The tyre burst annoys me. The Air France Concordes didn't have the same safety features as the British Airways one - specifically, the BA ones had guards against burst tyres.

Virgin Airways wanted to buy the BA planes to keep them flying and offered to, but BA just didn't want to give them a public relations win so refused to sell. Shambles all round.

Another ancient here - I still try to convince the admins to give me my first account back, this one - number 13802. The place both has and has not changed - it always had its share of ranting, but people do seem to knee-jerk more negatively to developments than in ye olden days.

Note that I created my account, saw that nearly 14,000 people were here and thought "what's the point? Who will ever possibly hear me in a place with 14,000 people?". Now of course, you can get ten times that for a picture of a dog's nose.

Most likely the next step change in AI improvement will come from the next generation learning from today's LLMs and diffusion models. But not being trained on their output. More likely they will be evaluated by current AI.

AI advancements have a predictable pattern. First we mimic how humans do something, then we use those AIs to evaluate the next generation which learns how to do it without mimicking humans. LLMs have been trained on human output and work by trying to determine what a human would do in any situation. The next generation will most likely learn how to think and speak without ever seeing a word of human generated text. Now that LLMs exist to evaluate their output we have the necessary building blocks to design the generation of AI that can really produce content far better than any human.

We are living in the era of early-to-mid 90s chess engines, where AI learned from human moves and brute forced its way to barely beating the best in the world. It took 10 years from the point where chess engines could compete with top humans players until chess engines were effectively unbeatable. And those unbeatable engines were trained by other AI, not by looking at human games. It got to the point where looking at how humans played would have just made it worse.

That's why they compared it with YouTube shorts, which is basically YouTube's TikTok replica.

Surely the Commodore Callback will come to save us. Surely. Any moment now. Phone of the moment.

Similar to phones though, you don't have to buy every 18 months. The one thing it might do though is affect second hand prices more, which is likely a good thing for affordability.

well once they crossed 2 billion the signed integer representation made losses into profits

Yes, often as a first step to legislation. In the sense that "we tried to let you self-regulate, you didn't, and so...".

I'm speaking here about EU and UK politics, can't speak for the US. It's actually quite usual to do it this way.

they don't have to make a profit on the investment. The investment is defensive. The goal is not to be outside the moat.

instead of explaining to my boss why he caught me spinning on my chair and stacking office supplies into Jenga towers as "I'm waiting for the compiler to finish" I can now tell him I'm waiting for claude to get back to me.

I was looking forward to tokenising the Swiss citizen. There would be fewer of them than bitcoins and not growing in populations, so by the same logic bitcoinETF use they would appreciate. And they are even backed by gold. Dang.. I'd have made a fortune.

People should watch Dark Star. "How do I know you are not false data?" "Doesn't matter, the concept is valid no matter where it originated from".

Anecdote only from me of course.but for what it's worth...I'm left-handed. Subconsciously I consider left = "towards what I know" and right = "going further out". This applies to walking, driving...all of it.

I know it's not actually true of course, but if faced with an unfamiliar t-junction while driving or perhaps I'm just out on a walk to get some distance in, that's how I think of it.

It's testable, I agree. However as a left-handed person where my dominant side is the left...I always go left if I can.

Interestingly, though admittedly this is purely my anecdote so take this as such, this translates to driving too. Unknown place, just driving for fun, reach a t-junction and have to choose? To me left = "towards where you know" and right = "going further out". Even if that's not actually the case, that's just how my mind sees it at first glance. Wonder if that's also looked at, and also if it's affected by location (I'm in the UK, so would drive on the left).

The first American to orbit, John Glenn, was also a Marine.