I don't see that format working until we have actual hologram technology. The vast, vast majority of places where I've used my smartphone and tablet in recent memory wouldn't have had suitable surfaces to project the screen or keyboard onto.

If a non-hologram projector does work for your use case, we'd still need massive improvements in battery technology. What you're describing seems analogous to a Nebula Capsule 3. It only gets 2.5hrs of battery life, and is much, much chunkier than a smartphone let alone a watch/ring. I'd also be skeptical of how visible the image would be in, for example, my brightly lit office, and cranking up the brightness would only increase the battery life challenge.

I'm not sure where you're getting that "~1.9 billion daily PC gamer" stat. The latest I can find from Steam is that they had ~70 million daily active players. A ~27x multiple seems implausible, even accounting for the facts that the figure is 4 years old and that not everyone games on Steam.

Out in the streets of American cities rounding up "gang members" or "narco terrorists" to deport/detain without due process?

Punishing a group because of the behavior of some individuals is generally understood to be "racist" or a "human rights violation". We generally try to avoid those things in polite society.

Does the ability to quantum tunnel seem like a "reasonable" property of protons? That they can pass through an impassable barrier because some tiny portion of their wavefunction seeps through to the other side of it?

Physics is weird, man.

Do you question quantum mechanics on the same basis? I can't think of a theory that more egregiously violates "physical common sense", and yet it does a remarkably good job of explaining how the world works in experiment.

Thanks for the kind words!

I think "yes, they make those things up" is overstating the situation and contributes to the sort of complaining you describe.

Imagine a scenario where you're standing across the room from a small paper bag on a scale. Confusingly the paper bag, which you'd think would only weigh a few grams, in reality comes in at 10kg. I don't think it's fair to say that I'd be "making up" anything if I theorize that there are massive objects in the bag that I can't see, and based on things like the size of the bag put some constraints on what those objects might be. It's formulating an explanation for empirical data based on our understanding of the physical laws of the universe.

I think that's a reasonable analogue for the current understanding of dark matter. We haven't figured out how to "open the bag" and say what particles or mechanisms are responsible, but it's not just a fudge factor in the models either.

Disclaimer: I'm going on an undergraduate physics degree and a casual interest in the subject.

If we don't trust the GPU in this hypothetical scenario I'm a little more concerned about the fact that it's also responsible for driving a car around other motorists and pedestrians.

That aside, you raise a different but not entirely new problem. Try convincing Uber that the driver is lying or mistaken when they accuse you of being the passenger who made a mess in the back of their car.

Why not? Car takes a photo of its own interior before the ride. Car takes a photo of its interior after the ride. GPUs analyze images to determine if the car has been damaged or significantly dirtied. If so, fine the rider for the cleaning fee and for the time the car is out of service.

Self-replying to include some more thoughts.

The military also has the advantage of being able to take a level of control over their "employees" lives that would be impossible or outright illegal for any other institution. If private businesses could throw you in jail for not showing up to work (going AWOL) or trying to quit before they're OK with it (desertion), and if they could control when/where you sleep, what/when you eat, and what you're allowed to do in your free time, I imagine a lot more companies would be open to taking their chances on a high school graduate.

There's a reason the military is known to be a massive engine for social mobility, far beyond most (all?) private enterprises. They (well, the taxpayer) are willing to take that gamble.

To restate my speculation from a comment further down in the thread, I'd assume it involves much more investment and therefore risk to onboard someone to the point that they're useful at Palantir than to train someone to take orders at McDonald's. It's much lower risk to McDonald's if their gamble on an untested employee doesn't pay off. (Unless the training involves maintaining the soft-serve machine, which apparently requires some sort of advanced engineering degree to keep operational.)

I think it comes down to the amount you expect to invest in the employee. If I'm running a job site and my hourly 18yo helper no-shows, I 1) don't pay them and 2) immediately replace them with someone else who can haul building materials. I was certainly making an assumption that onboarding to an entry level job at a place like Palantir is going to involve investing significant time and effort into the employee before they start producing more than they consume.

But on reflection, that's probably not the case. They can pay rock-bottom wages given that they're hiring out of a demographic that no one else in the sector is touching, and their four-month seminar course probably serves as a cheap way to assess whether the employee can show up to work reliably and interact with others in a professional environment. Their execs confirm as much: "Palantir executives said they had a clear sense by the third or fourth week of which fellows were succeeding in the company environment."

Setting aside whether a college education itself provides value, as a hypothetical hiring manager I would be a bit nervous hiring someone who's never demonstrated that they can feed themselves, clothe themselves, and make it to scheduled appointments (ie, classes and meetings) without the oversight of mom and dad. Obviously having a college degree doesn't correlate perfectly with abilities in those areas, and you could demonstrate the same with a few years work experience. But hiring out of high school introduces a certain level of risk.

On the flip side, I expect that an 18 year old highschool grad is going to be even more susceptible to brainwashing with the corporate culture than a 22 year old with either a degree or work experience, so maybe there are pros and cons?

Where on earth is congress?

My understanding is that this is, unfortunately, probably technically allowed in the absence of a federal law saying that it's not. Or, at the very least, the current Supreme Court certainly wouldn't shut down the behavior. It seems like such a law would enjoy support from a wide enough cast of characters (the left, because "stick it to ICE" and the libertarian right because of the obvious infringement on personal liberty) that it should have enough support to pass.

If we don't see someone proposing legislation in the near future, it'll be one of the most obvious signs yet that lawmakers across the board have forgotten what they're meant to be doing.