I agree, they should start small, and then steadily expand; pretty much the way Waymo is doing.

I'll believe they've sussed it when the number of Cybercabs on the road simultaneously is greater than the number of people Tesla could plausibly have hired to remotely babysit them; until then, there's always the possibility that they are doing the Mechanical Turk thing and their "full self-driving" cars are really "self-driving (supervised)". (It wouldn't be the first time; they've been caught pulling that trick with Optimus on multiple occasions)

If we assume there is meaningful competition between insurers, then any insurer that started charging "normal" drivers extravagant rates would start losing customers to its competitors who could easily undercut them on price. So the likely outcome would be that self-driving cars would get cheap insurance, and the rest of us would continue paying rates similar to what we pay now. In particular, the arrival of safe self-driving cars would presumably not result in human drivers having more accidents.

OTOH if there is not meaningful competition (e.g. due to a monopoly or oligopoly), then the insurance companies can charge anyone whatever price they like, because the only alternative to paying it would be to not drive a car. But that would be the case for both human-driven and self-driving cars.

You're only slightly exaggerating. In reality, the corporate overlords dream of printing piles of money and becoming vastly richer than they already are; monitoring and controlling the 'average' citizen is mainly a means to that end, rather than an end unto itself. A citizen that depends on your product to conduct his life is a citizen from which money can be regularly extracted!

Say that Chinese-made cars are banned from the USA, as described. What happens then? China licenses its auto technology to a European (or Mexican or etc) company, which then produces the same cars and sells those to the US, and the US manufacturers still have to either step up their game or get competed out of the market. The only way to avoid that reckoning would be to ban all foreign car imports entirely, which is probably where the Trump administration will start heading, sooner or later.

Not true. Islam forbids the consumption of pork as food and the use of other pig products, such as pigskin, but allows the use of pig organs to save a life if there is no alternative. Jews too may receive pig organs as transplants since Jewish law explicitly permits any commandment other than the ones against murder, idolatry, and forbidden sexual relations (adultery, incest, etc.) to be broken in order to save a life.

I didn't ever think I'd live to see The Forbin Project become a real possibility, but here we are.

It's also at least *mostly* academic. If Apple charges only for actual clicks, rather than impressions, then the cost to the advertiser is arguably the same whether the targeting is good or not. The only difference is the cost to Apple itself.

I would assume the main signal that Apple has is whether the user already has the app installed and/or has previously tried the app and deleted it. And while I understand why app developers would *like* to be able to know every app you have installed so that they can't show ads for it, Apple stopped letting them do that a long time ago for good reason. It's a *huge* privacy impact.

If Apple could come up with a privacy-protecting way to help app developers filter ads that are irrelevant based on installations and other factors without revealing to the app developer what exact apps are installed, I think a lot of users would consider that to be a win, because the ads we endure would at least be slightly less absurd.

But there is no rational universe in which someone can reasonably argue that it is anticompetitive to use the fact that you know that you already sold someone a product to avoid telling them to buy that product, or at least not without arguing that the existence of a single store is itself anticompetitive (which it is, but that's an orthogonal problem).

Well, yeah, but that's ads running in an entirely closed ecosystem. I guess in a silly way, you could argue that in-app ads with tracking disabled are less effective, and App Store ads provide another way to get eyes on apps, so it kind of competes, but that's like saying that Special Rollback Deal signs inside an individual Walmart store compete with Google AdSense. It's technically correct, but not particularly interesting.

Put another way, I can't imagine that any significant number of people who, prior to the do-not-track rules, used to think that in-app ads were targeted well enough are suddenly thinking that targeting is bad because of those do-not-track restrictions. In-app ads are all too horribly targeted across the board for such a thing to be plausible. And the increase in the number of people choosing to use their ad dollars for App Store category promotion over in-app advertising because of those tracking rules is probably even smaller, if it is even nonzero.

I'm not saying that no judge could possibly find that such claims have merit, because there's always somebody who doesn't understand things who will rule in your favor if you venue shop hard enough, but I am saying that IMO, the claims have little to no merit, at least on the surface, and that Apple's DNT rules A. are likely required by law for European compliance anyway and B. have a legitimate public interest that massively overshadows any mostly hypothetical and negligibly sized anticompetitive impact.

The problem with wearing Water Wings (even really good ones) instead of learning how to swim is that on the day the Water Wings stop working, you still can't swim, and now you're floundering out in the middle of the pool.

Since when does Apple have an advertising ecosystem? I mean, I know there was that brief iAd disaster, but that's been dead for a decade now.

Is competing with the absence of something a problem from an antitrust perspective? If so, explain why, and how intrusive advertising benefits users, rather than app developers.

I'm with Apple on this one. Squarely.

Yes and no. With AI tools, people who know nothing about a code base have a much faster path to making small changes — the kind of changes where someone familiar with the code base could review it in thirty seconds, but could also make the change in thirty seconds if they had time. AI massively increases velocity at the fringes.

But for more complicated changes, in many cases, having AI write the code can cause the author to spend almost as long reviewing the changes as it would have taken to write them, because gaining adequate understanding of the code and paging back in memory of how things work would normally have occurred during the natural course of writing the code, a little as a time, and would have been a decent percentage of the time spent writing the code. When reviewing code written by someone else, you're back-loading that work at review time.

And it also introduces some added risk, because if your code reviewer doesn't know that the change was written by a bot and assumes that you already put the time into making sure it was mostly correct, their review might be more cursory, because they may not take the time to think about all of those details. So if you as the code submitter don't do this, the code quality may suffer severely.

Ad astra per aspera. Strangely fitting. :-D

Anyone who says we need to do X to solve climate change is wrong, because there is no one "X" that does it.

We need renewables, nuclear, electrification, synthetic fuels, forestation, mangroves, direct air capture, BECCS, biochar, enhanced rock weathering, cloud enhancement to increase albedo, possibly orbital solar shading, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and more that I don't know about including things maybe no one has yet thought of.

We created this problem through a wide variety of mechanisms, burning many different kinds of fossil fuels in many different contexts, and we're going to need an even wider variety to fix it.

And even if they happened faster, it still wouldn't be enough. The focus on emissions reduction to the exclusion of everything else is going to kill a lot of people.

The only way we're going to fix this is to get to net negative, and while emissions reduction can help it will never be enough. That being the case, we should be investing a lot into capture and sequestration research.

Absolutely. We should admit that we're in for some more CO2 rise before we can make it fall, no matter what we do, and invest in geoengineering research focused on techniques to directly reduce insolation and ocean acidification.

None of this is either/or. We need to be doing all of this in parallel: Electrification, renewables, nuclear, and synthetic fuels to reduce burning of fossil fuels, carbon recapture, especially at high-intensity carbon sourced (e.g. cement plants), but also from the atmosphere, and geoengineering to directly cool the planet and increase ocean pH. And we can... but the laser focus on renewables and electrification and renewables is harming the future.

That seems like it would be relatively easy, and safe as long as no one makes a suicide cord and tries to use it to power the house. I don't know if any of this class of equipment provides it.