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Comment Re: Structural Unemployment Death Spiral (Score 1) 195

>>[If] everyone just received $xx,000 a year. It just inflates the cost of rent, basic necessitates, and everything else.

Only if the supply of those things doesn't change. When more people can afford things, the economy will produce more of them. Henry Ford understood that the only way automobiles would be anything more than a toy for the rich was to pay his employees enough that they could afford to buy what they were building. More people with extra money = more demand = higher volume = lower cost.

Comment Did Apple just give LLMs their "XOR moment"? (Score 1, Interesting) 71

Apple’s new paper on GSM-Symbolic shows that today’s best language models crumble when a gradeschool math word problem is re-phrased -- even if the logic is identical. It echoes 1969, when Minsky&Papert proved that a singlelayer perceptron could never learn XOR.

That blockade vanished in 1986 with backprop and nonlinear hidden layers. My bet: LLMs won’t need two decades to cross the reasoning gap. Why? Agents that call scratchpad Python or GraphRAG pipelines already externalize formal reasoning, turning the model into a planner rather than a prover.

Comment Nice Chart, Vox—But What About the Other 50Y (Score 3, Insightful) 76

Look, I’m thrilled Vox can read an SEER plot and notice that smoking, screening, and HPV vaccines matter (slow clap). But before we crown Big Tobacco lawsuits and Gardasil as the sole saviors of humankind, can we maybe glance at, oh, the last half-century of environmental regulation?

What about the asbestos bans that cratered mesothelioma in post’70s construction cohorts? 84% risk reduction -- ring a bell? What about Chile and Taiwan slashing arsenic in drinking water and watching bladder and lungcancer mortality do a Wile E.Coyote cliff plunge two decades later? Or the Mercury & AirToxics Standards that took nickel, chromium, and friends down by 80% -- something the EPA’s own Section 812 analysis credits with thousands of avoided cancer deaths?

But sure, let’s keep peddling the tidy narrative that medical tech alone bent the mortality curve. Those radon-mitigation building codes? Irrelevant. Beryllium and benzene exposure limits? Yawn. Apparently if the benefit isn’t measured in ninefigure pharma revenue or a primetime Super Bowl ad, it doesn’t make the Vox word count.

Pro-tip: pathology doesn’t care whether the carcinogen came from Marlboro Country or your municipal tap. Policy matters, and not just the ones that poll well on Twitter.

Comment That's the plan (Score 3, Insightful) 47

>>Waymo remains unprofitable despite raising $5.6 billion in funding last year.

That's the plan. Just like Uber ran at a loss for years, undercutting taxi services until they captured the market, then jacked up prices and squeezed their employees (sorry, "contractors") after they had no more competition. Now robotaxis will do the same thing to them.

Comment It's only "fair" (Score 1) 54

Airlines up-charge people travelling together via the seat selection fee (so they can sit together). People travelling alone are less likely to pay extra to select their seat so the airlines have to find a different way to up-charge. Baggage, food, drinks; everything is an up-charge now. Can't wait for them to start charging to use the goddamn washroom.

Comment What's in it for me? (Score 1) 68

Not surprising in the least. For that last 25 years we've been taught that our data is valuable (and it is, Silicon Valley has made billions off it). Not just our email addresses but our opinions and preferences. Why on earth would anyone give away their data for free to a survey? At least Google and Facebook are offering some service of marginal value in return.

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