My university did the opposite, and to this day I think it was good.

At the end of the first semester, you were given a test in the three most important subjects for your field. If you failed, you could re-take it after the summer break, before next semester starts. If you failed it again, you could repeat the first semester and try a third and final time. Fail that, you're out.

It was hard, too. In my class, we were just over a hundred when we started. We were 28 in the 2nd semester. But of those 28, almost everyone made it to the end. Everyone who would've failed somewhere along the way had already been weeded out.

It was brutal, it was stressful - but IMHO it was the best way to do it and be respectful of both student time and university resources.

We had that in 1st grade. Not university, school. So students starting university have now regressed to the level of 6-year-olds ?

I get that it's stressful. I don't get how "managing stress" has vanished from the requirements of getting a degree.

People taking uncalibrated and unverified stuff and claiming life-changing benefits are why we are testing this in the first place.

> but can be largely controlled by the clinician/therapist/shamanic guide

From what I can tell this is a drug user myth, and one of the reasons these drugs are a drop in the bucket compared to other illegal drugs. A "trip sitter" is certainly a good idea, to avoid people hurting themselves as a result of drug-induced beliefs, but they won't save you from randomly having a bad trip, and once users have had a couple of those, they lose enthusiasm for the drug. LSD and friends are less affected by user expectation than other illegal drugs/alcohol.

It's a replacement for current turboprops, on their shorter routes. This is a picture of this plane:

https://www.heartaerospace.com...

This is the De Havilland Dash 8:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And the ATR 42:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Note some similarities?

You're need to get to work, get groceries, maybe go for an occasional Sunday drive. Do you buy a Porsche or a Honda?

SpaceX is. Grok/Twitter/xAI isn't. And SpaceX themselves advise that most of the growth potential, and thus most of the future value, is in the latter, not the former.

Software. Software companies often get P/E ratios of around 30 because they spend lots of money developing a product but after that they usually have very high profit margins and their incremental cost is pretty close to zero. That's why everyone, from Tesla to Uber, wants to be a "software company."

They're not though, and neither is Anthropic. They're a service provider whose ongoing costs are very high and there's no real reason to think they're going to be coming down much in the near future. Their incremental costs are also very high, having to pay for all the processing time. They're more like Tesla who has to actually build cars not just provide a download link. Except even Tesla doesn't have to spend billions every quarter to come out with a new product to keep up with their neck and neck competitors.

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.

Microsoft's roots run deep, and into the hearts of corporations and governments. Linking the hot thing of the moment into that plant, however badly, is what separated Microsoft from IBM. Big Blue's massive and iconic familiarity was the result of a happy accident they did their level best not to repeat, while Microsoft was always and remains happy to play to the demands of the moment to the detriment of security and reliability. Nothing has ever really changed with Microsoft regardless of CEO except that they've become more willing to throw things away and start again — but of course they still make the transitions from one thing to the next in the same way in which they do every thing: with hands of ham.

Good thing for them lock-in works!

Microsoft would simultaneously have you believe that their products are so good people can't help but want to use them, and that China is a hard place to sell a product in successfully so of course it only makes sense for them to withdraw.

Fact is, all of Microsoft's products are outshone by someone else's now, and many of them are free, and most of them are even Free!

Microsoft has already been transitioning towards being a service company more than a product company with Azure and 365. They are an IBM or Oracle now. Nobody wants most of their products, but they have legacy products that it makes sense to put them next to. If you were starting from scratch today, you'd start with something else.

Yes, I agree, but it's insensible. The competition isn't going to wither because they have to compete with everyone, since it's an internet-delivered service. Plus, the industry is ripe for new developments from previously unknown players. Transformers made LLMs viable. What's the next development on that scale? It is of course unguessable, but if it doesn't come from Anthropic, they're not special.