If we change the "right to repair" laws, we should also change the liability laws. If a home-repaired unit becomes unsafe and injures people, who is responsible?

In the case of farming equipment, suppose a farmer makes a repair to a piece of equipment and then his son is injured or killed by said equipment. Who is liable?

The company would say that the farmer took full responsibility once he modified the equipment, while the farmer could say that his modifications did not affect the safety of the device.

It's also not at all clear whether a physical repair done by the farmer could have contributed to an accident made by software. Lots of things can affect software, such as the alignment of the two welded pieces. The software makes a performance analysis of stopping distance based on information it has, but the repair might have changed those parameters.

People who like to race want to download new parameters into the ECU of their car, but that's illegal. It actually is: the parameters are set to maximize efficiency, and while you can get better performance with different numbers, it would promote climate change, so it was made illegal.

Being able to repair things is good, and it's very clear that open source has driven the software industry forward, but we need to be careful about liability as well. Jailbreaking your phone is one thing, but jailbreaking your EV might have catastriphic consequences. I'm not a fan of ID-tagging headlights (BMW, Mazda), but if an accident occurs because of reduced visibility the company could be held liable.

I'm completely in favor of being able to repair things, and John Deere is the worst sort of predatory behaviour, but just wanted to point out that there's another side to the story and we should be careful.

Each to their own. You have no choice when it comes to the notch and the ribbon (unless you decide to not use a Mac or MS Office). But while it's clear that there is a market for folding phones, it's also clear that it's not for everyone. Folding phones are not going to replace regular ones anytime soon.

We can only hope.

Wireguard, a lightweight and secure VPN
Windscribe, a VPN service.

That's already happening. For instance, a Ukrainian company called The Fourth Law produces a $50 "autonomy module" that can take control of a suicide drone for terminal guidance. It works in certain use cases, but for true autonomy where you can do more with fewer operators, they need advanced sensors and better processors. As the IEEE article mentions: that increases cost, power requirements, and heat and EM signatures. Acceptable for an expensive precision missile, but not for small swarming suicide drones. Maybe a satellite with edge processors such as mentioned in TFA can act as eye-in-the-sky and direct drone swarms to their targets, providing at least part of the sensor data and AI compute, without the added latency of a round trip to a ground station for data processing.

Solar, wind, nuclear = plenty of spare carbon free energy. The idea of storing nuclear power came from the fact that the nukes of the time were by far the most economical in cost per MW when ran at max output.

I'm Dutch, our only option for hydro is to dam off part of the North sea, pump out water, then let the water flow back in through turbines. It's probably not cost-effective. This is a variation on the old Lievense Plan (which had a large basin filled with pumps, and drained through turbines). Interestingly, the original plan was not just for storing cheap wind power, but also for storing and balancing cheap nuclear power.
Note that some nuclear power plants can run load-following (for instance some of the French ones).

Clearly, more research is needed... MORE!

"Fluid" intelligence is the ability to think, reason, solve problems, and learn things. "Crystallized" intelligence is your amassed knowledge.

These are technical terms used in the literature.

Intelligence is nature's guess as to how complex your environment will be... but there's an out. People with low fluid intelligence have to work harder to understand things, but if they put in the work they can amass a body of knowledge that rivals that of people with high fluid intelligence.

And of course, lots of people with high intelligence stop learning in their mid twenties. At that point they've conquered their environment and are living successful lives (good job, married, kids &c) so there's no real reason to push themselves. Lots and lots of people, even smart people, haven't read a single book in the last year - and this observation was true in the 1970's before the internet.

(And nowadays this is probably more accurate due to the appalling quality of information found on the internet.)

It's a question of training. We're evolved to believe what people say, it's a way of reducing the cognitive load of learning things (by believing what someone else has already figured out). We're not used to questioning the logic of someone else's beliefs.

As an example of this, note that Warren Buffet has built a career on identifying fallacies in business, google "Warren Buffet fallacies" for a list.

None of these fallacies is taught in school, everyone has to find them and figure them out on their own. And then you have to use them in your daily lives.

Almost no one is used to doing that, which leads to the current problems with AI.

Amazon's valuation was insane back then, their potential for growth was anything but certain (or even likely) at the time. And the SpaceX valuation seems to have been inflated by buying the similarly overvalued xAI company, and doing a stock swap to cement those valuations. I'm sure plenty of people will jump at the chance of owning SpaceX stock at whatever price (I would have when it was just SpaceX), but in the long run?
Well, maybe. Maybe lower launch costs will open up new markets for launches. Maybe they'll get their space-based data centers to work. Maybe xAI's AI will amount to something some day. Maybe there's a vast market for sat based cellular service. Not something I'm going to bet my money on... $1.75T seems high even if they manage to achieve one or all of those things.

Replace them with AI as well.

I love my e-ink reader. I can read anything anywhere, and when my last book is finished, the next read is just a tap away. But that's just for linear reading. When I'm studying, I might be flipping back and forth through a syllabus, or have several of them open side by side. That works poorly on a tablet. On the plus side, with a tablet or latop, students no longer have to carry an unhealthy amount of heavy books to school.

As for using a laptop for taking notes, I find that to be way more distracting than taking notes on paper, whether it's me taking the notes or someone next to me.

The interface in OnlyOffice more closely resembles the modern ribbon interface in MS Office. For some people, that's a reason to choose LibreOffice instead. OnlyOffice. LibreOffice works very well for me, but I don't work with complex documents, and I don't need collaboration or cloud stuff. The latter might be why they selected OnlyOffice, since that's more like Office365 than MS Office; a more modern paradigm.

The claim that "false premises invalidate everything built on them" only holds when the error is unrecoverable and propagates non-linearly.

But in many cases:

The error is consistent and quantifiable, so results can be recalibrated

The relational findings survive even if absolute values shift

The direction of effect holds even if the magnitude is off

A good counterexample of this is carbon dating. Early carbon dating used an assumed atmospheric C-14 ratio that turned out to be slightly wrong. The premise was false, but scientists didn't throw out decades of dating results. Instead, they developed calibration curves (using tree rings, coral, etc.) to correct the systematic offset.

Not yet but I’ll go see it soon What makes me really sad though is that being a “non franchise movie” is now enough of a thing for it to be pointed out specifically. All the big productions these days are in some “universe”, part of a franchise, a sequel or prequel or reboot. God forbid a studio dares to allot a blockbuster budget to an original work.