plenty of talented writers out there who need jobs, and are willing to do the work, and won't complain if you forbid them from using AI "helpers".

"At least they owned their mistake?" When you've been caught red-handed violating your own policy, you don't have a lot of options besides "owning" it.

It may indeed be true that this unfairly penalizes the ethical writers who work for ArsTechnica. Unfortunately, that's kind of how publishing works; when a publication violates standards of integrity or of quality, it hurts the career of everyone who works at that publication.

Regarding the whole topic of "backlash": Even if you, me, and everyone else on this thread stops reading ArsTechnica (which I haven't read in a while anyway), that's not going to affect their bottom line. It won't even be noticed. That's why journalists need to set up a regulatory body, as I suggested in my earlier post. There are tens of millions of people who will deliberately avoid AI-generated news and deliberately seek out news sources with the "no-AI" seal of approval. *That* will damn sure be noticed.