jessriedel

Besides making the airport more pleasant, targeting announcements to the relevant travelers also means they are much more likely to be heard. When 99% of announcements are irrelevant, we just mentally screen them out.

If that were really the risk they would spin them out.

Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again.

Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.

The UN security council is one reasonable and popular choice, although it has lots of problems.

But enforcement is not even my point. I'm referring to a moral principle.

Most of the people who make the argument I described probably believe the UN is the only legitimate body that could make this decision, based on some combination of practicality, historical precedent, and international agreement. And the UN absolutely has a mechanism for doing it (the security council). But one alternatively might argue the UN is broken/dysfunctional/corrupt enough that it can't be relied on despite having the "proper paperwork", just as national democracies can be for national affairs.

I think the (disputable) argument is that, for global stability and equilibrium reasons, there should be a general prohibition against kidnapping/assassination of de facto heads of state, regardless of whether they were legitimately elected or are dictators.

It's quite a bit about that, but it doesn't detract from my point. Mechanical disturbance alone can spread cancer and increase mortality.

"The risk of tumor seeding after liver biopsy is 2.7%"

https://easl.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Hepatocellular-Ca...

Tissue containment systems for uterine morcellation

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safety-communications/up...

Cancers aren't perfectly optimized to metastasize, and metasteses (rather than, e.g., bulk pressure from the original tumor) are usually what kills you. It's perfectly possible that the procedure kills 90% or 99% of the cells in the original tumor but increases migration of the remaining cells such that the net effect reduces patient survival.

If that's your honest impression, it's incorrect and I urge you to spend more time working with frontier models.

Do you have a source on that? The current article describes the software very differently:

In any case, the software updates rolled out by the company appear to be quick and easy to install. Many airlines completed them within hours. The software works by inducing "rapid refreshing of the corrupted parameter so it has no time to have effect on the flight controls", Airbus says. This is, in essence, a way of continually sanitising computer data on these aircraft to try and ensure that any errors don't end up actually impacting a flight.

I'm quite aware of the limitations. That's why I bothered to post a comment. But it's definitely better to do due diligence by asking first, since many responses can then be checked. Mentioning it in the comment shows the effort, similar to "Google turned up nothing".

I thought some combination of error correction and redundant systems was already widespread in airplanes to prevent cosmic-ray induced errors. (GPT agrees.) What am I missing? I've read multiple articles on this, and none of them address the fact that the problem, at the level of detail described in the article, should have been prevented by technology available and widely deployed for decades.

I check Google maps ETA estimates when I get in a car in SF; they are accurate for Uber or Lyfts, but Waymos are absolutely slower there. This is especially, but not exclusively, true for routes where a human would take the 101 or 280, for obvious reasons.

I have normal vision. I wouldn't say completely identical when they are side-by-side, but they are very close. It's effectively impossible to discriminate them when they are not side-by-side, which for this plot is very important.

The author's mistake was this: "[my colors] are equidistant in the hue circle". The problem is that the hue circle (at least under the parameterization scheme he used) is not uniform over discrimination, i.e., the ability to discriminate two hues is not invariant under displacing them an equal amount along the circle. (I presume this is one of those situation where it's misleading to think about three primary colors on equal footing because of quirks of human vision biology.)

First, the author could have chosen 7 hues at max-saturation that were easier to discriminate than this. But more importantly, he should have used the other color axes: saturation and brightness. dark red (~maroon) and light red (~pink) are a lot easier to discriminate, even when not next to each other, than the two shades of green he used.

As an outsider that's a reasonable thing to suppose based on a plain reading of copyright law, but in practice it's not true. Researchers update their preprint based on changes requested by reviewers and editors all the time. It's never an issue.

Yes, nerves from the brain to the heart can influence heart beat (and other features like heart conduction and blood flow to the heart itself) in response to stress and exercise. Heart transplant recipients lose these features. They make poor marathon runners :)

He's asking about what the nerves do in a normal person

Thanks!

Batching isn't mentioned anywhere. Do you have a positive reason to think this, or is it just the easiest hypothesis (besides a typo) explain what the author wrote?

I don't think tinting is the same thing as electronic dimming.

