I'm sorry, but when you look at the current administration, are the people at the top people who scream to you "I reached my position because of my competence and skill"? It is the crowd that's constantly screaming about "DEI" that has been the most obsessed with promoting people based on appearance and personality over any actual competence whatsoever in the fields they're being put in charge of.

And for the record, the guy who led the X mob against this person - Nathan Cofnas - has stated that beyond "whistleblowing", his motivation is that Beyond whistleblowing, he states that after a 'revolution' removes professors like Arday, it will open opportunities for him to become 'head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard'. Are these the sort of people whose side you want to be on?

Also, people think they're so clever when they do this, when they generally don't actually work with modern models anyway. It just makes you look manipulative and unprofessional.

College GPAs are just meaningless and it's time we just forget about them.

That GPA is what gets you in the door, over other applicants on those first jobs...

Hell, when I think about it....if "I" were a child today, and my parents raised me like they did back in the day....they'd be under the jail, with child protective services taking me away LONG ago....

No cell phones...and during the summers starting when I was a teenager....my mom started work again....so I'd be home alone all day, running around the neighborhood with my friends, playing all day.

We rode bikes and skateboards miles....played in the woods near our subdivision that hadnt' been developed yet....built forts, built skateboard ramps (the local house constructions "donated materials").....neighborhood pool, etc.

When I was very young, I had to call home about every 2 hours from a friends house....but other than that, I'd leave at sunrise and my folks generally didn't see me again till dusk and dinner, where we all ate together.

I got a job at 16yrs....I've been working ever since. With a little help, early graduation, I bought my own car my senior year in high school....a '78 280Z....fun!!

But yeah, no supervision was how we grew up, my friends and I are all older adults now, many with kids....we got into trouble and mischief, sure, but nothing that stopped the world and we learned how to deal with people and the world.

It's over an order of magnitude heavier than the largest of those (Helios).

There's a difference between an aircraft being built to lift itself and perhaps a tiny payload and be paperlight vs. an aircraft designed for actual commercial service carrying passengers.

The feet are needed to accelerate the plane to takeoff velocities in order to conserve battery mass.

Also, the big AI companies get a number of advantages, such as large batch sizes and being able to balance on-peak and off-peak workloads better.

Is most of your daily driving "a race"?

This is a midrange model. This is competitive midrange pricing. For my midrange work I've been using GLM-5.2 - Gemini 3.7 flash is a bit cheaper and a bit better on the benchmarks, so yeah, I'll probably switch so long as the prices stay low.

Sometimes you need a high-end model (Claude Fable, GPT 5.6 Sol, Kimi K3, etc). Sometimes a low-end model is fine (GPT 5.6 Luna, DeepSeek 4 Flash 0731, etc). Usually a midrange model is the best balance.

There are to be three variants of the ES-300: an all-electric 200km version, a hybrid 30-seat 400km version, and a hybrid 25-seat 800km version. And the ES-300 airframe very much is not some existing airframe.

EV fires are rarer than ICE fires (and slower spreading as well), so given that the competition is fuel-based....

It is a perfectly cromulent statement. 1MW = power, $5 = a cost of energy. They are providing both power and (indirectly) energy.

They didn't bother to install a co-pilot, a seat for the co-pilot, passengers, seats for the passengers, the hybrid gen set as you say, fuel for the gen set, and who knows if they installed a full production sized battery or just a smaller one

Are you just learning about the concept of a prototype in this comments section?

That's not correct. There are three modes. All-electric, hybrid-30 passenger, and hybrid-25 passenger, with ranges of 200km, 400km, and 800km, respectively. The airframe is to be certified for 20k feet (FL200), with optimal cruise altitudes from 10-15k feet, but this was explicitly described by the company as a "low-altitude test flight".

And to all the people going, "LOL, that's never going to cross the Pacific!" or similar range comments... and? Long haul flights (over 4000km) are only 5% of commercial flights. Very short / regional flights are 27% of total flights. There's very much a market for puddle jumpers, and airlines very much will buy them if they offer competitive advantages.

I can't remember the last time I witnessed a hospital demonstrating general competence

Where do you live where it is so bad there?

Unfortunately in the past 2 years...ive had to make a number of visits to the ER and one major surgrery....and I could NOT be happier with the doctors, nurses and general staff of the hospitals I've been too....

And my insurance covered most of all of it...didn't put me in the poor house like so many seem to claim will happen in the US if you get some much as a hang nail....this is private medicine I'm talking about with me, not VA.

It is 12000 days into September, 1993: Usenet is long since an artifact in the memory of greybeards; the internet belongs to the monkey cage. Yet on Slashdot, we still get physics puns. Here, the golden age lives on.