The broad concern from this poll is clear: half of Americans say they’re more worried than excited about AI in daily life. But a key finding that truly crystallizes the issue is this:

76% of Americans say it’s extremely or very important to be able to tell if content was made by AI—yet a majority, 53%, admit they aren’t confident they could actually do it.

That disconnect is dismaying, because deception isn’t new. Politicians shape stump speeches into whatever “reality” sells. Propaganda, advertising, and courtroom rhetoric are all exercises in selective distortion. Starting with the ochre splashed on the walls of Lascaux and continuing through centuries of myth and image-making, human culture has always blurred the line between truth and narrative.

We happily suspend disbelief for cinema or literature, but we are appalled and recoil when the same fakery is spilled across our screens in our newsfeeds. The context has changed, yeah -- in the theater you willingly suspend your disbelief. But why are humans so willing to suspend it when it comes to their newsfeeds? Why is AI the bogeyman, here? AI doesn't change the fact that most humans lack critical reasoning skills, while some are exceptionally adept at exploiting that lack. AI hasn’t made us worse at spotting deception; it has simply made it obvious how bad we’ve always been. The real question isn’t whether we can perfectly separate “real” from “fake.” It’s whether we can re-calibrate our critical reasoning for a world where fakery is frictionless and narrative is weaponized.

AI isn’t the problem. It’s the mirror.

So let’s get this straight: a MAGA true-believer shoots and kills a MAGA kingmaker, and the MAGA-chaired House Oversight Committee’s big takeaway is call in the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit? Comer calls Kirk a “patriot” and frames this as proof of “radicalization of online forums.” What’s missing in Comer's script is the part MAGA refuses to acknowledge: the shooter wasn’t some “Antifa super-soldier” conjured from MAGA fever dreams. The shooter was one of their own -- just read his social media.

Instead of grappling with how grievance-politics metastasize inside their movement, the MAGA nutbars running the Oversight Committee are doing what the MAGA nutbars above them are demanding: find a scapegoat, any scapegoat, and get the spotlight off of MAGA. Their choice? Silicon Valley. Drag in some gaming-focussed CEOs, grill them on their platform's “nefarious purposes,” and hope the ensuing headlines bury the fact that a hate-spewing MAGA mouthpiece was silenced by a hate-filled MAGA nutbar's rage. Let's be clear, here: Kirk spent a decade cultivating that rage. He reaped what he sowed.

Apple said they’d never cave,
Touchscreens weren’t their game,
walled gardens are their claim to fame,
But here we are all the same

Come on, come on, come on, come on —
And touch me, babe, can’t you see
That’s the feature they resisted endlessly!

Now OLED shines so bright,
M6 dreams at night,
Steve said “no” back in the day,
But now Tim says we can win that fight

Come on, come on, come on, come on —
Touch me, babe, can’t you see
The market is not afraid, what was that promise that Tim made?

Come on, come on, come on, now touch me babe!

With apologies to Jim Morrison and the boys... :)

Hmmm. Back in my cold warrior days, it was the Iron Curtain. This is starting to remind me of that. Back then, Moscow tried to wall off Western goods and information; today, Beijing is walling out Western GPUs — ironically not to restrict information, but to accelerate it on homegrown silicon.

CAC’s ban on Nvidia AI chips forces Alibaba, ByteDance, and others to buy Chinese accelerators (Biren, Moore Threads, Huawei Ascend). The short-term hit is performance; the long-term play is industrial policy — subsidies plus captive demand to build a self-sufficient AI stack. For Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, it’s a hard cutoff: export restrictions from Washington on one side, Chinese bans on the other.

The result is a bifurcated tech world. U.S. + allies double down on Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and hyperscaler silicon (Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium, Microsoft Athena, Meta’s in-house chips). China builds its own ecosystem behind their silicon curtain. Standards and frameworks are going to fracture (Huawei 5G, anybody?) Only this time, the wall isn’t made of barbed wire and checkpoints -- it’s wafers, fabs, and platform lock-in. That means redirection of focus to Europe, India, and the Middle East — where U.S. tech giants are already announcing multi-billion AI buildouts. Huang's direction here is pretty clear -- he all but told Wall Street don’t model China revenue. Given the Chinese market once drove 20–25% of Nvidia's revenue, Wall Street had better pay attention. :)

Domestically, I'm thinking Washington will harden its stance in a couple of ways. Xi basically just told Trump to take his "AI tariff" and shove it -- the 15 percent of H20 China sales Trump extorted from Nvidia just vanished. Xi won that round, bigly. Be interesting, though, to see how the more rational people in this benighted administration respond. I'm thinking more subsidies for TSMC Arizona and Intel Foundry. But I also see even more draconian export policing from the MAGA nutbars. Get out the popcorn; this only going to get stupider with Trump trying to call the shots in a game that he has no clue about.

Socrates...is that you? :) Well said.

You are most welcome. As my favorite sci-fi wordsmith Robert A. Heinlein pointed out, “Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.”

Any help I can provide you in achieving sapiency is my pleasure to provide.