The premise of this question is wrong, and it's super disappointing that everyone is giving answers as if it's correct. The Honda test rocket only went to an altitude of 300 meters. It's been possible to propulsively land rockets from such low altitudes for decades, e.g., McDonnell Douglas DC-X test in 1996. (And ofc, if you're just talking about re-use for any landing method, the space shuttle first reused the solid rockets and the orbiter in 1981.)

Reusable, propulsively landed stages for rockets capable of putting payloads into Earth orbit is stupendously harder. The speeds involved are like 10-100x higher than these little hops. The first stages of Falcon 9 and Starship are still the only rockets that have achieved that. Electron has only re-used a single engine.

FYI you can get auto-dimming side mirrors (same mechanism as for rear-view mirrors). I presume it’s a pain to install them after-market, but it can be done and maybe worth it for you if brights bother you enough to wear sunglasses.

I am deeply looking forward to the dragonfly mission to Titan, since we'll finally get high-resolution color images from the surface, which has liquid seas of hydrocarbons like methane and ethane at -290 F.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(Titan_space_probe)

The single image from the surface by the Huygens probe leaves a lot to be desired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Huyge...

Like the interior of the planet, the atmosphere is overwhelmingly hydrogen and helium. And helium is liquid even at 0 temperature unless under pressure, so presumably (?) would be liquid on the surface. These materials are mechanically very different than the silcates and metals dominating the Earth’s crust, and I don’t think we even have well measured bulk properties? Not sure what erosion processes would look like.

As others note, the definition of Jupiter’s radius is set by where the pressure is 1 bar. This is somewhat arbitrary, but the arbitrariness doesn’t matter much: the pressure drops to 1 microbar just 320 km higher, which is <0.5% of Jupiter’s ~70,000 km radius.

Well, the preprint announcing the discovery describes its orbit as extending to "the inner Oort cloud" even though aphelion is 1630 au.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15806

and probably out at several 1000 AU at maximum.

The preprint announcing the discovery lists the semi-major axis as 838 au, so the major axis is 1676 au and aphelion is about 1630 au.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15806

A big reason is simply that managing a fleet in heterogeneous fashion as you're describing (different cleaning schedules for the cars) doesn't really make sense IRL.

Of course it does. Pre-Uber, we had both standard yellow cabs and black car services at different levels. (The main reason you see relative homogeneity within yellow cabs is that the government forces it by setting prices, not because of anything intrinsic about a fleet. Black cars are excluded from these rules.)

In shipping we can pay for different speeds and types of handling. On planes and trains we have different class tickets. In the rental car market, we have Hertz and we have rent-a-wreck. And even within Hertz, there are different car quality levels, which somewhat decreases flexibility (since you need to have more cars on hand than you would with a homogeneous fleet), but it's worth the upkeep to charge the wealthy customers more. Etc.

Then please explain how cars would get dirtier as the service scales up? If today is already seeing the cars at full utilization, barring a cost-cutting measure that determined that cleaning less frequently would be a significant cost savings (which is a big assumption on your part), then we should be seeing roughly how clean the cars will be into perpetuity.

1. Tech prices come down, so the average customer willingness to pay for cleanliness comes down.

2. Services often launch with non-scalable attention to detail to control the initial public impression (eating the cost), and then relax over time.

3. Segmentation that's not feasible at the current scale but will be in the future.

Higher willingness to pay does not matter unless the market is segmented.

Incorrect.

unless they explicitly make an expensive "oft-cleaned" tier and a less expensive "less-oft-cleaned" tier,

That's exactly what I'm saying would happen. We already have it with Uber Black.

You're assuming that the cars today don't get maximum utilization, and that with more utilization you'd see dirtier cars.

No, I'm not assuming that.

As another note, I just don't see how cleaning-based market segmentation would make good operational sense

Again, Uber Black.

Cleanliness doesn't seem that related to how expensive the tech is either - if anything it would only go down if it ceased to affect willingness to pay.

If a service is necessarily expensive, it will more by wealthy people, who have a higher willingness to pay for cleanliness.

As it stands, clean cars are important to their customers.

This varies depending on the customer.

If usage increases, cleaning can ostensibly increase too, no?

Greater usage can lead to economies of scale that push down the cost of cleaning, but I think we're already at the scale (hundreds of cars) where most of the economies of scale have been reached. I expect it's close to linear from now on.