This type of supply chain breakage is why I think we have already passed peak automobile lifetime (cars built 1990-2010): in the future when critical parts fail there won't be any spares, and unless one is willing to take on 10s of thousands of dollars of firmware modding no workarounds either. I would not expect cars sold after 2010 to have lifetimes of more than 10 years or so.

Everything RFK Jr does is related in some way to his network of scam companies making money. Trying to figure out how this seeming nonsense fits into that MO.

If some government is spending $20 million to investigate this, that seems like an insane misuse of taxpayer money.

BTW, the ascii glorp above is a unicode em-dash, proving that I am an LLM and hence not a disinterested party to the discussion. :)

At least that's what I heard skeeted on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/danbi...

And of course this is no surpriseâ"an inconclusive study that can be used to justify a controversial headline is gold in the infotainment biz.

How would an LLM accurately determine which cases were "easy"? They don't reason, you know. What they do is useful and interesting, but it's essentially channeling: what is in its giant language model is the raw material, and the prompt is what starts the channeling. Because its dataset is so large, the channeling can be remarkably accurate, as long as the answer is already in some sense known and represented in the dataset.

But if it's not, then the answer is just going to be wrong. And even if it is, whether the answer comes out as something useful is chancy, because what it's doing is not synthesis—it's prediction based on a dataset. This can look a lot like synthesis, but it's really not.

I was hoping for football fields, but no luck. :(

There used to be a nuclear power plant in Brazil that at one time locals called The Firefly due to its operating history. Clinton Nuclear Plant is the US' closest equivalent to that. ComEd, which has a long and large if not always 100% successful of running nuclear plants, spent years resisting all pressure from the ICC and state government to take it over from its original owner and then when their new corporate parent forced the issue spent years and many careers trying to make it work.

Matches the non-existent brain cells in RJK Jr's skull.

And he failed to pay her, as per his usual SOP.

Queen's English is "has got." "Has gotten" is U.S. English. Presumably author is from the UK.

Unclear why one of the traditional routes of population increase in US states - for the last 425+ years in most states, closer to 525 years in what is now California - is deemed to be "propping up" the population. Almost as if there is an agenda and a narrative to declare more recent immigrants as not real citizens or not real people. As opposed to, say, a German family that immigrated to the United States in 1904.

In the Old Days(tm), say 1990, electric power companies depended on Bell System wires for the most critical protective relaying applications, and the Bell Operating Companies provided nine 9s reliability with latency approaching the speed of light. Television networks likewise: national distribution in as close to atomic time synchronization as was humanly possible.

Today one is lucky to be able to make a voice call from one medium sized city to another without dropouts, jitter, disconnections, and other digital voice garbage. Latency? Ha ha ha ha. Reliability? Not even funny.

Progress!

There's actually a solid history to show that being a late adopter isn't always a bad thing. There's clearly some value in LLMs, but at this point most of what we are hearing is speculative hype intended to kite stock prices. Basically a ponzi scheme.

I'm sure that some value will drop out of this in the end. I am not at all sure what it will look like, except, probably not much like what the hucksters are promoting.

When things are clearer, it will make sense to invest. Right now, it's probably best to let other people burn cash. Particularly since one of the things they're doing is completely destroying copyright law, so when they're done, we can just copy whatever they did with impunity.

As first described the Google glasses would have been very useful in industrial environment and for jobs such as railroad locomotive and airliner maintenance - having maintenance instructions automatically overlaying your sight picure based on what you were working on would be a great thing for productivity and safety. Problem is that would have been billions of dollars in development of the hardware and the pattern recognition software alone. Then maintenance documents (drawings, procedures, etc) would have had to be incorporated and the owners of that IP would not have been willing to participate except on an equal contractual footing. So huge upfront costs and no equally huge revenue stream for Google in sight (heh).

That said, the idea that a secretive recluse billionaire who made his money by stealing other people's PII might not realize that ordinary human beings do not care to be under a combination of Superman's x-ray vision and Thiel's tracking database 24/7 is... not surprising.