>Thanks to my severance package, I can't collect unemployment right now

I don't know where you live, but in my state in the US, you absolutely can collect unemployment while you are on severance. I've done so twice with full disclosure to the unemployment agency. Maybe double-check your situation?

I read about this phenomenon in the young adult novel "The Secret of Terror Castle", published in 1964. Three teenage detectives investigated a mysterious castle where nobody could spend the night without running away in terror. The culprit? Someone playing the lowest notes on a pipe organ to produce the jitters. This book was the first in a much beloved series called "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators".

AI learned to code by reading human code examples. Where will the training examples come from if AI codes directly to a human-unreadable language?

So, companies that violate this act are... debased?

Answer: diversify.
40% domestic stock, 20% international stock, 40% fixed income is an example mix for non-cash investments for an adult.
Avoid precious metals, crypto, etc. Too unpredictable.
You might not get rich, but you may have a decent life.

Quick: the domain IA.com is still available! Do I hear $07 million?

These arguments seem like a reasonable point mixed in with neurobullshit.

The reasonable point is that people have become very (too?) dependent on their smartphones. The bullshit is that it's part of the mind. No, it's part of your niche. So are lots of other things.

FWIW, I live a perfectly fulfilling life without my phone. I never carry it with me, except when I need a GPS. About 90% of the time, it sits on my desk at home, not in my pocket. I walk over to check it a few times a day for text messages. It's just a device, not a body part.

>Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees.

This is a really common kind of myth. I've heard the same story about libraries at a dozen universities. Snopes even has an article about it.

This happened to me today. I googled the possible interactions between two particular drugs, and the AI summary said they can be dangerous to take together. Every medical website I visited said they're safe to take together. So did my pharmacist and my doctor.

Consulting is a great way to tank your academic reputation if you aren't careful. If Professor X consults for company Y, and then the professor's research happens to agree with or confirm something Company Y does, Professor X may be seen as a company shill. Every academic who consults has to walk this tightrope.

I love, love, love watching movies on a big theater screen. Except the last time I went, the theater showed 30 minutes of previews for blood & gore horror movies. (The movie I was seeing was a comedy/drama, not horror.) Who the hell comes up with these ridiculous preview pairings? After the third knifing I was ready to walk out.

This survey is meaningless. You don't ask a general summary question ("How much do you trust the media?") and report the result. You ask specific, neutral questions ("What is your level of trust or distrust of the NY Times on topic X?" "What is your level of trust or distrust of Fox News on topic Y?") and then aggregate the data to produce a summary answer. That is Survey Making 101.

All general summary questions are invalid, period.

Plus, brains don't process colors! They process light waves. Color doesn't exist in the outside world, light waves do. Color is a relation between the world and a brain.

These kinds of brain studies are common and they suffer from a subtle problem. When you train an ML model on brain activity from 15 people, the classifier works for those 15 people. It usually does not generalize. Train the model on a different set of 15 people and get different results. Yet the researchers make claims that they've found the elusive brain signature for color or whatever they're looking for. This approach reflects a basic misunderstanding of machine learning.

Note that this study doesn't create any sort of "universal" brain-to-text capability. It's tuned to the three specific individuals in the study. A fourth person's brain activity would just be noise. If you and I think of a rubber duck, our brain activity does not look similar.