Left out of the article is the emissions cost of manufacturing a new aircraft. Yes, per mile, the older ones are less efficient. But making new airplanes is far from emissions-free. And the article acknowledges there's a serious backlog in orders; companies who want planes are having to wait for them. So unless there are serious proposals for how to expand the airline manufacturing industry, the article is not going to lead to any change in emissions.

I see at least two reasons for the press to report layoffs and not hiring.

1. "If it bleeds, it leads." Long before social media, newspapers focused on articles that engaged and got your attention. And we as humans tend to be more engaged with stories of extremes and unusual situations, especially tragedies. People are naturally risk-averse. Layoffs fit the narrative of what interests us to read.

2. The easiest way to win a race is if nobody knows you're racing them. Businesses don't announce big hiring sprees to chase tricky problems or corner new markets; they announce the release of a product or service after months of hiring, development, and testing. So if a company lays off 1000 on one team that they think is going nowhere, and hires 1000 for a new project, the government requires them to disclose the layoffs, but the company keeps the hiring a secret as long as it can.

You can find counter-examples, but the general rule holds.

The article and commenters agree: creating an AI to answer probate questions is tricky, unreliable, takes a lot of resources, and can cause serious problems when it gives wrong answers. So how about approaching the problem from a different angle: simplify probate laws.

We all know that's easier to say than to do, but ask yourself if it's easier than creating an accurate and reliable AI. When your people can't understand the laws and the processes they're required to live under, maybe the solution is to change the laws rather than build another appendage on top of it all. Plus, if you can host the FAQ on a web page instead of continually monitoring a LLM for injection attacks, the state can save a lot of money and resources that can go to solving other problems.

It's not likely they had to do something unique for each camera; they probably hit one or more central master databases. That's the problem with cloud-based things: there's a very tempting attack surface that's outside your control. What stands out to me is that, after reviewing the outputs of these 120,000 cameras to find anything interesting, they found under 1200 videos (an average of 1 video per 100 cameras x who knows how many hours of footage), and the thieves got paid between $20 and $45 per video. For something that invasive, it doesn't look lucrative.

I agree my friend and their job opportunity are not average. But you said "Nobody in the real world." That part is wrong. And if you're researching NYC, you know that I-Banking pays far better than Accounting.

A college friend of mine was making $110K right out of undergrad 25 years ago. Some industries just pay big bucks.

Different royalty rates are one possibility. I think different churn rates are another more compelling argument.

Per TFA, Spotify wants people to just keep listening as long as possible. If, on average across all people, Spotify finds that users let Dua Lipa play uninterrupted, but are likely to interrupt playback on some other artist, Spotify will play Dua Lipa for everybody more than that other artist. It's trying to make background music, not DJ the best dance party ever. It doesn't particularly know or care about your individual behavior, unless you actively create a data trend of interacting with the app whenever a specific song comes on.

That's a great price. Used to be $2.50-$3.00 per watt after credits. But perhaps @Tony_Isaac is trying to put a 20kW system up.

Were you talking about computers, or about lawyers, politicians, CEOs, and salespeople?

Bitcoin is working well right now. Tulips worked well for a while. Pets.com had a Super Bowl ad. US housing -- remember the folks who said you can never lose money investing there? I can't prove Bitcoin will crash, but I think its only value is that people think it has value; if others decide they don't want your Bitcoin, you can't eat it or wear it or make anything useful with it.

Challenges here are a lot like time-outs in other sports. There's strategy in when you use them or lose them. That shouldn't be surprising. More than 90% of games don't go into extra innings. And if this new rule leads to a disparity that makes the game not fun, expect another rule change.

Very true about learned helplessness. How many of us can arrive in a city we've never been in before, and successfully drive somewhere without electronic navigation, only paper maps? But this isn't just an individual problem; this helplessness is societally-enforced as most gas stations don't have maps for sale and AAA no longer stocks the same depth and detail in paper maps they used to, thanks to our reliance on electronic nav. We used to read user manuals; now everything's online if it exists at all. But every generation says this; someone else will tell you they hand-tuned their spark plugs and kids are missing out.

Yes, businesses can respond to commercial signals. From the summary:

I have two problems. First, competition didn't CAUSE. It let people see things and make decisions, and make excuses for the decisions. Your competition doesn't run your business; you're free to be heterodox. The parent who says, "If all the other parents let their kids drink bleach, I have to let you do it too, because of competitive pressure" is guilty of child endangerment. OpenAI wasn't forced to do this; they were just greedy and not wanting to lose short-term market share to less honorable competitors.

Second, the commercial pressure that you are relying on to hopefully cause them to stop doing this is the very commercial pressure that was their excuse to start doing this in the first place. The blowback may be strong enough that they'll change things for the better this time. But do not expect the trend to be noble; people have a tendency to be lazy and self-seeking. Most of the bad press will move on when something newer happens, and then the feature will quietly return.

This generation had a Real ID Act passed in 2005. It was supposed to take effect in 3 years, in 2008. In reality, 20 years later they are mostly there. "On January 14, 2025, the Transportation Security Administration maintained in principle the deadline of May 7, 2025, but allowed flexible enforcement, for example by warning holders of noncompliant documents rather than refusing them altogether, until May 5, 2027."

Microsoft and the government are not the same, but we have a cultural history of holding onto things longer than someone in a central office decrees.

Interestingly, I read that the "cash for clunkers" program largely killed off demolition derbies. Why, you ask? Because they established a minimum sale price for cars. Californians could get $1500 for surrendering their old car to be crushed, and the folks who previously paid $500 or so for an old beat-up car that they'd modify to enter in the derbies could no longer buy a car for that price. The prize money in derbies wasn't rising, so people stopped entering and the events died out.