No, unless and until they can produce a gallon of gasoline chaper than pumping oil out of the ground, refininging it, and shipping it to the gas station -- an economic miracle if you think about it

This makes sense for remote, off-the-grid locations where you have access to renewable power like solar that you don't pay for by the kilowatt hour. You could make enough gas from a modest setup to meet an inidvidual's needs.

It's one thing to man-rate a *technology*; but the *production processes* and supply chain need to be equally robust. The Apollo Command Module was flown a half dozen times before any manned mission.

Apollo was a project that had economic scale. Many test objects were created and many beta units produced of critical components like the Command Module. While managing larger scale processes has its own challenges, the fact that the processes are *repeated* make them easier to debug.

The low pace of manned missions in the current era adds to their risk. You can man-rate the *technology*, but (a) it's minimally tested and (b) produced artisinally instead of industrially. There were, perhaps, 180 space suits of various types produced for Apollo (not all of which flew), which while below "industrial" production quantities was a lot of repeittion of the operations needed to make them. The astronauts on Artemis missions will be wearing suits produced at a rate of a handful over a decade.

While the hindsight and experience from sixty years of manned space flight reduce the technological risk, that is offset by the production quality risk from low cadence production. Assembly personnel and even vendors can turn over between production orders.

I see this as a rich-get-richer scenario. Smart people, the ones who can outthink statistical parrot, will be able to use its speed at processing and digesting massive quantities of data to improve their productivity. People who can't outthink the things will have to use them *credulously*, and thus become functionally dumber than ever.

For a private company, making a profit is necessary for continued existence. Companies that don't make a profit get bought out and liquidated for the value of their assets.

The alternative would be to nationalize drug development -- socialized medical research. Or there's just waiting and hoping for the best, which is what we're headed toward.

If a restaurant is going to spend money on tech, I'd rather it be a web site with the full menu where I can just click/tap what I want including things like check boxes for extra sauce or perhaps a catch-all text field for notes.

Whereas Google says their rankings aren't affected by payments (other than their promoted link) they are awash in advertising cash.

Maybe. Presumably, Amazon also is awash in cash, but that didn't stop them from showing ads while you pause a show on Amazon Prime. Companies just can't help themselves. They shove ads into every possible corner.

Based on what? I've been on light rail systems in Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and San Jose. While I've seen an occasional homeless person, none of those systems have homeless people camping on them.

I think what you think of as recipients resenting handouts is commonly misunderstood. People have a basic need to feel like they are doing something worthwhile, which is traditionally fulfilled by them having jobs that pay them an amount that indicates how much other people value the work. Telling people they need handouts, then, indicates that they aren't capable of doing meaningful work. On the other hand, if people see that their work is valuable to people who can't afford to pay them a living wage (for example, daycare providers for retail workers who are parents), they're much more willing for somebody else to provide the money. UBI also helps the perception, in that there's no implication that recipients aren't also capable of getting paid for their work, since it's universal, and that frees people to look for things to do that they personally value but may not have built-in funding.

Of course, none of this helps if no occupations people can do are worthwhile any more because AI just does it better. You still have to worry about a high rate of idleness, even if the people aren't broke, but that's a somewhat different problem.

Had one last year -- a 12 v battery died and needed roadside replacement. Jump starts are still pretty common. So is overheating in the summer -- requiring coolant top-ups, even hose replacement can be done roadside. Some modern cars can go into "limp" mode because of faulty gas caps and you might have to reset the ECU in some cases to get home or to a shop. Those are just the ICE specific problems.

But yeah; ICE cars since 2000 have reached a level of reliability that would be unheard of when I started driving 40 years ago.

...if we're hyping our company's Ai snake oil. We should absolutely *not* classify them as people for other purposes, e.g., legally: it wasn't my company your honor that did that bad thing, it was the AI.

Sixty years ago it would have been "solid state". Ten years ago it would have been "block chain". Ten years from now it will be something else.

My favorite bug was when they started using message-signaled interrupts. When enabling MSI, they didn't disable the traditional IRQ, and my machine would keep delivering it. In particular, the network card would do something to toggle the IRQ line whenever a packet came in, but would leave the line triggered when idle. If this persisted for five minutes, the kernel would decide that line was stuck and mask it, but it was shared with my hard drive, whose driver would then never find out that operations had completed. Very odd to debug a computer that would fail if you left it alone too long, and nothing suggested that the network card was using that IRQ once it was configured to use MSI instead.

The fun part was that other people had machines where disabling the IRQ would also disable the MSI, so my fix broke other motherboards, and the PCI standard said something that could be interpreted as requiring either behavior. Fortunately, there was something you could check about the manufacturer to decide what to expect.

Applications which required getting mRNA into particular cells had problems with delivery, unless those cells were in the liver where everything tends to end up eventually. But getting cells in muscles in one arm to present antigens of a respiratory disease turns out to be fine for producing an immune response to the disease when it shows up in the lungs, so delivery isn't an issue for vaccines. This was known at the time of the article, but all the diseases with known proteins that would make good antigens already had approved vaccines, and nobody really wanted to develop a flu vaccine technology that wasn't more effective and just didn't take all summer to grow after settling on a strain. Then COVID showed up, and the ability to produce a vaccine knowing just the antigen and do it fast was suddenly important.

For that matter, this year it would be useful to be able to change the flu vaccine between Thanksgiving and New Years, because they picked the wrong H3N2 in the spring, but we don't have a suitable regulatory framework for approving that change, even though it's easy to make with mRNA.

I met my spouse through Craigslist. We've been together for 17 years and counting.

The decision to do it was made in 2011, and they've been building the parts that will go into it, and they'd already committed to doing the installation at the end of the current operating period, but the schedule for ending that period is "mid-2026", so he gets to be the one who makes that date exact, with people hoping to get one last experiment that doesn't need the upgrade in before they have to wait a long time.

That's what a kernel developer told me when I reported this problem. In particular, they said I had a machine with an nVidia device that was different from all the similar devices they'd seen in not having the second copy engine actually function. They gave me one line of config for my PCI ID, and then it worked perfectly.

They found and fixed the issue immediately upon seeing logs from my machine, but they'd never seen exactly that issue before to know in advance that it was a possibility.