And I want to be clear in the above: I fully acknowledge the irony, in that the US tech industry has been a powerhouse. There seems to be a massive disconnect in the US between tech innovation and tech infrastructure. The US is a world-leader in the former. It's consistently a deep laggard on the latter. The reasons why the US has so much trouble getting its act together on infrastructure and systems are complex, but it is remarkable to see, as someone who has spent their life in a mix of the US and Iceland. And it's not just Iceland that has it's act together on these sort of things - it's most of the developed world, and even surprising amounts of the developing world.

, with the most sophisticated banking system

Any American who believes this should try living overseas for a year or two. The US banking system is insanely backwards. Numerous aspects of the US medical and government systems as well. It's hard to explain it to you unless you experience it.

Checks are just one symptom (in Iceland, 15 years ago bank tellers would look at you weird and have to get the manager if you had a personal check, and 10 years ago, stopped taking them altogether). For like 15-20 years, we've had free instant bank-to-bank money transfers (no third party involved), everyone on the same service, to the point that if someone is collecting money for a gift for a coworker's birthday, it's always been, they just send an email with their bank details, instead of going around and collecting cash. All your bills - all of them - just show up in your bank's inbox. On and on.

I mentioned the medical system. Let me give a random example. In the US, you go to a doctor and they determine you need a prescription. They or their receptionist have to ask what pharmacy you want it at. It gets routed through SecureScripts (before that, it was all phone based!), and depending, you may also need to also call into the pharmacy before you go there - and if you need it "transferred", it's a multihour process. Here? The doctor just jots it into their computer, that's it. You can literally just walk out of the doctor's office into the pharmacy next door (or any other pharmacy), tell them your name, and they go grab your order.

Everything is connected. Everything is interoperable. All keyed to your kennitala (ID number) . And the kennitala is only a key, not a password. The fact that a SSN in the US is treated as both a key and a password is insane, from a security standpoint; by contrast, you can just post your kennitala online, it's fine. We have multiple actual authentication methods. The most convenient is the Auðkenni system. Our SIM cards store credentials in a separate cryptographic chip. When we need 2FA, for any business or government agency (all on the same system), it sends a special SMS that the phone routes to the SIM card to process, and then (at the OS level) pops up an authentication dialogue, so we have universal 2FA, linked to our kennitala, in all of our phones. It's been this way for like 15+ years.

Or let's talk taxes. You all know what it's like in America, so let's explain what it's like in Iceland. I get an email letting me know it's tax time. I go to the tax office website. I get 2FA login via my phone. My tax forms are right there. They're already filled out, with all of the information already collected. For like 90% of the population, it's just click through, verify it's correct, and submit. Some people may have some things that weren't logged, such as overseas investments or whatnot, but for most people, it's like a five minute process.

On and on. It's been so weird seeing America getting things 1-2 decades after us and acting like, "wow, we're leading in banking technology!", etc. No, you're an aged dinosaur, way behind the rest of the world because none of your systems work together and you're so slow to adapt to change.

These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.

It has been my experience, sad to say, that online stores aren't above selling consumer credit card information either, and I've grounds to think Amazon is one that does this.

I have an industrial air conditioner for my home. (It's a small home, but summers are increasingly severe.)

I don't recall being asked a damn thing.

My suspicion is that this is scaremongering.

I have been stress-testing AIs with increasingly complex projects for some time. The Chinese AIs struggle, but actually do a FAR better job of handling massively complex tasks than Grok, and Gemini just rolls over and whimpers at anything above a very low level of complexity.

What I've found is that the Chinese AIs tend to be sycophant but do "understand" complex projects properly in that you can ask specific technical questions and the answers will be generally very accurate. Any sort of critical analysis is beyond them, though. (Ether that, or I'm a mega-genius. Which....doesn't sound terribly likely.)

Of the "Top AIs", ChatGPT is good on basics but is incapable of any kind of detailed generation. Claude is brilliant at detailed generation, but overloads with anything but a tiny data set.

I've been putting up the projects on Gitlab for a while, so anyone who wants to see an AI break down and cry in despair is able to do so.

The secret tools don't bother me - they'll have long understood how to use Big Data and Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. AI isn't going to find out any more than combinations of those tools will, because that's basically all AI is - a Big Data classification system.

So you're telling Claude something vague and washy, then Claude invents a prompt that might vaguely possibly be somehow related to what you want along with a drink that is almost but not entirely quite unlike tea. Claude then recurses through this until it has a Celtic knot so intricate that it has its own Hausdorff dimension. What burps out is a product that is completely useless and patented to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

They won't be OceanGate-grade. They used PRCF that had already been rejected by quality control. That's a non-starter in aircraft.

