There was a period where in-game deaths were football's big problem(especially because it was an Ivy League game at the time; and the sons of people who mattered kept dying). Then-president Roosevelt personally stepped in to try to clean things up enough to avoid a ban; which gives you a sense of how long they've been at this.

Reminds me of something I've read: boxing with gloves is massively more dangerous than bare-knuckle boxing. Normally, punching someone's face with full power will also wreck your hand. Gloves remove this drawback, and thus lead to many more cases of severe brain damage.

The NFL has been pretending to care about concussions more or less as long as I can remember; and I'm north of 40 at this point. I suppose it's marginally less pathetic than their "no, of course constant head trauma has no neurological effect whatsoever" stance; but it's still desperately hard to take seriously.

I'm not desperately impressed by xenophobic analogs to the privacy policies we really need regardless of the nominal HQ of whoever is hoovering up the data; but this seems like a situation where, if the US techbros can't hack it, they might as well just call it a day and go home. We've definitely had years, at least a decade and probably plural decades, of US 'tech' being diverted to software faff vs. the sort of hardware and relatively low-level work that once put the 'silicon' in 'silicon valley' before it was all hypergrowth SaaS nonsense and onanistic VC hypebeasts; so if they can't even handle implementing software for these cars I'm not really sure what good we can pretend they are still for.

Seems like particularly specific flavor of 'Dutch disease', partially concealed by the fact that both actual engineering and rent-seeking software faff are both qualified as 'tech'; but we've had a prolonged period of quiet brain drain; inspired by the fact that the margins are better on social-mobile-something and enterprise SaasS than on actual technical work; rather than the more classical case where an extraction industry distracts you from your actual economy; but the mechanism and effects have been largely the same.

The US is a signatory of the Geneva Convention on Road Traffic; so just an IDP and a drivers' license from another signatory state(or a Vienna Convention on Road Traffic signatory) would probably do at least in the short term. Not sure that the question of ongoing operation on US roads by someone who remains subject to a different state's licensing requirements has been addressed; since historically it would have been purely hypothetical.

Because, as we all know, part 129 requirements for foreign airliners are totally equivalent to whatever hiring standards waymo feels like using for their offshore call center. Clearly equivalent situations.

I don't doubt that the previous requirements were effectively impossible for nontrivial portions of the industry and their customers; though, given the wall-to-wall dumpster fire that is IT and IT security; I can only see the attempt to treat that as evidence that the regulations were unrealistic and unduly burdensome as either myopic or deeply cynical.

Commercial software and both commercial and institutional IT operations are much more an example of the fact that you can absolutely run on dangerous and unsustainable shortcuts so long as there are no real consequences for failure than it is a case of a competent and successful industry at risk of being stifled by burdensome regulation.

The reasoning is honestly just baffling. Apparently the old requirements "diverted agencies from developing tailored assurance requirements for software and neglected to account for threats posed by insecure hardware." by requiring that people keep track of what software they were actually using.

Aside from the...curious...idea that knowing what your attack surface looks like is a diversion from developing assurance requirements; the claim that the old policy about SBOMs is being revoked for not focusing on insecure hardware is odd both on the obvious point that basically anything with a sensible scope only focuses on certain issues and leaves other issues to be handled by other things and the only slightly less obvious issue that most 'insecure hardware', unless you've qualified for a really classy covert implant or have high sensitivity TEMPEST issues or something, is not actually hardware problems; but firmware problems; which are just software problems that aren't as visible; exactly the sort of thing that SBOMs help you keep an eye on.

Not like anyone expected better; but this is exceptionally poor work.

The usual term with things like plumbers is "rollup". Even the most delusional excel jockey probably doesn't believe he has 'operational alpha' vs. a veteran plumber in matters of plumbing; but he(correctly) knows that local plumbing outfits are a fairly heavily fragmented industry with a lot of relatively small players; the sort of quaint folksy thing that looks like one of those competitive free markets they told you about in EC101. And, if you, purely hypothetically, can borrow money for a pittance, you don't need to improve operations when you can just buy a bunch of the small players, consolidate them, and then raise prices to match the newly reduced level of competition.

Same deal works with more or less any business with a lot of mom 'n pop operators; as well as things like rental housing. Maybe there are some marginal efficiency improvements in back office functions because it's not eleventy zillion individual copies of quickbooks; but most of the actual margins come from the higher prices you can command from customers and the lower prices you can offer to suppliers and employees once you consolidate a given sector in a given area. The effect is particularly lurid when it comes to thinks like small medical and dental practices; or care homes; since there it's about the money; but being about the money is also about pushing your employees to recommend unnecessary implant surgery and cutting patient/staff ratios as hard as you can without anyone noticing too many bedsores. Fantastic stuff, really.

