The baby step is very significant to me. Because if the study did not account for other factors known to correlate or actively contribute to strokes and death by heart attack then it would be pretty weak and easily dismissed as correlation is not causation. If the findings are true that, there is a correlation between xylitol ingestion and strokes and death by heart attack outside of any other known factors, then it immediately calls for action. Foremost for those who consume xylitol to consider cutting back or abstaining until further research can be done. In addition it provides focused motivation for some postmortem analysis for xylitol and testing on what mechanism might cause the increased risk.

But I do personally have skin in the game as I enjoy chewing xylitol gum. I find it to be an enjoyable treat that I considered guilt free in terms of no calories from sugar, and even better perhaps killing cavity causing bacteria that would be fed by sugar, all while giving my mouth a cool clean mint freshness. So it is a bummer to find that those benefits may have a very negative side effect in the long run.

I hope your skepticism is true, and some researches are trying to hide behind a weaselly association; but hopefully the scientific process will play out with another party or two conducting similar studies and research while others further the research and starting cutting people looking for xylitol in the veins!

Yeah I was looking to defend chewing my Xylitol gum since I am generally low risk for heart attack and stroke. I was going to assert it is just unhealthy fatties who are going to die of heart attacks and strokes anyway and chug Xylitol instead of eating right; they are skewing the data. However:

It would be nice to know if massive amounts of Xylitol in your system cause your blood to plaque up and clog pathways increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke. Or if the "real" sugar people are at it again running around and sprinkling Xylitol gum at the morgue on corpses with the tag "heart attack" or "stroke" on their toe like dirty cops who just shot a guy by accident and sprinkle some cocaine and meth on him.

I think you are right, the issue is license plates; they make us too easy to track.
I do not believe legislation outlawing the requirement for license plates has much of a chance; but perhaps a compromise?

I propose a e-ink license plate supported by the state.
The e-ink licensee plate rotates license plate numbers on a regular basis so that a camera system like flock would generally not see the same number on your vehicle twice, and as a result would not be able to easily confirm it was the same vehicle.

On the states end it would be possible for law enforcement to look up the vehicle by submitting the license plate number and the date time to a system.
However, accessing this system would require personal credentials identifying and logging specifically who is access the license plate; as well as immediately notify the owner of the license plate that they were being tracked by law enforcement in this manner.
The officer Bob stole officer Jack's credentials would still hold Jack responsible as well for his credentials.

Law enforcement will be required to work completely in the light, any secret access would be grounds for throwing out any connected legal cases connected to obfuscated access to license plates. I believe this would be the hardest part, and the government would secretly work to circumvent and argue it can work covertly. As a result the systems would ideally be operated by third parties outside the government and vetted externally for such circumvention.

But even if we eliminated the requirement for license plates you will need to fix that distinctive dent on the front right bumper of your car.
In addition we must all drive red Honda Civics, make sure to rotate the hardware addresses on our tire pressure sensors, vehicle built in 5G modem, smart phone, Bluetooth headset, and any other device screaming an electronic signature.
Oh and please make sure your tires are all inflated to the recommended pressure exactly; or better yet deflate and inflate them to random pressures within the acceptable range to skew your signature, as well as rotates the tires each time before you leave your garage.

Be sure to wear your wig or hat, sunglasses and fake mustache so you are not easily identified through the front windshield by facial recognition.

https://invalidinventions.com/...

He would enjoy it, open his front window curtains wide, and walk around naked in his living room of course.

Of course his front yard would then be known to be safer than a dark alley for committing crime, since no cop wants to view the video feed and the Ai just sees blurs due to the auto nudity censor.

Since you mentioned mouse clicks along with keyboard strokes I would have assumed further upstream than the keyboard if the two issues were related.
However I am skeptical it is intrinsic to Windows since I have never encountered nor heard of such an issue.
My keyboard was literally $3 from micro center (they seem to attract liquid and the water proof ones were no fun to type on) and never misses a keystroke in Windows, Mac OS, and Linux with a KVM in between.
It sounds infuriating, I would probably have tossed the whole rig for another Windows machine if I was stuck using Windows.
I am confident it can be resolved for you.

What else about Windows do you find inferior?
Genuinely curious, been poisoned by years of Microsoft hate myself, but my actions speak louder as I chose Windows over and over given the choice; same with most everyone around me who is not just trying to make a statement and actually wants to get things done.

