The public vs private distinction is used, yes, but it is no way, shape or form allows the government to "set rules" that infringe on your Constitutional rights. Can police officers strip search you in the street without cause? Can cameras x-ray into your car? Can they place tracking devices on your car? Fingerprint the tires? Use facial recognition on you without your consent or knowledge or any suspicion of a crime? There are endless ways to invade someone's privacy in public, it's not a free-for-all for the government. And that includes even passing laws that are later deemed unconstitutional themselves.

I understand there is gray area, and I'm not in any way against regulating pubic roads and requiring driver's license, speed limits, etc, but the "you are in public, you aren't entitled to X privacy" argument isn't valid on its own.

License plates are maybe interesting if you want to argue they themselves are public property that just happen to be "along for the ride" or something like that, but no reasonable judge should deny that it's a mere proxy for tracking YOU without cause.

I don't deny this is where we are at, legally, but it is quite the circular argument at its core.

It's ok to track your license plate, because you are required to display a license plate for tracking.

A quarter of YC startups can be built with any rapid application development tool of the past 30 years. It could be Hypercard or Filemaker Pro for all they care, they aren't investing in this stage into computer science fundamentals.

Add to this the fact that they are a deal flow + tech trend factory, and AI is the biggest tech trend of the year, and yeah... AI-related PoCs from young aspiring entrepreneurs are a perfect fit.

It's neither good nor bad, but says VERY little about software engineering in general.

Never mind AGI, we don't even have a particular strong notion of what our own intelligence is.

That said, just because you can't define something all that well doesn't mean I can draw a smiley face on Broccoli and call it a robot. LLMs show absolutely, positively, ZERO fundamental ability to reason, generalize, or compete with the thought process of a human. OpenAI is playing semantics to say: if software can produce X output from Y input in an economically competitive way, then whether it's "actually" intelligent is irrelevant... so let's just go ahead and say that it is.

The entire event is estimated at $20B - $30B in damages, of which the FAIR Plan holds a minority portion of the claims. They have $400M on hand, $5.75B in reinsurance (not $2.5B), and if they are covering $458B worth of property statewide then they should have around $200M/month in revenue in the form of premiums from houses not burning down.

Oh, and the state has a $15B fund in place for any claims against the utility companies, and a $2B safety valve to reduce claims (split between the homeowner and other insurers).

Yeah, it's a bad situation, but they aren't paying off a $400B bill with $3B. More likely, they have about the right sized fund for a worst-case scenario.

Now go look up Florida, North Carolina, Louisiana, Texas in recent years. No insurance problems with those hurricanes, right?

There are no states that are able to smoothly bankroll all-time large natural disasters, and shitting on someone else's human suffering out of political spite is the lowest of lows.

"Amazon developers were unable to find any mistakes in Q's work in "79% of the auto-generated code reviews."

Uhhhh, so 21% of the code reviews had mistakes? What kind of mistakes? Is that good?

I always enjoy some good old fashioned "this is a good number" statistics. For all we know those code reviews, if trusted, will lead to worse results than before.

There exists a whole class of non-custodial exchanges where the wallet remains in your control. Unfortunately, the overall market has yet to prefer actual security over centralized exchanges, which are practically the antithesis of the underlying assets they are trading.

Not everything about the US real estate market is good, or bad, clearly.

That said, 6% commissions are a ripoff perpetrated by large, monopolistic agencies, lame certifications and legacy systems. There are tons and tons of people paying 6% as if a buyer's agent did 10s of thousands worth of work for them, when they literally either didn't have one or they put in a few hours of effort max. At least the seller's agent is in theory managing the whole sales process and "putting in the work".

It's because the large agencies (Coldwell Banker, Keller Williams, Re/Max etc) have most of the listings, and they keep commissions artificially high in a variety of ways. Corporate takes billions in profits, they maintain expensive offices all over the place, they force employees to each be a Realtor®, which in itself is mostly bullshit certification, they roll all of that back into massive marketing campaigns, they manipulate access to MLS, etc, etc.

Companies like Redfin and Zillow are the first wave of digitizing the industry and creating actual price competition. If you trust Redfin just as much as Coldwell Banker, you'll save quite a bit of money.

If these lawsuits actually manage to dismantle some of the monopolistic practices in the US real estate industry, the floodgates may open to the point that 1-3% commissions is way more common than 6%, and of course the DIYers will still be able to do it for more or less flat legal fees.

