bell-cot

From the PoV of any wanna-be Skynet - snuffing out all "the wrongs sorts of" humans, with the help of some powerful group who imagine themselves "the right sort", sounds like the b…

Very nice article, though the length is up to New Yorker standards.

620 points, 547 comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674446 Or the tl;dr; version - "Don't buy a Ford".…

Sadly, the article feels like it's arguing against ideologues. Whose definitions of "air conditioning" are zero-competence straw men. That doesn't sound like the setup for a healt…

True. Family-owned is " allowed to be good". Not "motivated". And bluntly put, the vast majority of businesses are running on thin margins - they couldn't pay well for rea…

Literally, you are kinda correct about Dodge . Practically, not so much. The court's judgement quite effectively ordered to Ford to abandon his rather pro-social plan, the keystone of which…

He was a niche-specialty career archivist, sorting through his library's collection of stuff from the right era and area. That is the discovery story behind a rather large fraction of such docum…

Even inside the tiny niche of the classical music history world, a book of daily exercises - written for some now-obscure student, and owned by a national library - is actually a pretty minor thing. …

> - Razor-thin margins so shops can't afford to pay well > - Having a shop in China machine the parts for you can be quite acceptable, especially in higher volumes Yes, in some circumstan…

Meh. "The smart worm sleeps in" is an old trope.

True. But unfortunately, through much of human history and in a wide variety of circumstances, social systems where the 0.01% are exalted as deserving of fairly unaccountable power (vs. the masses des…

Ah... Starfall is a big hockey puck. Actual warheads - especially kinetic impactors - have much pointier shapes, so air drag won't slow them to a crawl before they reach their targets. And f…

Loitering capability? > This version of Starfall is not capable of de-orbiting itself but instead relies upon its launch vehicle to guide it back into the atmosphere.

> These models use the type of battery found in some electric cars ... > On the Impulse Cooktop, that battery can also produce a whopping boost of heat by channeling 10,000 watts to a single ele…

> Perhaps the real question isn’t: Why does H-E-B do so many nice things for the state? But: Why aren’t more companies like H-E-B? > ... in this company’s nearly 120-year history, it’s remained …

Not saying the bureaucrats are great at this - but your "left to the criteria of" sounds like a massive duplication of effort.

What did you switch from and to? Even Tesla's Charging Calculator is far less optimistic than that: https://www.tesla.com/charging-calculator "Seattle" may be a critic…

Not quite that simple. "Normal" home outlets (120v, 15A) charge EV's very slowly. And even then, non-trivial driving will show up on your electric bill.

Between the article's opening "developed ... under a veil of secrecy", and closing comments about the DoD being very active in sub-orbital delivery, I'd assume that the Pentagon ha…

Yep. The linked NYT article has this weak-sounding line - > Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole sto…

Not a doctor...but wouldn't a cardiac ejection fraction of 10% show as a low and intractable blood oxygen level on the patient's first ER visit? Especially with: > For the past four days…

Assume that saying "X is stupid" is pejorative shorthand for "I strongly disagree with the other side's criteria judging whether or not X works".

Far more informative, overall - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_processionary - including: >The moths are widely distributed in central and southern Europe, and are occasion…

At one point, didn't CF talk about a "we'll feed 'em corrupted & hallucinated data" service, to help deal with strip-mining AI crawlers?

Re-post that comment top-level, so folks can see that the Big Name is now on stage. ;)

Yes - I was just trying to give things a "this is interesting, so upvote & discuss!" kick. In the absence of Ken popping up with good "Author here for your 8087 questions" com…

Back when "AI" meant a midget hiding inside a supposed chess-playing machine, elected politicians had a technology called "actually care about the voters and their feelings" to do …

Closely related, 8 days ago, 138 points & 28 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519011 (about the 8087's adder)…

> The study reveals that lower temperatures and a slower heating process can produce an alloy double the strength of steel, three times stronger than aluminium, and around twice as strong as the sa…

Somewhat. 99%-ish of adult humans will show far more zeal, focus, attention span, etc. on any "Issue X", if both they and their peers have a whole lotta money riding on Issue X. Then there&…