On one of my Mac OS machines I use a Windows keyboard which places the Command Key (windows key) a bit further left and helps, but still to your point the Ctrl key for copy and paste is more comfortable.

But command+v and command+c is one of my favorite things about Mac OS out of the box. I hate trying to copy from PowerShell Windows or Terminal in Linux; I generally end up terminating my process by accident a few times before I remember I am not on Mac OS.

I think you are correct on the Windows UI being snappier. I would blame the fancy animations and transparencies for that on Mac OS perhaps.

I have never seen a missed click or eaten keyboard stroke myself, no v's instead of what I want pasted; perhaps it is your hardware?
Do go on all day, I would love ammunition against Windows, you have provided me with nothing I can reliably cite or reproduce.
I go between two Mac OS machines and a Windows machine on a daily basis and find the Windows machine to be the much more pleasant experience.
I paid a hell of a lot more for the Mac OS machines as well, and would be happy to retire the Windows machine; but given the choice when all three can do the job I sit in front of my Microsoft OS.
My main complaint would be Windows seemingly streaming who knows what out of my machine back to Microsoft, and if Mac OS is doing the same for Apple they are at least better at hiding it.

The key labeled "Delete" on your MacBook keyboard is backspace for a Windows user, and requires holding function for delete functionality.
Never bothered me since I use a full keyboard attached to my MacBook, but it was a surprising argument I had no rebuttal to.

I would say a toy generally has dumbed down functionality and flashy colors, which would describe the appearance of MacOS.
But hey I would love to see you use MacOS, maybe I would learn something; I use it every day and find it much more obtuse and slower than Windows.
Every MacOS advocate I have asked for a tutorial has tripped all over, and the best will offer a dozen apps to make the OS usable in the same way Windows is; or they are terminal keyboard masters because the trackpad is like poking yourself in the eye.
My preference would be the freedom of Linux, Apple hardware quality, finish and performance, and Window's just works.

My Mac Studio M3 Ultra crashes multiple times a week due to DisplayPort SST issues in MacOS 26, thankfully fixed in MacOS 27 from my testing of the beta.
Been a long time since I have seen my Windows systems brought down and they are cheap shit hardware I cobbled together.

I am not convinced that any significant number of people are staying with Microsoft because of some Windows only app.

The last two people I tried to get to move to Mac OS easily crushed that recommendation:
"No Delete key on a MacBook, pressing function + delete is annoying; I will just buy a Windows laptop with an actual delete key."
"I want a touchscreen laptop"

I walk past my fellow developers at work who are typing proudly on their expensive MacBooks, typing into Microsoft Visual Studio Code...

For me I just like how the mouse acceleration feels in Windows over MacOS and Linux, it is just smoother.

I would be happy to leave Windows behind forever, but I confess there are many things Microsoft has done well that I miss when using Mac OS or Linux.

The so called AI bubble will crash, stock prices will drop, but the demand for AI is obviously not going away; in addition it is only going to demand more and more RAM.
It looks like Micron and those who stand to lose profits from more RAM competition are the ones attempting to block Apple from using Chinese RAM.
Even if it does take 3 to 5 years to stand up a semiconductor fabrication plant, Apple alone can surely keep it busy.

Google says a single production line semiconductor fabrication plant that can produce DDR5X, LPDDR6, and HBM4 costs between $15 billion to $30 billion.
Google also claims Apple has access to maybe $40 billion in cash and up to $146 billion is liquid reserves.

So Apple can make a credible bluff that it will have a fab in 3 to 5 years to get its way today; and if they call it then Apple should just go all in and build the damn thing.

John will do it, Tim needs to step down already.

Yeah, out of the US frontier model providers Google seems to be giving us the best open weight solutions lately.
However, Gemma 4 is probably about a year behind the frontier models, and maybe nine months behind the Chinese open weight models.
It seems Google could do better than Gemma 4 today, given Qwen3.6 is very useful with similar model sizes.

Of course Google Gemini has been a distant third now in the frontier race as well.
I want Gemini 2.5 Pro open weights, last years frontier model, or Gemini 3.0 Pro.
Those are still far enough behind Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini 3.5 Flash that they would not compete with those services, plus they are probably so large that most could not run them on their own hardware anyway.
But they would compete with open weight Chinese models today and offer an alternative to running those on your own hardware.