All good. I understand skepticism about licensees, IP, and all of that, and appreciate the back and forth. Obviously I'm going to be defensive, because we're talking about things I've experienced first-hand, and seen the work put in, but also, you have no way of knowing we *aren't* a fly-by-night startup.

To be clear, you certainly didn't start this thread merely objecting to some phrasing from the article. You claimed that the company was merely capitalizing on the output of someone else's work, just another licensee, etc, etc. Sounds like you see it as least somewhat differently now and it's more about the phrasing. As a company, we have to pretty much shrug at that point. It's a small miracle when articles get most of the facts straight, let alone perfectly describe the NASA relationship. We honestly try.

The funny thing is, when you are a NASA licensee, it is forbidden to market yourself directly as a NASA "partner", or have any implied endorsement. You really do have to stick to the facts and follow certain rules. Unlike companies that are "inspired" by some NASA tech, or not really licensing it... they aren't under any obligation unless they actually infringe a patent and get sued by the government. Real licensees that intend to make a real product know that they can lose the license if they abuse it.

FWIW, people do approach us all the time and ask if we invented (or patented) nitinol and we always tell them "no". It's just where their minds go with no help from us, but we don't take advantage of it.

Yes, nobody is debating whether SMART Tire has licensed SMA tires patents from NASA (they hold the foundational patents from the rover work). I'm familiar with the program, given that I delivered the winning pitch and signed the licensing agreement.

You seem to be hoping to downplay his contribution somehow. Yes, it was a team. His role was principal investigator, named co-inventor on all the patents, and the lead tire industry expert. He also personally conceived of and built the spring tire, prior.

He is also named on over 50 tire patents covering a significant portion of the tires you see on the road every day.

Why are we debating his credentials again, other than to minimize the new company and presume all credit is due to NASA only?

Nobody claimed SMART first "came up with the idea" for SMA tires.

Yes, it was adapted to bicycles. That's largely a new invention. Or did you think a (not fully developed or deployed) metal mesh tire designed to carry 100lbs at 0.1 mpg for a few kilometers on Mars, was going to work great on a bike for thousands of miles with a human rider on Earth?

And again, it was "adapted" collaboratively with NASA through a Space Act Agreement, thus why some outlets are calling it a "partnership". Note that NASA doesn't use that term, because they are a government agency and they don't endorse private companies.

I recommend checking out the Veritasium YouTube video, if you are curious about who these people are. All of the inventors appear in it, they are all good friends, they're all brilliant, and they would all roll their eyes at any insinuation that SMART hasn't developed new technology of its own.

"The technology" in this case is the bike tires. I'm not sure what pedantic hill you're trying to die on here, but nowhere is any of this misrepresented or is anyone confused about whether NASA may have worked on the rover tire first.

You assumed this to be a situation where a company "just licensed" some NASA technology, but it's not. The company includes an original inventor, has literally partnered with NASA on the bike project, is the only entity further developing for space applications (including NASA), and is in no way, shape or form merely selling licensed NASA technology.

No rover has been launched yet with SMA tires, let alone in 2020.

You mean like a paid Space Act Agreement in which NASA analyzed and optimized bicycle tires?

Also those words are not the company's, they are the journalist's. They are both perfectly accurate, and not the company's wording.

Great explanation, thank you. One point of trivia, in addition to nitinol enabling rover tires with no bump stop... we're making even larger LTV tires that have a *nitinol* bump stop to protect the wheels and carry extra load. This is the difference between carrying a couple hundreds lbs for 20km and still taking damage, and carrying 1,000lbs for 10,000km without fail.

And yeah, the material composition is extremely important. Rubber shatters on the moon, and nitinol actuator wire would be useless on a bike. So we choose the formulation that DOES work under the conditions needed.

Muscle wire is nitinol that is in an actuator (heat activated) phase at room temperature. Electricity can be substituted to heat the material quickly. Boeing is using it to control aircraft wings and flaps.

Off the shelf muscle wire is interesting to experiment with, but may not do what you need for any given application. You'll want to think about the transformation temperatures, geometry, material composition and so on in a commercial setting.

Interestingly, you can also activate SMAs with magnets, add gradients to the material and all sort of other wild stuff.