KSteffensen

1984 is not inspirational, it's cautionary. The main character has already lost from the first page of the book.

If they believe it's OK to cane the kids, why limit it to boys? Girls can also be extremely nasty to each other

Didn't the Dunedin study also find that childhood self-control and delayed gratification correlated with adult life outcomes?

https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz/files/1571970023782.pdf

Please fix the integer overflow. Total income over the game was tracked in a 32-bit signed int, so if you earned too much money suddenly the total would turn negative and your stocks would crash.

I'll get some downvotes for this but PhD vs master's degree difference is mostly work experience, an element of workload hazing and snobbery.

Somebody with a masters degree and 5 years of work experience will likely know more than a freshly graduated PhD

Remember to factor in all the trees that will need to be cut down in order to provide the wood.

Of course, over time we can increase the amount of industrial forest, but that will take 40-50 years.

To someone that knows nothing about car SW architecture, that is surprising to me, I would have expected a number of control loops for things like fuel injection, ABS brake control, drive-by-wire, EV battery charge and discharge, etc. each running on their own processor due real-time safety considerations. These I would expect to be different implementations and parameterizations of the same control theory maths.

On top of this comes some functionality to control windshield wipers, lighting, AC, seat heating, etc. Stuff which is probably not top-tier safety critical, but still important. I would expect that stuff to run on one, maybe two processors.

Then comes the infotainment system, running on its own processor.

Sensors are supplying data to all processors through some kind of modernized CAN bus and some sort of publisher/subscriber protocol. Maybe some safety critical sensors have dedicated wiring to the relevant processor.

A lot of variations on this seems possible with the same SW platform, tuned and parameterized properly. The real-time safety critical stuff would need care, but is doable.

Am I completely off the mark? Can you give some examples of where I am going wrong?

There is a low-stress driving environment in Italy? Where's that?

Milan is the only place I have ever been where reversing on the high way is a reasonable solution to missing an off-ramp.

Lost techniques are the field of experimental archaeology.

The main problem with development of new antibiotics is not that it requires groundbreaking new science to be invented, but that there is no business case for it. Or at least the business case for spending your R&D on anti-obesity medicine looks a lot better.

My preferred solution to this logic problem:

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0327.html

To me that panoramic view is scary, not magnificent. It's a monoculture desert. There is no life there, other than the very carefully cultivated one organism.

Believe me the farmers have been doing their best to buck this.

I don't understand how a tiny country like Israel has become so important in global politics. By population Rwanda is ~30% larger than Israel.

China has a lot of interest in the war not ending one way or the other. Their peer competitors are spending resources on it and a potentially problematic regional competitor is becoming more irrelevant the longer it runs.

It that really a precedent we would want to set? It sounds like it would be bad for global trade that state actors could arbitrarily seize privately owned property.

Cure cancer? Solve this climate change thing?

I don't know anything about the author and their situation, but in my experience the first time you realize that your life is not going to be as you expected in major ways can be quite hard.

I don't think mourning is an inappropriate word to use for this.

Are you absolutely sure there is no Arrakis involved in the choosing of that acronym?

LLMs don't have anything to gain, but the people publishing their output do.

I find it entirely appropriate to call LLMs "bullshit generators" rather than "hallucination generators".

Whichever is cheaper. My gut feeling says pallet, but I have no idea.

Aligning the EPAL pallet and the 30' container is another great candidate that is just not going to happen.

First law implies that it is impossible to change a badly designed system into a well-designed system through incremental changes.

I disagree with this, it is certainly possible to improve the state of some system without starting from scratch.

"The lesson you should draw is not that object-oriented is bad, but rather that whatever is the current trendy technique and trendy idea, is likely grossly overrated."

Generative AI

Will they continue to be easy to disable?

This article and related discussion might be relevant. It addresses more or less exactly this sentiment:

This is the reason why I get a bit frustrated whenever I see somebody in tech dismisses the EU as just trying to protect European companies from competition with their glorious and wonderful US companies.

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39602417

Because it sets up incentives for whoever benefits from the labor to lobby for stricter crime laws regardless of whether those stricter laws lead to less crime in the long term.

Ursula K. LeGuin's 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' deals with this

https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

Well, it happens:

https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/incident/chinese-serbian...

It's possible to work for someone else without being a mindless drone.