XAi was supposed to release their previous best model once it was no longer competitive.
So Grok 3 and maybe even up to Grok 4.3 as of yesterday should have been opened.
But like Google, XAi with Grok is not a leader with US models, maybe taking third with Grok 4.5 until Gemini 3.5 Pro is released later this month.

I do not have the hardware to run Grok-2 at any reasonable speed, nor would it seemingly be worth it today.
I am sure the same would be true for Grok-3 and beyond.
I can run Gemma 4 at full 16-bit quantization, but Qwen3.6 seems to do better.
So I can appreciate the release of an open weight model that targets hardware a mere mortal pro consumer might have.
However, I will still rather give my $20 a month to a company that was releasing open weight models; and when my lender finally lets me take out a second mortgage for the rack H100s then I will be good to go.

It really seems like Google and the rest of them should be concerned about the Chinese models getting a foothold.
I would really like them to do something other than crappy legal tactics like blocking imports of Chinese models to avoid having to compete and give us open choices.
It is too bad that a US based company has not developed an open weight frontier model with a viable business plan.
Nvidia might be a hope there, since they will want to sell H100 level GPUs to every man, woman, and child in a few years; and we will want frontier level models to run on them.
But Nemotron is not quite competitive yet either.

This is the punchline.
Gold star for everyone!

If your exams are so easy students can cheat on them, that is a professor problem.
I had classes in college where you could have had the internet and phone a friend and still probably would not pass the exam without properly knowing the material; I respected those subjects.
The classes where you were not allowed to bring a back pack, nor wear a baseball hat, and only could use a #2 pencil to the exam were a joke; nothing taught, nothing learned.

If you want to pay tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to "cheat" and not learn the material, what do I care?
A person using ChatGPT, the notes on the brim of their baseball cap, or the hired test taker gets it done; why are we concerned how?
Eventually it either catches up with them, or they are able to "fake" it and cheat through life; either way the work is completed.

Oh it is about academic integrity at Brown? Give me a break. Like there has been any of that anywhere for a century.

It really seems like OpenAi, Google, Meta, and SpaceXAi would do well to release more open weight models.
Their current models are still a few months ahead of the Chinese models, so their last versions would be right on par.
It still takes a lot of expensive hardware to run the truly competitive Chinese models, as it would the on release old American models as well.
As a result you are not really going to lose much if any of your customers to those running your models locally, because if they are capable of doing that they are already looking else where.

But sadly the American frontier Ai model companies have mostly regressed in releasing open weights.
Meta has gone closed and is no longer really even talked much about.
Grok open weight releases are are behind on the promised release schedule sadly; and generally even behind in terms of their latest frontier model.
Although it will be interesting to see how the new Grok 4.5, the first model it trained with Cursor, is going to score.

I would much rather hand my Ai subscription money to a company that released their model weights.
Better yet it would be nice if they shared their annotated data sets and training recipes as well.
However I am not sure how an organization that "gave everything away" like that would survive.
Right now it would have to be based on having massive compute and renting it out for profit that is put back into model development.

The Chinese companies either have a large side gig, like Alibaba, Bytedance, and Xiaomi similar to Meta, Google, and Microsoft here.
On top of that the Chinese government may be providing some support as well.

But if you at least released an open software stack that competed with or beat OpenAI and Anthropic models it seems like that should start to hurt their bottom line. The leading Chinese models appear to be no more than three months behind OpenAI and Anthropic. In addition their models seem to cost less to run.

I suspect their is a bit of distrust around anything coming out of China.
However a company capable of running these massive models would be much more secure using open weights they can run on their own hardware with much less worry that someone will take it away.
I would think this would be especially appealing for organizations outside China and the United States.
Mistral AI has said as much, working out of France.

Maximum? Most 4 day a week work plans I have seen still require 40 hours a week meaning four ten hour days.
I find that to be very appealing and perhaps more productive than five 8 hour work days.

However, anything less than 8 hours of work in a day is not what I what consider a full day of work by any measure.
Someone who works six four hour days is certainly not achieving a six day work week, but instead can perhaps at best claim 3 days of work spread out over 6 days.

But either way, if we set it at a maximum of 8 hour work days it only proves my point that workers in the EU are putting in fewer hours on average, less work, and it does not seem surprising that productivity has suffered.