The "Nerds" part.

Yeah, but your T-16 wasn't running a full multitasking OS, network stack, X-windows, a word processor, and a web browser.
Even if you got the targeting computer upgrade it had only shitty low-res vector graphics.

That 8MB machine was comparable in function to modern PCs with 1000X the memory.

Those observations are somewhat out of date. Modern (ie 2026) frontier models have a lot more "knowledge" than their weights.

e.g. When I asked Claude about its own memory, it used a "product self-knowledge skill" which includes looking at its own SKILL.md file.
I believe Qwen 3.5 has similar capability, but of course you need to have it configured.

Ask Claude? He says:

Hey Editor, did you miss the lesson about tides in school? :-)

Yeah, Bytes vs bits. But who measures RAM in bits?
I remember too 8MB being the minimum, but upgraded to 12MB so it was possible to do something else while the kernel was compiling.
How did we get to the point where 8000MB is considered a bare minimum?

But you've got to do both. Doubting oneself is "critical thinking". Doubting other sources of authority is "independent thinking".

The thing is, nobody has enough expertise to be an independent thinker in every area. So you essentially MUST delegate your ideas in some areas (variable between people) to external authorities. At which point what you "believe" depends on which authorities you choose.

A related question is "how firm is that belief?". This also tends to vary wildly with little apparent (to me) reason behind it. This is one feature that *can* be related to IQ, but isn't always.

You'd think with the successes of the original 16-bit Apple machines, then the Mac platform, full of third party software of every kind imaginable, it should have been self-evident that third party apps would be natural and beneficial. But people like Jobs just can't help themselves: their instinct is to control their platform and exclude everyone else. So they indulge the Reality Distortion Field hard enough to convince themselves that such a scheme is viable, all evidence of history to the contrary, and capture all the money.

The jail breakers are the real heros. They're the ones that pierced the Field and corrected this dysfunction, where no amount of explaining had any impact. They left Apple with two choices: go to war with jail breakers and become a pariah, or correct the bad thinking that prevailed to that point. Fortunately they chose the latter.

Or maybe unfortunately. The residual tyranny that did survive is more than I've ever considered tolerating. Maybe it would have been better if Apple had self-immolated the iPhone with Jobs' vision.

The majority of automated speeding tickets in all AU states for which i found data was in the "0-9km/h" over the limit category.
They state there is a 2-3km/h threshold to allow for measurement errors. (though the machines now are extremely accurate)
Anecdotal reports are consistent with this.

Whats your reasoning coward?

They? Gloating is unseemly. Nobody though Trump would start a war.
Certainly back in 2016, a small consolation over his win was that a new war less likely than under Clinton, who was something of a Hawk.

But back in the old days, when the US was a democracy, they would have needed support from Congress to start a major war.

There is nothing about such a mission that mandates obsolete, 2x order of magnitude money torching. Please stop it with your commie shilling.

It doesn't really matter in the long run. Sooner or later the US with elect another (D) president and the teacher's union and/or some other pressure group will once again cut NASA's space program and take the money. After than, NASA or whomever will be forced to adopt cost effective solutions.

It's not just widespread, it's universal. What varies from person to person is the domain that they apply thinking to, and how they validate the authority they choose to trust.

Nobody is an "independent thinker" on every topic. Wherever one is an expert, one tends to be an "independent thinker" in that domain. Where you don't feel knowledgeable, you tend to accept an authoritative source...possibly after doing some amount of checking to see whether others think it reliable.

I don't think it's directly related to IQ. I also don't think it's restricted to chatbots. A lot of people are willing to accept the opinion of any authoritative source that they've accepted. Think religion or political party. Once they accept it, they stop questioning it's proclamations.

Note that this also applied to those who accept the proclamations of scientists or compilers. Once you accept an authoritative source, you pretty much stop questioning it. It's been multiple decades since I really argued with a compiler...unless it was a known bug from a source I trusted. I generally just assumed that I misunderstood what the language meant by that construct. (Of course, the few times I really didn't accept it, I eventually turned out to be wrong. Oh.)

I have to stop you there. The RS-25 rockets on the SLS were indeed being re-used, after they flew on the Shuttle. They were designed for re-use, and incredibly expensive. So it is something of a "crime" to dump them in the ocean. But yes, NASA's attempts to save money by re-using the Shuttle orbiter and boosters were ultimately a failure.

The billions spent on the SLS program since the end of the shuttle program have an opportunity cost. And it was apparent a while back that the SLS was a dead end, and the cost as unsustainable as the Apollo program. Rockets like Starship and New Glenn are the future. Falcon and Falcon heavy are the present.
The Artemis 2 mission could have been done using Falcon Heavy at a fraction of the cost. Or wait a bit and use Starship. We'll be waiting for Starship lunar lander anyway.
 

Pardon? Have you not seen the barge landings? SpaceX have chosen a "return to launch site" profile for Starship booster, as the most economical, but it is not a requirement. And it won't stop them putting 100-200 ton to LEO. Full re-use of the upper stage might be a long way off, but just re-using the booster is a huge gain.