Even the summary mentions that this is different to the "shark skin" effect. People have no attention span these days.

Boeing has a mechanical linkage between the pilot's and first officer's controls. It's designed so that you can break it in an emergency by forcing the controls. The audible "dual inputs" warning is an Airbus thing where they use sidesticks with no mechanical linkage.

You think 1,393 miles is impressive? I did 7,950 kilometres last year - half marathon distance every day. Almost made 8,000, but not quite. I'm taking it a bit easier this year, though.

Wavetable synths gave you a different set of trade-offs due to limited sample memory. You ended up with low effective sample rate at low pitches. If you compare Super Famicom and Mega Drive soundtracks, you can see the composers tailored them to the systems' strengths. For example, Mega Drive games could do a more convincing rendition of saxophones and brass. The Roland Sound Canvas was what most PC games with MIDI soundtracks were developed against. It was the first proper General MIDI synth module, and did a pretty decent job. Everything else was a fallback mode. The next big step forward was Yamaha's AWM.

I think this may be because in the 60s there was far less violent crime, so the only murders out there were domestics which are trivial to solve. It would interesting to test the idea.

This isn't true. After peaking in the '90s, violent crime is basically back down to '60s levels now. The generally accepted hypothesis is that the rise in violent crime was mostly due to burning fuel containing tetraethyl lead, and the subsequent drop is mostly due to reducing exposure to lead (and other heavy metals).

"AI" proponents keep touting language translation as something LLMs do well, yet they're absolutely dreadful at it for pairs of languages I'm familiar with. "AI" translation cannot get pronouns right when translating to/from languages where pronouns depend on the relationship between the speaker and listener (e.g. Korean and Viet). Admittedly it can be ambiguous if you only have a single sentence, but "AI" doesn't get better with more context. Give it enough material that it's unambiguous to any human, and the "AI" won't even be consistent between sentences in a paragraph. For another example, it can't deal with implicit topic when translating from Japanese. Someone recently posted an "AI" translation of a Japanese video game that never had an English release, and this was really obvious right from the intro. There's a guy telling you what you need to do, but the "AI" translated it as him saying what he needs to do. Once again, it's basic stuff that no human would screw up. You're trying to claim it works at "a super-human level" when out here in the real world, it screws up stuff that any kid who's been to a few language classes can get right. It makes the rest of your enthusiasm for "AI" seem completely misplaced.

the US is not trying to make the rest of the world dependent on US manufacturing by undercutting everyone and putting them out of business

That's exactly what the Bretton-Woods agreement was supposed to do - make US exports artificially cheap to try and put everyone else out of business.

The BYD Shark petrol-electric hybrid with DMO AWD seems to hold up pretty well in tough Australian conditions. Ironically, it isn't actually available in China. There's no chance of it making it to the US market.

I don't think they're saying it's the only choice. They're saying that if you're using VMware to provide high-availability service with automatic hot failover, etc. then switching to IBM mainframes is cheaper than staying with VMware given Broadcom's new pricing. There are other solutions with their own pros and cons, but given mainframes' reputation for being expensive, this really says something about how much Broadcom is charging for VMware.

I don't know what the AC you replied to is referring to, but Don Ho has occasionally used the release notes (opened automatically after installing an update) and the web site to express anti-PRC opinions. I wouldn't call them "tirades", but some people apparently get very upset if software developers express opinions.

My kids have managed fine without social media, so the ban hasn't affected them at all. There are various services for children to socialise provided by government-affiliated groups if parents aren't involved.

Sydney has PCYC (run by the police) which operates youth centres with sport facilities and various affordable programs. Melbourne has "adventure playgrounds", weekly video game groups run by the social housing providers, free after-school soccer programs run in association with the Melbourne Victory A-League team. There's lots more, that's just a few examples.

If kids aren't socialising, it's either because they don't want to, or their parents are preventing it.

ISDN was pretty popular outside the US. In Germany in particular, it was used for payment terminals at a large proportion of businesses. In Australia, it was the most cost-effective way to connect a small PABX to the phone network (you could get an ISDN connection with 10, 20 or 30 bearer channels, depending on how many simultaneous external calls you wanted to support). In Japan, payphones had ISDN sockets so you could plug in your laptop/palmtop/whatever and check your e-mail or connect to your office network. It's been phased out now, but it used to be pretty important and widely used.

I miss ISDN. Only 20 years ago, all Japanese payphones still had ISDN ports. I wrote software to handle downloading updates over ISDN while cooperating with point-of-sale systems that also needed to use the ISDN lines. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.

I'd argue that nukes have a stabilising effect, because it creates a very strong disincentive for a major conflict between nuclear powers. India/Pakistan without nukes would have been more likely to have an all-out war.

Yeah, I don't see how this is a trade. For example a future contract has something delivered. If I sell you a December steel rebar contract today, I have to deliver that rebar to you in December, and you have to accept the delivery (unless one or both of us offloads the contract to someone else or we liquidate it, but you get the idea). Even cash delivery futures on e.g. a stock market index are more real, as we'd settle for the difference between the price of the future contract trade and the index value on the delivery date (equivalent to trading a basket of index constituent stocks).

These "prediction markets" are just bets. That's all there is to it. There isn't some real product changing hands, it isn't tied to the price of something tradable. It's just betting on some event occurring.