imagine kodi or whatever, but legal. it shows you all available shows and movies, and interacts with whatever streaming network it is on. has lots of plans available, including a la carte and bundle the entire catalog of multiple streaming providers. all within a single app or website.

it is not convenient having to juggle within all multiple streaming apps / sites. i would pay for this convenience

No, unless and until they can produce a gallon of gasoline chaper than pumping oil out of the ground, refininging it, and shipping it to the gas station -- an economic miracle if you think about it

This makes sense for remote, off-the-grid locations where you have access to renewable power like solar that you don't pay for by the kilowatt hour. You could make enough gas from a modest setup to meet an inidvidual's needs.

It's one thing to man-rate a *technology*; but the *production processes* and supply chain need to be equally robust. The Apollo Command Module was flown a half dozen times before any manned mission.

Apollo was a project that had economic scale. Many test objects were created and many beta units produced of critical components like the Command Module. While managing larger scale processes has its own challenges, the fact that the processes are *repeated* make them easier to debug.

The low pace of manned missions in the current era adds to their risk. You can man-rate the *technology*, but (a) it's minimally tested and (b) produced artisinally instead of industrially. There were, perhaps, 180 space suits of various types produced for Apollo (not all of which flew), which while below "industrial" production quantities was a lot of repeittion of the operations needed to make them. The astronauts on Artemis missions will be wearing suits produced at a rate of a handful over a decade.

While the hindsight and experience from sixty years of manned space flight reduce the technological risk, that is offset by the production quality risk from low cadence production. Assembly personnel and even vendors can turn over between production orders.

I see this as a rich-get-richer scenario. Smart people, the ones who can outthink statistical parrot, will be able to use its speed at processing and digesting massive quantities of data to improve their productivity. People who can't outthink the things will have to use them *credulously*, and thus become functionally dumber than ever.

For a private company, making a profit is necessary for continued existence. Companies that don't make a profit get bought out and liquidated for the value of their assets.

The alternative would be to nationalize drug development -- socialized medical research. Or there's just waiting and hoping for the best, which is what we're headed toward.

this feels like a facebook newsfeed. old reddit cloned old digg. i can't stand new reddit, so i will continue to use old reddit while it still exists

Had one last year -- a 12 v battery died and needed roadside replacement. Jump starts are still pretty common. So is overheating in the summer -- requiring coolant top-ups, even hose replacement can be done roadside. Some modern cars can go into "limp" mode because of faulty gas caps and you might have to reset the ECU in some cases to get home or to a shop. Those are just the ICE specific problems.

But yeah; ICE cars since 2000 have reached a level of reliability that would be unheard of when I started driving 40 years ago.

...if we're hyping our company's Ai snake oil. We should absolutely *not* classify them as people for other purposes, e.g., legally: it wasn't my company your honor that did that bad thing, it was the AI.

Sixty years ago it would have been "solid state". Ten years ago it would have been "block chain". Ten years from now it will be something else.

Whatâ(TM)s interesting here is that as a professional musician, this guy is a public figure and the âoeactual maliceâ standard for defamation applies â" a standard that was designed when defamation could only be done by a human being.

This requires the defendant to make a defamatory statement either (1) knowing it is untrue or (2) with reckless disregard for the truth.

Neither condition applies to the LLM itself; it has no conception of truth, only linguistic probability. But the LLM isnâ(TM)t the defendant here. Itâ(TM)s the company offering it as a service. Here the company is not even aware of the defamatory statement being made. But it is fully aware of their modelâ(TM)s capacity to hallucinate defamatory âoefactsâ.

I think that because the tort is based in the common law concept of a duty of care, we may well see the company held liable in some way for this kind of thing. But itâ(TM)s new law; it could go the other way.

The laborious, linear interface is of course another limitation of all kinds of tapes -- digital or analog. But getting rid of this also changes human behavior. People don't listen as much to long form collections; they don't even necesssarily listen to entire songs.

A mix tape is essentially a long format program manually and personally curated for you by another human being, unmediated and indeed untracked by any third corporate party. Losing the mix tape was a real cultural loss. Sure they didn't sound great, but they didn't have to.

I suppose every technological advance is potentially double edged. When people get books and literacy, verbal storytelling declines. That doesn't make books bad. the technical limitations of verbal stories -- say limited repeatbility -- are real limitations, but that doesn't mean something wasn't lost.

PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

no problem.