"There is existential risk for a number [of funds] because of the fundraising environment,"

I'm not sure words can adequately express the hubris and myopia of someone who blames "the fundraising environment" for the fact that their heavily leveraged buyout of a bunch of things they had no actual plan to improve value of is catching up with them.

In the strict legal sense it might not be a ponzi scheme; you can end up depending on new suckers to pay off your current creditors through incompetence as well as malice; but 'existential risk' because you've potentially run out of new suckers means that you are running a ponzi-tier business regardless of the exact motivation.

It's fairly hard to see why anyone would be contributing to xbox hardware revenue at this point, aside from possibly buying controllers. In pure hardware terms MS and Sony are shipping aggressively similar gear; and in software terms the list of games that are fully exclusive or 1 console + PC but not the other console is overwhelmingly tilted toward playstation(with Nintendo kind of doing its own thing, as ever, with a small but very high exclusivity lineup).

What's the case for buying the xbox under those circumstances? I guess the cheaper Xbox variant is the minimum-viable Call of Duty box; so that's something(though something MS is actively undermining by trying to pitch game streaming on basically anything with a display as the minimum-viable option); but that's a thin list of advantages.

Why no focus on how Waymo prioritized their customer over some non-customer riffraff. impeding their travel experience? 8/10 randroid lunatics agree that Waymo has a duty to prioritize customers over non customers!

It's possible that people would; but this system is not that. It stores a variety of data locally to automatically generate the prompts that give a fresh session the illusion of continuity in the face of restrictive context windows, and ; but farms out the bot part the usual suspects(though the project creation sees to prefer Anthropic; so it's not Sam specifically who is getting the data).

It's 'local' in the sense that a real mail client sucks less than webmail.

It's less odd if you consider the contexts both sides are coming from: If you operate above the level of immediate consequences; the belief that how you characterize it can be as or more important than what actually happened is simply a correct empirical deduction. Just ask anyone who somehow skates blithely from one...opportunity for learnings...to another...difficult transformation period...seemingly with no impact on future employability. While if, regardless of the euphemism used, you'll be having your credentials deactivated and putting your meagre effects into a cardboard box while security watches there really isn't any euphemism that is actually going to work.

HR and PR are the ones that most genuinely puzzle me; since they are less commonly in positions where it's just plain true that how you spin it is what matters; but also often seem to be behind the curve on the fact that the euphemism treadmill means needing to regularly replace euphemisms and they absorb the meaning of what they were intended to obfuscate and eventually sound even grimmer than the plain statement.

I'm curious(honestly a bit morbidly) to see whether there will be organizational/emergent downsides. In principle not being able to do novelty is fine. Realistically a lot of science simply isn't going to be novel; between interesting hypotheses that ended up not being borne out by experiment(such 'negative results' being a necessary but under-published area) and things like ecology or material science where sometimes you just need to characterize all the bivalve species on a coastline even if they seem to mostly just be fairly basic clams and mussels; or pound through eleventy-zillion variations on plausible engineering ceramics looking for atypically good properties.

However, as we've had the misfortune to see in our inboxes and the powerpoint decks that get inflicted on meetings; people tend to generate more of what is easy to generate; and scientists often get rewarded(in terms of hiring/tenure track; grant funding, etc.) for apparent productivity. The most extreme exploitation of 'AI' for this has proven somewhat nontrivial to combat(the various shit-tier journals and paper mills that add noise to the literature and allow the dishonest to pad their resumes existed back when they relied on human labor; but systems that are good at high speed production of plausible-looking output have thrown them into overdrive); but even if you focus entirely on honest actors doing real science in good faith, if the bots are genuinely useful but only for non-novel work; that seems like a situation where you've just created an incentive toward focusing on low-novelty work and toward seeing the scientists doing the most bot-friendly stuff as the most productive; while those who venture beyond the scope of its abilities are putting out papers by hand and appear much less productive.

Science has often had a slightly ambivalent relationship with novelty(you probably won't end up being remembered as a rock god unless you do come up with something really cool; but initial reception can be downright chilly: look at the career trajectory of someone like Barbara McClintock and transposons. Worked out for her in the end, Nobel in 1983; but that was for work that people were actively disinterested in when she did it in the mid 40s to 50s; and not everyone gets brought in from the cold before the point is moot); but it's probably not going to help if, wholly aside from cranky old guys controlling tenure committees and grant allocation, people who hew quite closely to data that LLMs have already chewed over genuinely crank out research substantially faster than people who venture further afield.