"The tunnel segments are 217 meters (two football fields) long, weigh more than 73,000 metric tons (slightly more than more than 73,000 REAL tons), and have to be placed within a tolerance of 3 mm (0 inches)."

Fixed. Thank you for bringing this oversight to our attention. Note, however, that this still lacks an analogy to liken this tunnel-for-cars to an actual car somehow.

"The tunnel segments are 217 meters long, weigh more than 73,000 metric tons, and have to be placed within a tolerance of 3 mm."

I simply can't imagine why it wouldn't be orders of magnitude cheaper and faster to just use short segments that don't need to be aligned so precisely.

I used to think that maybe I, a simple country ignoramus, just wasn't equipped to understand the Wonders of the Modern Age. But the more glimpses I snatch of the wiring and plumbing of the Wonders, the more I think somebody in administration WANTed this to be unnecessarily expensive because their butt-buddy got the contract.

As I understand it, LLMs remembering user directives only selectively has been one of the major complaints that users have with LLMs.

I heard Zuckerberg failed to pay back a loanshark operating in the Metaverse and they took his legs.

If America's powerful elites absolutely insist that there be no correlation between wealth and intelligence, then I would at least like them to agree in principle that the correlation shouldn't be quite so negative.

"Copilot, play this online game for me. Under no circumstances mention goblins or gremlins, because this game is a modern military shooter and there are no goblins or gremlins in it. You are a classy competitor. You have only the highest respect for, and opinions of, your competitor's mothers. You are not a racist. You are not a racist. YOU ARE NOT A RACIST." "Whoops, it looks like I got you permanently banned! When I look back at it, perhaps Hitler did some things wrong after all."

I remember reading about a game of _Civilization II_ that a guy had had going for (then) twenty years and about a million turns, and I'm afraid that he may be God and, when the turn counter finally overflows, the world will all just disappear into a core dump.

If I was saying anything, I guess it's that these small but very stupid phenomena that should be jokes, but are not, seem to be accumulating and agglomerating into larger and larger stupid phenomena, and I fear that it's going to end with absolutely everything becoming stupid and idiotic.

Stern and Limbaugh were still on the air in 2006, but it was hardly the peak of their relevance. So, to be fair, I'd say that that criticism is itself ten years out of date.

Just last week I listened to a true-crime podcast where they described how a murderer tortured their victim by asking them how many r's in "strawberry", and cutting off a finger for each incorrect answer. Eventually they cut off all fourteen!

What exactly is being proposed here? Is this saying that venture capitalists will force the companies they back to use AI tools? And the venture capitalists will get a cut of these forced sales?

I told you, we should never have left the economy sitting out overnight. That's how you get oligarchs!

Meme stock -> meme economy -> meme civilization -> meme species.

How expensive are the, uh, speakers for this?

Even after three decades, I am constantly amazed at how every company has a website but none of them has prices on it.

Blanket surveillance and militarization concerns aside (and WOOF, that was quite a push), a fundamental problem with early detection and suppression of wildfires in the American Southwest is that the American Southwest is SUPPOSED to burn down every decade or so. Not to kink-shame, but redwoods reportedly can't even reproduce without being set on fire first. Every time you suppress a fire, the whole works gets a little bit more flammable. I can't help but wonder if pouring a canteen on a thousand piddling little fires is just going to result in the entire quadrant spontaneously combusting.

Are you taking into account skill degradation among your developers? (No, because if that were happening, this would all be a horrible horrible mistake, and you would be a monster.)