I’ve got bad news for you, too: it’s called non-linear scaling. The stresses and torques at 95 m don’t scale linearly, Fatigue, resonance, and aeroelastic behavior all get more brutal the longer the blade gets. Math has no mercy, and neither does fatigue stress and resonant frequencies. The GE engineers had to solve several trade-offs; basic physics constrained them to 68.7 m. The catch is that root bending stress grows with the square of blade length, while the natural bending frequency drops with the square. That means when you jump from ~70 m to ~95 m, you almost double the stress and cut the frequency in half — putting resonance right in the range of rotor harmonics and gust energy. Blades are deliberately tuned to keep those resonant frequencies out of harm’s way, and the longer they get, the harder that tuning fight becomes. So yeah, two-piece blades are real, but the leap from ~70 m joins to ~95 m joins isn’t just “add a few more bolts.” It’s a whole new problem set. When you've grokked the engineering math, come back and we'll continue this discussion, ok? I suggest you start your education with Euler-Bernoulli beam theory.

I do like the airship “what if” angle — blades are long and (relatively) light, so on paper it seems tailor-made for buoyant lift. I've already posted about it, elswhere in this thread.

The catch is handling. A 95m blade slung under an airship turns into a weather vane the size of a football field. Crosswinds, gusts, even wash from the stabilizers during takeoff/landing would make it a nightmare to keep stable. Then once you’re down, you’ve got the classic LTA problem: mooring a giant balloon in real-world wind -- and there is going to be a lot of that, especially if the destination is a wind farm. :) Honestly, wind is why airships never really solved heavy cargo despite the payload advantage.

So yeah — cool idea, and I like thinking about it too. But in practice the “free lift” just buys you a new set of headaches. Big ones. :)

Yeah, I had the same thought — the trick is that a 95–100m blade is less “dead weight” and more “giant sail.” Even if you scale a helo to sling 35 tonnes, you’re still fighting rotor wash, gusts, and control oscillations the whole way. Not saying it’s impossible — a “Skycrane on steroids” is a cool mental picture — just that the physics gremlins don’t go away, they just move around.

I’m genuinely impressed with the fixed-wing design they’re proposing to haul 95-meter blades. That’s not “strap it to the roof rack and hope for the best” engineering — it’s a clean-sheet aircraft designed to wrap itself around a renewable energy problem. Respect.

But my inner contrarian couldn’t resist: what if we dusted off lighter-than-air?

On paper, it almost makes sense. Those blades aren’t dense hunks of steel — they’re long, fragile aerofoils weighing maybe 35–40 tons apiece. That’s a volume problem, not a mass problem. Buoyant lift was born for that kind of cargo. Picture a modern cargo airship, two blades slung under its belly like chopsticks, floating from port to installation site.

Of course, reality is a cruel engineer:

Wind sensitivity: Giant balloon + giant blades = crosswind hell. Even with AI vectored thrusters, gusty weather would turn every flight into a white-knuckle simulator run.

Ground handling: Mooring a 200-meter airship with unwieldy cargo is not exactly “pull up to the gate.” It’s a dance involving tethers, winches, and crews large enough to look like a Graf Zeppelin re-enactment society.

Economics: Slow cruise speeds and weather holds are poison to project schedules. Every extra day those blades aren’t spinning is money lost.

Still, there’s something about it that scratches the “I like a challenge” itch. LTA wouldn’t be faster, cheaper, or easier than the fixed-wing plan — but it might be a different kind of elegant. Less brute force, more "float it gently like a leaf across the sky."

I’m not pitching this as a better solution. The fixed-wing aircraft is the real thing, and it’s an excellent solution to the problem of dragging a 100 meter long telephone pole around the country on highway infrastructure never meant to accommodate this cargo's geometry. But part of me likes the idea that LTA is still out there in the margins, waiting for some lunatic engineer to say: “Yeah, let’s try it.” As my friend Hunter used to say, when the going gets tough, the tough get weird. :)

No, you are not. The “I’m totally pro-X, but” preface is a tell. It’s rhetorical Kevlar for what follows, not an argument. My guess is you are a fossil-fuel shill, not a serious commenter. If you’re “all about wind,” you should know the logistics wall we’re hitting with 90–100m blades and why new transport concepts exist in the first place.

False premise, twice. First, nobody’s proposing to chainsaw national forests so an outsized cargo bird can cosplay a 747. These aircraft concepts are designed to use short, semi-prepared strips sited on already-open terrain (prairie, pasture, fallow fields, deserts) near the project—then reclaimed. Second, air delivery shrinks—not expands—the footprint compared to today’s miles of widened switchbacks, blasted hairpins, and tree-clearing for oversize trucking turn radii. One graded strip near the site plus a short last-mile haul beats carving a serpentine road corridor across counties to drag a 95m telephone pole around corners.

What’s “half-thought” is assuming the bottleneck is runway grass, not physics and geometry. The whole point is that ground transport is choking on bridge limits, curve radii, and slope constraints long before you even get to aerodynamics. Building a vehicle around the load (the blade) is literally the opposite of half-baked—that’s standard heavy-lift engineering.

