The real issue is that the packaging process used to create vaccines in quantity is a process where you mix a tank of mRNA with a tank of other stuff and get a tank of lipid nanoparticles. Getting different mRNA in each dose means you only get one patient's vaccine per time you start and stop the machine. There's also a step where one copy of mRNA is used to make a macroscopic quantity of copies in a bioreactor that needs to be flushed in between different sequences, but can just run when making enough of the same thing for a large population. It's likely that the cost for each different sequence will come down if it's worth designing and building equipment that switches every dose, but there's an intermediate time between proving that the treatment is useful and being able to provide it in a cost-effective way.

It's clearly all the superfans who hear that there's a new album and immediately drive into their local record store. (Rather than doing the sensible, calm thing and entering the store on foot.)

Spirit is kaput. Google is picking up wreckage from the scene at scrap value.

But you do make a point that most people underappreciate. The Spirit airline experience was bad, but one of the bigger factors in the poor experience was that everyone on the planes were extremely grumpy. You could avoid being nickel and dimed but there was no escape from the foul mood. No other airlines have ever come close.

I'm sure there's an element of tax avoidance here. Elaborate commercial arrangements like this often do.

With their COVID vaccine, the first time was the highest dose they knew would have only acceptable side effects, and they reduced it for the next iteration when they saw how effective it was. (If you remember the myocarditis rare side effect, that was only seen with the first version.) I would guess that the next step is backing off on the dosage to reduce the side effects now that they have results on effectiveness, which will also let them make a better case for younger people at less risk from the flu.

Some important background for this is that, around 1900, mathematics got formalized to the point that there is a standard for whether a proof is valid or not that doesn't depend on humans thinking about it, just doing a bit calculation following an algorithm. However, it is such a large calculation that nobody wrote complete formal proofs or verified all of the steps (since they'd be spending huge amounts of time on obvious parts, and not the novel aspects). Then, in the past 20 years, people have made computer systems that work on complete formal proofs while showing you the interesting parts, with the rest in macros, and check these proofs automatically. This means that finding proofs has the form of things like what AlphaZero is good at: something to check if moves are legal and a win condition. However, only a relatively small portion of mathematical research has been put into Lean so far, and that doesn't include the sorts of obscure results that often turn out to be useful in other problems. So the current wave is using LLMs to find results in the literature that might be relevant and producing formal versions of them, game AI to put them together, and deterministic validation to check each of these as it goes along and then people can see at the end that the calculation shows the proof is valid. The only part requiring mathematicians is checking that what the proof proves is what they understood the open question to be.

That's only half of the potential problem here. I've experienced model hallucinations where the model seems to have completely fabricated ideas or conclusions which it says are included in a reddit thread. The latest version of mainstream Claude (via Perplexity) is still doing this.

Eric S. Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", which inspired Mozilla to make their browser open source. For some reason, this means they name their extended support releases after him.

This also pokes a huge finger into the eye of Adobe. Splitting and merging PDFs is one of the main features of Acrobat for a whole class of white collar workers.

Electricity prices in Europe are around 2x what Americans pay. In Japan it is even higher. Each 9 added to uptime has a cost, and Americans have apparently decided they don't want to pay.

Most US population centers are in places east of the point in their time zones where the sun is overhead (or due south) at noon, and being a bit west is better than being a bit (or very, for New England) east. This means that DST is mostly the right UTC offset for the wrong reason: Boston should be on Atlantic Standard Time year-round, but Eastern Daylight Time is a name for the same clock setting that is already used there sometimes, so that's easier to legislate. Of course, the people who live west of their true noon line don't think permanent DST would be good, but the fact that we should have no DST and a different map is too nuanced for the position that there's got to be a single simple answer as to how to fix everything, regardless of the situation.

I don't think this is trying to get back into the US market. OnePlus is banned because it's part of a Chinese corporation. OPPO is... that corporation. It's not going to confuse any regulator who found something to complain about with OnePlus. This is more likely a mundane tactic of being liked in Europe for phones and wanting to expand that reputation to the parts of the organization that sell other consumer electronics.

I've been seeing a LOT more ebikes and small (250cc and lower) motorbikes on the road lately. I live in a state where summer is oppressively hot (winter is bike season) and most riders appear to be commuting to low-posting jobs. It seems to be the k-shaped economy manifesting on the road.

Not to mention these vehicles are a huge pain to work on. I changed the spark plugs in a 150/1500 class truck recently and had to lay down on to of the engine on a chunk of old mattress to reach any of them. And needed a 2-step stepladder to get up there. I've since changed to a Ridgeline and you can reach anywhere in the bed and most of the engine without a ladder. The interest in the Slate and recent sales of smaller trucks suggest that this is a growing market.

You use your coal to make steel, which needs the carbon from the coal for the alloy. Not all use of coal can be replaced by other electricity or heat production, even if getting blast furnace temperatures out of a nuclear reactor weren't considered bad.