I'm lazy, but even I would do a daily backup if hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake.

Hundreds of millions were not at stake the day the hard drive was lost. He could have easily replaced it back then at a much lower cost.

The drive was lost in 2013. In 2013 the price of 8000 bitcoins ranged between $400,000 and $8,000,000US.

Even at the low end of that estimate, it's still more than the value of my house. Not doing basic due diligence like keeping good backups is massive negligence. Yes, his girlfriend shouldn't have thrown his hard drive away, but he was the one who put himself in a situation where he could lose that kind of money from a single mistake.

You're throwing the baby out with the bath water. Most people don't even have landlines anymore, so you'd make 911 mostly useless. Not to mention that there are many valuable uses of 911 on mobile phones, like calling for help after being in a car accident. The big thing is not to let people spoof their call's origin. There are actual use cases for fooling caller ID, but the damage caused by spammers and scammers far outweighs the benefits. If we make caller ID a reliable indicator of the source of a call again, it would make people wary about using their phones for illegal activity like calling in bomb threats.

This gets both parts of the solution: don't have emergency services overreact, and find and prosecute people who make false calls. Overreaction- sending in the SWAT team with hair triggers- is a key reason this is worse in the US than elsewhere, and we need to stop letting our police shoot first and ask questions later.

We also need to do something about malicious calls. This is not a harmless prank. At the very least it's harassment and abuse of government resources; at the worst it's (attempted) murder. If we start devoting serious resources to finding the perpetrators and prosecuting them, people will mostly stop trying this stuff because they'll fear the consequences. Of course it would help if we made our phone system harder to spoof, since faking the source of the call is part of the way perpetrators think they'll get away with it. Making calls harder to spoof would have a huge number of other benefits, too.

Yes, we did need a formal study. In the absence of proper scientific studies, it's easy for people to confirm their preexisting beliefs. If they a true believers that AGI is just around the corner, they claim the success of LLM proves we're almost there. If they think AGI is a pipe dream, they dismiss the success of LLM as fooling people with a souped-up autocomplete model. A scientific study can't actually answer the question of whether AGI is coming soon, but it can answer questions like whether LLM have done subsidiary tasks like building a coherent model of the world. When we learn that it hasn't, it affects our beliefs in whether AGI is coming soon or not.

Regularly changing your passwords makes sense if you're worried about people stealing the hashed password file and cracking it offline, especially back in the day when password length was restricted. Of course the main solution to that is to let/require people use longer passwords or pass phrases, which fixes a lot of password problems simultaneously.

It's a conveniently vague time interval. It's short enough that everyone needs to plan for how to incorporate Altman's company's services into their business, but not soon enough that he can be held accountable for it failing to show up on schedule. Also, hopefully long enough in the future to give people time to forget the prediction when it turns out to be wrong. In other words, it should be ready in time to use on our fusion-powered Mars colony.

I think the big mistake is not so much privatizing a public utility as privatizing a well functioning public utility for ideological reasons. If a public utility is doing a good job, don't sell them off just because you have a generalized desire to shrink the public sector. Very often, that ideological commitment to shrinking the public sector just happens to be funded by the people who want to buy the newly privatized business for less than it's worth. In the same vein, focus your desire to nationalize industries on ones that are doing the worst by the public, not on the ones whose owners are the worst class enemies.

Of course in this case there is an actual indication the industry in question is having problems. The utilities are bungling things in a way that makes the whole industry less efficient. They have promised they'll fix things real soon now, so maybe they should be given a chance, but it does give ammunition to the people who say selling them off was a mistake.

Is anything from our birth still in our bodies after a while?

The proteins in the lenses of your eyes are never replaced, and they gradually accumulate damage over time. This is part of what causes cataracts. There is probably some way of converting the degree of damage into an age estimate, but that has a couple of huge problems. First, the damage is probably affected by factors like exposure to UV light, so lifestyle might make a big difference. Second, you need to sample the lens to test it, so you can't do the testing until the person dies or is undergoing cataract surgery.

Sure, it'd be nice to nail down details of the previous scary time for everybody, but what about catching the next one earlier?

These are not opposing goals. If you want to stop the next pandemic, it helps to understand how previous pandemics spread. The most recent pandemic is possibly the best place to start, because it happened under conditions most similar to those in effect today. Those who refuse to study history are doomed to repeat it, and that applies just as much to the history of this pandemic as it is to wars and politics.