Pick a lane. Either access is “surprisingly little impact,” in which case a temporary strip near the pads is a rounding error—or access isn’t little, because anyone who has escorted oversize loads knows those “back roads” become widened curves, shaved cutbanks, and permanent turnouts to swing a 95m blade without planting it in the trees. Air delivery reduces the number of places you have to permanently deform the landscape.

Seriously? Just imagine if drive-by slashdot trolls understood mechanical engineering. A 95-meter blade carries gigawatts of cyclic bending and torsion through continuous carbon and glass fibers. Cut those fibers for a bolted joint and you’ve destroyed the very thing that gives the blade its strength, forcing all that stress through a splice or sleeve — the weakest possible link. Even if you bury the joint inside a fairing or coating, the tips are moving at more than 300 kph -- any discontinuity in stiffness or surface finish risks tripping the boundary layer and shredding efficiency. Turbine blades also flex millions of times a year for decades, and a even a hidden joint would still create micro-slips and stress risers — a fatigue factory, not a long-life structure. Add to that the fact that blades are tuned so their natural resonances stay out of operational ranges; drop in a splice and you shift mass and stiffness where it matters most, leading to tower resonance, gearbox grenades, and very expensive noise. And even if you somehow engineered the perfect internal splice, you’d still need to prove to insurers and certifiers that it can survive twenty years of salt spray, UV, lightning, and cyclic loading — a test program that would cost more than building the custom transport aircraft in the first place.

This is why engineers designed the aircraft around the blades — not the other way around. Structural integrity and aerodynamic continuity are non-negotiable. “Just bolt it together” isn’t an idea; it’s cosplay engineering for people who think physics bows to their snark.

Nope. Your entire post is just wumao boiler plate BS -- pretend the technical risk doesn’t exist, wave your hands about why it “can’t” happen, and hope the thread gets derailed.

The real threat, the one you are trying to minimize, is surreptitious radios enabling side channels to exfiltrate data like location, usage, and control signals they sniffed. Radios enable latent remote control vectors, even if “sleeping” until a trigger. Radios don’t need a SIM card to transmit. SDRs, mesh radios, unlicensed ISM-band emitters, even LTE-M/NB-IoT modules can beacon or handshake without a carrier-issued SIM. A hidden transceiver embedded in an inverter or BMS doesn’t have to “get called” — it can initiate traffic, join a mesh, or beacon metadata until it finds a bridge -- like the one embedded in that shiny new dash cam some idiot got on Alibaba that he drives around town with, just waiting to be pinged by a Chinese mesh router embedded in a solar powered highway sign. The US and other nations have already flagged unexplained comms components in imported Chinese grid gear. U.S. DOE and DOT advisories aren’t about “pagers”; they’re about spectrum anomalies tied to critical infrastructure.

This “Presidential Memorandum” on pharma ads is political theater, not policy. It has no teeth, no new authority, and no binding effect on drug companies — it just tells FDA and HHS to “do what you’re already allowed to do.” The point isn’t regulation, it’s distraction. Trump’s approval is tanking, Epstein Files headlines won’t go away, tariffs are backfiring, and his domestic policy of deploying troops to cities run by members of the opposition party is an unmitigated PR disaster. Cue a shiny new “tough on Big Pharma” memo to change the subject. And let’s be real: in 2025, advertising is largely opt-in. Beyond the vanishingly small number of Americans who still watch linear TV, who even notices these drug spots anymore? The memo solves nothing, but maybe it buys Trump a couple of news cycles.

This smells like a slashvertisement, but if you ignore that and get beyond the marketing fluff and Apple lock-in, there might be something to live language translation. There are big caveats: translation accuracy still stumbles on nuance and idiom, even tiny latency can break conversational flow, and $249+ hardware limits accessibility. And if your conversation partner isn’t on the same ecosystem, the magic trick collapses.

But despite all that, I think this feature matters. If email was the killer app that launched the information revolution — breaking barriers of time and distance — then live translation has the potential to be the killer app of the AI revolution, breaking the language barrier. The shift isn’t in raw capability (Google Translate and DeepL already exist), it’s in immediacy and intimacy: earbuds that let two people talk naturally, eye-to-eye, without the pause-type-wait cycle. If that becomes smooth, cheap, and universal, it changes travel, business, education, healthcare, and emergency response alike. And yes — obligatory Trek/Hitchhiker's Guide reference — it’s as close to a real Universal Translator or Babelfish as I’ve ever seen. :)

It still would need guardrails, though. Accuracy vs. context is still an unsolved problem with AI in general and LLMs in particular. Machine translation is much better than it used to be, but idioms, humor, and cultural nuance still trip it up. A mistranslation in casual chat is harmless; in a courtroom or ER, it’s dangerous.

History suggests it won’t land all at once. Every killer app goes through a phase of overhype, then disappointment, then quiet ubiquity. Think videoconferencing (promised in the ’60s, normalized in the US only after Trump's ludicrous mishandling of COVID-19.) Live translation may follow that curve: first as a glossy Apple demo, then gradually becoming ordinary infrastructure. It depends on whether Apple (and others) can make it cheap, accurate, low-latency, and universal enough to actually dissolve the walls between languages, and not just demo well on stage.