That, despite the first manned hot air balloon flight having taken place in 1783.

I have my doubts about an AI's reliability over the course of 400 years. Even if the hardware holds up, by the time the ship gets there, the AI may moved on to different plans than the ones its creators had in mind :)

That was true back then; is it still true now, a number of years, and many expensive lawsuit-settlements later? (I suppose it's possible that Toyota has learned nothing from the experience, but that doesn't seem like the most likely outcome from a company that generally prides itself on quality and reliability)

Linus should have followed the example of Steve Ballmer, who showed us the proper way to rant

One could make a pretty good argument that those 32 states did vote against their own interests, so clearly there is a way.

If you are coding in a language that doesn't have pointers, then you don't actually need to understand how pointers work... any more than you need to understand how assembly language works in order to program in C++. It might be helpful in some cases to understand pointers, in the same way it might also be helpful to understand assembly, or transistors, but plenty of people successfully write software (even well-designed, correct, performant software) without it.

Is that obvious? To me it looks like the task was defined by someone who was looking to simplify the requirements so that test-takers could focus more on the relevant parts of the problem and less on corner-case minutiae.

It's the programming equivalent of the Physics exam question that ends with "ignoring air resistance".

Perplexity's accusatory and belligerent tone is as good as guilty plea in my book. They sound like someone who is trying to insult the other party into submission so that they won't have to come clean.

Putting it on board a rocket means there is a significant chance that it will be scattered across the launch site or the area downrange of the launch site, if the launch goes wrong. I don't know how you could mitigate that risk.

Really? AFAIK it was a joke phrase some individual came up with to gently mock the idea of "coding" without actually knowing what you're doing... and then (some) people somehow went ahead and adopted it as a serious idea anyway. (I wish those people luck, they are going to need it)

Stopping distance for a fully loaded semi at 55 miles per hour is 133 yards. If you step out in front of that truck 15 yards ahead, there's nothing the truck can do about it -- well, it could try to swerve, but it's anyone guess whether that would help or just makes things worse.

I'd go a little further, and say that any single sensor technology alone is inadequate, due to the amount of damage that occur after an unmitigated sensor failure. Multiple sensor technologies should be active at once, so that if (when!) any one type of sensor gets fooled, the others can override it and nobody dies.

My friend's cousin got rear-ended by a semi truck that didn't see the red light at the end of the off-ramp, or the car that was stopped at it. He was instantly killed, his car was crushed like a can.

It turned out the semi's driver had been on the road for 14 hours straight, and was not, shall we say, in a fully lucid state.

Would a self-driving truck have avoided this death? It's hard to say for sure, but we can probably at least say that its cognitive abilities wouldn't degrade over the course of a long day, due to lack of sleep.

... which means that for every dollar Wyoming gets out of this deal, Florida will be paying out five dollars for additional disaster recovery. Wyoming might as well be hacking into Florida's treasury and draining their funds directly.

Weird; Teams is the one Microsoft product (other than their mice and keyboards, which don't really count) that I actually like using. It's a little slow, and the text-search capability isn't very good, but for the most part it just gets out of my way, does its job, and helps me do mine. (I'm running it under MacOS, though, maybe that makes a difference)