"for sale" != "in stock"
They're accepting orders. That means they're selling them. And that means they're for sale.
But like you said, we'll see whether they're still around in 9 to 12 months. If their "blackfly" is like the one I grew up swatting away in Ontario, they'll disappear sometime in the early summer after making a damn nuisance of theselves leaving painful, itchy bites.
Rush Limbaugh, the famous non-scientist and opinionated blowhard, made the same argument you just did. And you're both wrong.
Humanity introduced chlorine (from CFCs) into the atmosphere. To put it succinctly, chlorine destroyed ozone faster than the sun could make it. Thankfully we started phasing out the use of CFCs in 1987, and the ozone layer has recovered.
Is it possible the space tourism demand has shrunk?
Blue Origin's waitlist is not public, but they do have one.
It was CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) not HFCs that were destroying the ozone layer. And yes, the human race stopped using them after the 1987 Montreal Protocol was created, and the ozone layer recovered. HFCs don't destroy ozone, but they are greenhouse gases.
I see this as step into a massive disaster.
Yeah, let's hope that never happens. Oh, wait.
And it seems you agree. As you said, exposure to more people at greater distances encourages them to be more accepting of others.
Morality is a set of societal goals. The best and broadest goals I have heard in that regard are increasing flourishing and reducing harm. Our need to extend our moral range beyond a small "tribe" of a hundred-ish peole required us to extend our beliefs about the behaviors others beyond those we see every day.
The book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is worth reading for more insights on this topic.
Someone emerging suddenly from behind a stationary vehicle, such as a school bus, especially in a residential area.
As far as I know, in all the countries I have driven, when a school bus stops and engages its warning lights, traffic must stop in both directions. There may be some exceptions for traffic in the opposite direction (e.g., when a divider is in the centre of the road.) This is a sensible law that accounts for young children being careless sometimes. We have all been there.
I have no doubt that Waymo and other self-driving cars can recognize a school bus and act appropriately within the law.
RFK Jr. is a fine example of the "sometimeses" -- per his tenure at HHS. Sometimes he's anti-science, sometimes he's pesudo-science, and who knows, there may be some science he actually embraces.
In general, I think the current administration supports science when the facts science conveys fit their agenda, or they produce whiz-bang stuff that excites the public. So NASA, for example, has a green light to build stuff to land people on the moon, especially before January 20, 2029. Yet the science directorate at NASA has seen a cut of 52%.
From TFS:
At most agencies, the most common reasons for departures were retirements and quitting. Although OPM classifies many of these as voluntary, outside forces including the fear of being fired, the lure of buyout offers, or a profound disagreement with Trump policies, likely influenced many decisions to leave. Many Ph.D.s departed because their position was terminated.
It wasn't so much the Trump administration firing people (although that did happen.) It was people quitting or retiring for the most part.
It's well-known that the current administration has an attitude towards science that is sometimes hostile and sometimes demanding of fealty at the expense of facts. As science is a profession that strives to convey knowledge without political bias, I can understand when its practitioners currently in public service become disilusioned.
Mathematically it is not hard. If the number of attendees exceeds about five, it can become almost impossible, but AI is not going to help that.
The problem is O(M*N) where M is the number of attendees and N is the number of days you want to check for availability. You just examine everyone's availability with some granularity (e.g., hour-by-hour) for a certain interval of days or weeks. You'll find all of the time-periods where everyone is free quite easily. So, it's nowhere near impossible to search for available time-slots, but there's no guarantee you'll find any.
Google doesn't strike me as a company that is in a state of desperation. My guess? They weren't offering this service, decided to enable it with Gemini, and then Digital Trends were the desperate ones who made a story out of it.
Free as in speech, not as in beer. That's not an anathema to open source.
I suspect the cutting-edge AIs will always be beyond the reach of an individual's hardware.
Morality is difficult enough for humans to define. But the best definion I have heard of what contitutes a moral act is: that which reduces harm or increases flourishing. And yes, you can create dilemmas that frustrate even this definition (choice between bus full of nuns vs. child-prodigy violinist, etc.)
I don't think it's feasible to teach morality to an AI by labeling all of its training data meticulously. Maybe some of it, but you're bound to miss things. I think it's more important to provide an AI with governing principles (i.e., "core values") and some examples to illustrate them.
I think I get what you're saying about Anthropic, that it's engaging in marketing hype, i.e., propaganda. But teaching an AI core values does not seem to me like the wrong approach.
Well, at least they published the constitution.
Considering what's at stake for the human race with AI, I can't think of a better case for open-source designs and software in all things regarding it.
In Nature there are neither rewards nor punishments, there are consequences. -- R.G. Ingersoll
