You know, where the second child died of Measles? Lubbock, TX is at about half the distance between Dallas, TX, and Albuquerque, NW, and nowhere near the border to Mexico. All of the infected were not vaccinated, and most of them are under 18 years old - children, whose parents were not very keen on having their children protected. For some reason, none of the measles cases reported were illegal immigrants.

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

Petrol cars burn 30 times as often as BEVs, according to the statistics of insurance companies. Yes, for each BEV fire, you have thirty conventional car torches.

And that's a problem exactly why? I don't claim it to be 100%, I just point out the error of assuming 100% uptime for any type of energy source. Any power source based on heat and mechanical components has a lot of wear and tear, and components have to be serviced and replaced all the time, be it coal, gas or nuclear.

You have to pay the tariff to register the car with the DMV. I don't know how long non-U.S. license plates are accepted for a car driving in the U.S., but I would expect it to be limited to 12 month.

The most famous fire on a BEV carrying ship, the MV Fremantle Highway accident, was caused by a patrol car catching fire. But apparently, the BEVs get the blame, despite most of them remained undamaged.

You can get Chinese (and some European EVs) for half the $40,000. And in China, even Korean EVs sell for $10,000.

It's a lot more complicated. Remember the solar panels to power the data center? They catch Sun light, so you need to add them to the surface of your data center. And to keep it at 300 K, you need twice the area to the other side to radiate off the heat. And those areas should not face each other, because they would then heat each other. It's a lot easier with convection, because then, the moving gas molecules transport away the heat.

You can calculate the amount of heat you can transfer via radiation. It's called Stefan-Boltzmann law. At a temperature of 300 K, you can radiate 460 Watts per square meter as a maximum. But from the Sun, you get 1370 Watts per square meter. That means that you have to have at least twice the area away from the Sun to keep temperatures at 300 K. A spherical body like the Earth would be at equilibrium at 279 K if it gets no other energy except direct Sun radiation.

... which, to be clear, is a good thing. Working around the compiler is dangerous and a code smell, so it shouldn't be something that is easy to do. It usually indicates that either the compiler's capabilities aren't sufficient to meet your needs (in which case, a better solution would be either a better compiler, or to re-evaluate the wisdom of your approach), or that you are doing something the wrong way and should find a way to do it that works with the compiler, rather than around it, so that you get the benefits of the compiler's co-operation.

I'm not a die-hard fan of C++, I do prefer Rust to it if forced to choose, but my greenfield choice is C-like options. However, this Rust fanboy stuff is super off-putting. There is much more to programming than memory safety, in fact, the overwhelming majority of defects are not related to memory safety. Rust isn't a magic bullet that writes bug-free code, careless devs can write bad code in Rust. Rust can and does crash, it's not bulletproof, it just makes it harder for you to work around the compiler when it comes to memory.