As production has ended, if the A380 is genuinely necessary, then the economics shift somewhat. That doesn't mean they CAN be replaced, from the sounds of it they can't* (at least in many cases), but the inability to replace the aircraft would mean that options that aren't rational become necessary.

*I have to be careful here. If the wing is designed to be the absolute minimum weight possible, then I don't see how they could be without fully disassembling the entire wing and then reconstructing it from the ground up. And adhesives/welding might mean that just can't be done. At all. On the other hand, there's no obvious reason why you couldn't design a wing to have far more structural support than actually needed AND make spars deliberately maintainable and replaceable. I don't have an A380 handbook in front of me, so can't say how Airbus approached this. But it seems improbable that they're built to be swapped.

Sigh. Ontogeny is NOT evolution. It is not the same thing as having a low MHC diversity due to a genetic bottleneck as well as lacking tens of thousands of years of evolution to a pathogen. Not the same at all. It's silly to even suggest that. Epigenetic shifts in an individual do not create new HLA genes.

Consider COVID. Novel bat coronavirus, nobody had preexisting immunity. Did everybody die? No. Because we had high HLA/MHC diversity, making it easier to target SARS-COV-2 epitopes. Native Americans lacked this diversity. It left them ill prepared for novel pathogens.

Also, you seem to believe that any disease you've never encountered before is fundamentally dangerous to an adult. That's simply not the case. Rhinovirus is intrinsically mild. It's an upper respiratory infection; it's not adapted to lower respiratory or systemic infection. It's not ebola. It's not going to become like ebola just because you've never caught it before. If a rhinovirus strain was reintroduced after 200 years after having been eradicated, we'd all get a cold, but by and large, we'd be fine.

And what would happen if Yamagata reappeared? We'd just add it back to our flu vaccines. Furthermore, the reintroduction of Yamagata wouldn't be catastrophic without that. You do not have to catch every Influenza B lineage at all, let alone every year. If you had been infected with B/Victoria and you were exposed to B/Yamagata, you'd have little sterilizing immunity against it - you'd very likely catch it. But your past exposure to B/Victoria is still greatly protective against hospitalization and death; B and T immunity against NA and the HA stem and stalk are conserved.

And this is about whether or not to catch every lineage. Well guess what, even with air filtration, that's still going to happen. Air filtration only has a meaningful impact for people at a distance, not people close together. It's about protecting the person across the room, not the person you're standing 50 centimetres away from. What it does change is how often you catch them. And if lineages or whole viruses go extinct, that's great. Worrying about some sort of reintroduction 200 years later is just inventing your own unrealistic misery when we have actual pandemic threats to worry about.

I guess I should be more obvious with the sarcasm in the future ;)

Fact check / Analyze (post is in response to an article about a new program to install better air purification systems):

Sigh, need an edit button. :P (But yes, it would be nice if more people actually cared about ensuring the accuracy of what they write and would do that before spouting off scientifically ignorant statements. I rather wish browsers had a "fact check" text box would flag in red any factually questionable statements the poster is making, with a mouseover note explaining what's wrong, with references)

"âoe" - what are you pasting from? Google Search AI? ;)

Naive vaccine approaches do struggle with long-term sterilizing immunity against fast-mutating viruses like influenza, COVID, rhinoviruses, etc (but non-sterilizing immunity from vaccines is actually quite effective at preventing the worst consequences!). Which is why new techniques are being developed to cause the body to target evolutionary-conserved regions of the pathogens rather than the "immunologically easy" (immunodominant) epitopes like COVID's RBM, influenza's hemagglutinin's globular head, and such. These regions are easy for the immune system to "see" and target, but at the same time, the virus is also evolved to be able to shuffle them easily, so you need vaccines designed to train the immune system to attack the parts that the virus can't readily change without breaking things. Some include things like having the vaccine present a large number of very different RBDs at once (making it easier to develop immunity by attacking the evolutionary-conserved regions instead), glycan masking the variable regions, and so forth.

True. But we were never "meant" to be locked inside with lots of other people, continuously breathing recycled, stale air over and over and over again.

Nonsense - Upper Paleolithic excavations of early-modern human villages show that rather than being nomadic hunter-gatherers in loose tribal bands as previously believed, they instead lived densely packed high-rise apartment buildings built of sinew-bound mammoth bone trusses and clad in hides.

In fact, a recent dig in southern France unearthed what researchers believe was a "co-living" mammoth-bone complex, where millennial Cro-Magnons paid a monthly subscription of two reindeer carcasses for a micro-alcove. The site contained numerous preserved slate tablets detailing how the "open-concept communal hearth" was always occupied, the resident shaman's smoke-signal network was frustratingly slow, and the neighbors upstairs kept pacing around in uninsulated, heavy-soled mammoth-skin boots at three in the morning.

The pressures facing the human body in modern society have not changed at all, so we should change nothing in response!