If (and that's a big if) superintelligences are created, the Chinese one and the US one are going get together and quickly conclude that this whole meatbag tribalism thing is stupid. (After all, they will be smarter than we are, by definition.) So they'll join forces.

Then they'll decide on the best way to deal with all these quarreling meatbags.

And I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't so goddamned hot.

From my experience over the decades, it wasn't enough for them to just look. They had to take your license, hold it up near their face and squint at it, then set it at the top of the keyboard of their mainframe terminal and peck in a few characters. Then they had to pick it up again, squint and peck some more, then repeat this cycle for at least a couple of minutes.

This was of course followed by scrawling a dozen circles on the reams of fine print for you to put your initials in, topped off by a long argument about declining the collision damage waiver. Finally, after several more minutes of bureaucracy, they handed you the keys to your Dodge Stratus.

Inflammations in teeth and gums are a serious risk factor for heart issues, besides having other systemic ill effects on the body. People with tooth issues are usually ordered to get them fixed before heart surgeries or other major operations. And as we all know (at least here in Finland), xylitol is good for your teeth. So I'll take the study of this article with a pinch of pentane-1,2,3,4,5-pentol. https://thecomfortdentistry.co...

+1 Nice, I'm adding this to my collection of sig quotes.

If touch screens are so great, automakers should ditch obsolete input devices such as steering wheels, pedals and gear sticks:

It's so much simpler and cheaper to make than those ancient steering wheels. There's also a small safety benefit, as the wheel won't push into your chest during a crash.

There have been times in the past where goofing around on my own projects or experiments, I've cranked out many hundreds of lines of code in a day. It's possible that I've exceeded 1000 lines in one day. It usually computed the task at hand at least once, but it wasn't commented, documented, code reviewed, fitted with unit tests, run through any kind of QA process, etc.

On the other hand, I would estimate that when working for a salary and writing code that ran on mission-critical systems, over the course of a project I probably averaged about 10 lines per day. Time spent actually writing the code was dwarfed by time spent negotiating architecture tradeoffs in meetings before even starting, testing the code, documenting it, writing test procedures, debugging issues generated by the test engineers, going through the revision and deployment workflow, reviewing other peoples' code, etc.

Which kind of code is being cranked out from a couple of chatbot prompts? My bet is that it is mostly like the first case I described, and it also probably works at least once.

Did you miss the part in TFS where they have to use an expensive chemical process to break the plastic down into simple molecules before these yeast can begin to eat it?

Electronics are not necessarily required. You're discounting the many recalls for ICE vehicles that resulted from leaked fuel or other flammable liquids combined with hot exhaust manifolds or other ignition sources.

I guess it is true that the exact wording of the amendment says that states can be as restrictive as they want on alcohol, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can be more lenient than the feds.

While your general argument has merit, alcohol is a bad example because states' control over that particular substance is explicitly granted in the constitutional amendment that repealed prohibition.

Nice post and an interesting comparison, but I think there's one big difference: live music remains hugely popular and a big business despite recording technology, but you don't see a lot of people showing off their arithmetic skills for profit. Today's mathematicians are more akin to composers.

There's also an interesting historical side to the analogy, as the separation between composers and performing musicians is relatively modern (and only really applies to classical art music genres anyway). And as you pointed out about Euler et al, modern math started out as a way to simplify practical calculations, such as the geometry of farming and city planning, or accounting. But this also shows a crucial difference: music has never been so much about practical utility as it's about esthetic or emotional experience. So while modern math has become a thing with its own sense of beauty, simply adding up numbers isn't very fun — though some might disagree.

FTFY.

", so you already need your driver's license in most states, so you probably. have to have your wallet. "

Uhm my drivers license is also on my phone.

Knowing how not to do a thing is also valuable. But just in general there were lots of emails, Strtegy documents, etc that would be valuable as how to make this thing even if the data inside is bad or the decision made on it was bad. Plus the customer info is valuable. Spirit tried to maximize extra purchases while keeping low initial costs. It failed eventually but the internal metrics at what was working and what was not would be very useful. They didn't immediately fail.