This. Stock options are zip until they're liquid. People learn this lesson in every startup boom.

Which isn't to say they might not be worth millions... but their valuations now are basically fiction.

It's the usual issues. If you acknowledge that homeless people are actual people who have problems which can be partially or fully solved, then you need to work on the problems.

You seemed to be confused. The goal is not to solve the problems of the homeless. The goal is to solve the problems caused by the homeless.

You know what Metrocard could do that Omny can't? Charge my commuter benefit Visa card -- you know, the one that lets you use pre-tax money to pay for the commute? I could buy Metrocard with it. Omny won't accept it. Of course when I call them they refer me to the issuer, who refers me back to Omny. Since it worked with Metrocard and it works with other transit systems, I'm pretty sure the problem is with Omny, but they don't give a shit.

Yes, but that 7mph IS about double their previous speed. You used to be able to win a race with the M14 by accident when walking briskly. Now you probably have to work at it.

Two more: drive car.

Officer, I was driving 50mph over the speed limit with my lights off at night in a stolen car with no plates, the wrong way down an Interstate highway, and as you can see by the empty bottles around me, my blood alcohol level is higher than your IQ. Why would you expect me to have a license?

Whatâ(TM)s interesting here is that as a professional musician, this guy is a public figure and the âoeactual maliceâ standard for defamation applies â" a standard that was designed when defamation could only be done by a human being.

This requires the defendant to make a defamatory statement either (1) knowing it is untrue or (2) with reckless disregard for the truth.

Neither condition applies to the LLM itself; it has no conception of truth, only linguistic probability. But the LLM isnâ(TM)t the defendant here. Itâ(TM)s the company offering it as a service. Here the company is not even aware of the defamatory statement being made. But it is fully aware of their modelâ(TM)s capacity to hallucinate defamatory âoefactsâ.

I think that because the tort is based in the common law concept of a duty of care, we may well see the company held liable in some way for this kind of thing. But itâ(TM)s new law; it could go the other way.

The laborious, linear interface is of course another limitation of all kinds of tapes -- digital or analog. But getting rid of this also changes human behavior. People don't listen as much to long form collections; they don't even necesssarily listen to entire songs.

A mix tape is essentially a long format program manually and personally curated for you by another human being, unmediated and indeed untracked by any third corporate party. Losing the mix tape was a real cultural loss. Sure they didn't sound great, but they didn't have to.

I suppose every technological advance is potentially double edged. When people get books and literacy, verbal storytelling declines. That doesn't make books bad. the technical limitations of verbal stories -- say limited repeatbility -- are real limitations, but that doesn't mean something wasn't lost.

It appears most of the high-precision users either detected or were informed that the NIST time was no longer healthy. NTP was affected, a bit more disturbing is that some other high precision users (but not GPS) were affected:

On Dec 21, 2025, at 2:30 PM, âjeff.sâ¦@nist.govâ(TM) via Internet-time-service Internet-time-service@list.nist.gov wrote:

Dear colleagues,

Utility power was recently restored to the NIST Boulder campus. Assessment and repair activity is in progress, but I want to give a brief status update regarding Internet Time Services on the NIST Boulder campus. As usual, status notes per-server will be manually updated here:

https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/ser...

Clocks and time transfer services operated from the NIST WWV/Ft. Collins and Gaithersburg, MD campuses are independent and were unaffected throughout.

Soon after the last notice, NIST facilities staff stationed on-site started a diesel generator held in reserve and activated a power transfer switch positioned to supply âoesecond backupâ power to the affected laboratory. The period without ac power (due to automatic âoefirst backupâ generator failure after 2 days of continuous operation) was about 2 hours. However, large battery banks kept all clocks and most measurement and distribution chains powered throughout. Additional quick action by NIST facility staff secured temperature control for the most sensitive clocks. We regained some monitoring ability showing that the disseminated UTC(NIST) signal likely did not deviate by more than 5 us (five millionths of a second) and appeared stable. Knowing this, I decided to keep the Boulder Internet Time Servers active until we lost monitoring or some other event caused the time scale deviation to increase significantly.

To put a deviation of a few microseconds in context, the NIST time scale usually performs about five thousand times better than this at the nanosecond scale by composing a special statistical average of many clocks. Such precision is important for scientific applications, telecommunications, critical infrastructure, and integrity monitoring of positioning systems. But this precision is not achievable with time transfer over the public Internet; uncertainties on the order of 1 millisecond (one thousandth of one second) are more typical due to asymmetry and fluctuations in packet delay.

NIST provides high-precision time transfer by other service arrangements; some direct fiber-optic links were affected and users will be contacted separately. However, the most popular method based on common-view time transfer using GPS satellites as âoetransfer standardsâ seamlessly transitioned to using the clocks at NISTâ(TM)s WWV/Ft. Collins campus as a reference standard. This design feature mitigated the impact to many users of the high-precision time signal.

Best wishes,

-Jeff Sherman

Not enough CO2. 2000 tons seems like a lot, but the Lake Nyos disaster which killed people within 25km was a release of 100,000 to 300,000 tons of CO2. A release of 2000 tons would be a major industrial accident but not an area-wide disaster.

If there was any difference between racial groups, or between men and women, on such an exam, it would be lawsuit-bait. A lot of the difficulty in hiring is coming up with measures which will easily pass Civil Rights Act scrutiny while still giving good signal (it has to pass _easily_ because even if you win lawsuits every time, the cost of defense will be ruinous). A college degree in a related field is generally accepted. Things like programming tests for programmers are. But the more general your test is, the more likely its relevance will be challenged. And the more widely your test is given, even if it passes CRA muster, the more pressure there will be to water it down to reduce racial and gender differences -- and also reduce useful signal.

Harvard has offered remedial reading since 1940 or 1941. They recently started offering remedial math. Stanford started offering remedial math (though they don't call it that -- MATH 18) in 2022.

PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.