When someone has created a successful product, they usually think it's because they're smarter than other people, and they're usually wrong.

Facebook is the only really successful product Zuckerberg has ever created. It succeeded because he was in the right place at the right time, and that doesn't happen very often. All of Meta's other major products are things they bought instead of building themselves. His attempts to build other things from scratch have mostly failed.

He decided "the metaverse" was the future of computing, just as everyone else was embracing AI as the future of computing. If he weren't the founder and single largest shareholder, that would have gotten him fired.

Ironically, Quest is actually the most popular platform for VR gaming. If he'd been content just to create a gaming platform, it would be considered a success. Instead he blew $80 billion trying to turn it into the future of computing, making it a massive failure.

On the contrary, lots of companies have created electric aircraft. It's clear to everyone in the industry that they're going to be important in the future. A few have already moved into production, and many many more are at the prototype stage.

All the existing ones use conventional lithium ion batteries, and yes, low energy density is the main thing holding them back. Which is why this story is such a big deal: 60% higher energy density than the batteries in existing electric aircraft. Somehow you flipped that around in your mind and said "no one else" has used batteries with much higher energy density than what everyone else is using because... the energy density is too low??

Almost every neuroscientist in the world would disagree with you about that.

They sold you a piece of software, err, sorry, a license to use a piece of software, and then it turns out they didn't have the legal right to sell you that license because it conflicts with other contracts they signed? That doesn't justify their actions. It makes them even worse by adding fraud on top of everything else.

Aside from "you bought a license, not software" being obviously BS, it doesn't really matter. If you bought a license, then you own the license. They can't take it back. If they block you from exercising the rights you purchased, that's cause for a lawsuit.

Did they ever use the word "revolutionary" to describe their work? No, of course not. Did they claim to have invented evaporative desalination? No, of course not. It's literally in the very first sentence of their abstract: "Solar-thermal interfacial desalination is a sustainable solution to meet the ever-increasing global freshwater demand." I really wish you wouldn't make things up like that.

So what do they consider to be novel about their work? That's in the second sentence of the abstract: "However, when treating actual ocean water, salt accumulation on the evaporator surfaces and brine discharge are major issues limiting the performance and posing environmental concerns." And they made significant advances in addressing those problems.

I know, it's much more fun to attack someone by pretending they said something different from what they said.

Says someone who obviously has never read any science fiction ever.

NoScript. No one gets to run untrusted code on your computer unless you approve it first.

To be fair (in a very cynical sort of way), is this really any different from boxing? People are paid to hurt themselves while crowds of spectators cheer them on. It's disgusting, but we've been doing it for a long time.

You obviously don't know who Cassandra was. To quote from Wikipedia, she was "a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies, but never be believed... In contemporary usage, her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate a person whose accurate predictions, generally of impending disaster, are not believed."

When your entire argument consists of nothing but name-calling and lies, at least know what the names you're calling them mean!

40 years is much too optimistic. We're dealing with nonlinear phenomena. Things change slowly until they change quickly, and then they're irreversible.

Once we pass the first few major tipping points, the eventual transition of the earth to a hothouse state will be inevitable. When the arctic ice cap disappears, warming will accelerate dramatically. When the Amazon collapses, it will release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Both of those will accelerate thawing of the permafrost, releasing even more carbon. At that point, the earth's future will be locked in. The transition will happen over centuries, but it will be impossible to prevent. And then it might not swing back for millions of years.

Speaking of the more immediate concern of doomed cities, it's likely that a lot of coastal cities in the southeast US are already beyond saving. Just a few weeks ago a study concluded that New Orleans can't be saved. Miami and parts of Houston are likely in the same situation, or if they're technically still saveable they won't be for long.

The article includes a major qualification that was omitted from the Slashdot summary:

The thing they've ruled out is the high end estimate of how much CO2 humans will emit, not how much the planet will warm. The rate of warming has accelerated in recent years, not because of how much we're emitting but because natural feedbacks are starting to amplify it. There's growing evidence that the old warming estimates were too low, and each emissions scenario will produce more warming than we previously thought it would.

They're both things I don't do and don't miss at all. But eating a healthy diet makes me feel great. I get unhappy if I have to go a day without any fresh vegetables.

It's not because you were born different than me. Your body adapts to however you eat. It responds well to your typical diet because that's what it's used to. If you switch to a different diet there will be a short period of your body being confused and telling you to go back to what it knows. Then it will adapt to the new diet, and you'll find eating healthy food feels great.

Here is what the report says.

That all sounds reasonable and matches what has been the mainstream advice for many years.

It isn't.

Life is full of risks. There are no guarantees, but you can still shift the probabilities. People who exercise are healthier on average than people who don't. It doesn't guarantee you won't end up badly hurt, but your chances of a long healthy life are higher if you exercise. That's the best you can get.