Which gets to the article's point that the automotive industry needs to start working on affordability. That said, I think there are additional problems that keep the car companies from targeting that market. One is simply that pure electric cars still have a price disadvantage, and the cheapest segment of the market is where that price disadvantage matters the most. That might be helped by shifting subsidies to boost the lowest end of the market over the higher end.

Probably a bigger problem is that the kind of people most likely to buy economy cars are mostly renters, who have a much harder time charging at home. Even if we build out public charging infrastructure, public chargers still tend to cost a lot more than plugging in at home, which removes some of the economic advantage from reduced operating costs relative to gas. And again, this is the market segment that's most sensitive to cost, so every little bit makes a big difference. The bottom end of the market won't benefit until the typical renter can count on plugging in at home.

Is every single individual up the chain supposed to personally conduct their own tests? That would do wonders for the cost.

Yes, every stage of the chain is supposed to be doing their own tests. The company that bought the titanium should have been testing to make sure it was actually of the grade the supplier promised. The end purchaser of parts made from that material should have been testing them to ensure they met specifications. That might have included testing the alloy themselves. That kind of diligence and refusal to take the previous supplier's word for things is part of the cost of manufacturing to the highest standards of quality.

The big problem with nuclear is that boiling water and using it to turn a turbine is expensive. Even if you solved all the problems with the reactor, nuclear plants still couldn't compete with solar and wind because the steam side of the power plant would still be too expensive. That's just capital costs; solar and wind are much cheaper to operate, too. Yes, renewable power requires energy storage and grid upgrades, but it's still cheaper even when you factor those things in.

Another possibility is to change the rules. Right now companies want to do more because that's the only way they can boost profits. We can always change the rules so they can get a bigger profit margin on grid upgrades than they do on new construction, and that will encourage them to look at upgrades first.

California already does something similar with electrical rates. Under traditional regulation, utilities encourage consumers to be wasteful because the only way to increase their profits is to increase consumption. California changed the rules so utilities can earn a bigger margin if customers use less power. The companies responded by encouraging customers to conserve; they have a huge range of incentives, including things like subsidies for replacing old appliances with energy efficient models. We've managed to keep total energy use flat even as the population has grown, and the utilities have led the way.

Because as has been discussed countless times, public transport doesn't go to/from where people need and sucks if you need to carry more than a small bag.

Then maybe we should put more effort into developing public transit systems that don't suck. Design a more sensible route system that minimizes the number of transfers people need to take, and increase frequency so needing to take a transfer isn't such a pain. Make sure the transit system goes to the places people most want to go. Also, FWIW, transit is not nearly the pain you say it is if you have large bags. I've taken suitcases on public transit with no problem, and I regularly see people with lots of stuff.

FWIW, old people are a good example of exactly why we need better public transit. Many old people fight to keep their drivers' licenses even when they're no longer capable of driving safely because they depend on driving for any kind of mobility. The idea of someone driving themselves home after their chemotherapy appointment should terrify everyone; chemo brain is real, and people who drive with it are a danger to everyone around them. Providing useful public transit would help all the people who are no longer fit to drive, or are too young to get a license, or can't afford a car.

The difference is that cars react worse to high demand than trains do. The capacity limit of a train is usually based on how often the train runs. It's usually possible to increase capacity by running more frequently, which actually improves the quality of service by making people wait less*. Very few rail systems- basically only the very busiest urban subways- have ever gotten to the point of maximizing the capacity of the rails, and the capacity of those systems dwarfs any roadway you can build for comparable cost.

In contrast, roads behave very badly when you try to crowd too many cars onto them. They actually reach their maximum capacity in people transported per unit time at some point below their maximum physical capacity for cars. When you try to shove too many cars on them, they slow down and you wind up with a traffic jam. Rail doesn't have an equivalent because it's centrally managed, and the operator never puts too many cars on the tracks. We could try harder to keep roads at or below their maximum capacity, but drivers complain incessantly anytime you try to impose congestion pricing.

*There's a quality breakpoint on any kind of shared transportation system (trains, buses, etc.) where the wait time is short compared to the ride time, so people feel like they don't need to consult a timetable anymore. They can just show up and wait for the next ride without having to plan in detail.