Way back when I first learned of heads-up displays, I imagined that they could be useful in wiring harness and hydraulic installation and maintenance in close quarters in aircraft and ships. I might've been influenced at an early age, by crawling around inside the local playground F-86 engineless jet with its mysterious wires and tubes, and realizing that it was much more complicated than my plastic model kits.

This is not inference. It is at best autoconjecture. Polly wanna syllogism.

HP instrumentation was forked off as Agilent then as Keysight.

I overheard someone ordering a "flat white" the other day. All I could think of to meet this description, apart from paint, was Ally McBeal. Not remembering the actress's name, I searched and determined that it was Calista Flockhart, that she is married to Harrison Ford, and that they have an adopted son named Liam.

The search offered a drop-down to answer the burning already answered question about whether Liam was adopted. Unable to resist, I took the bait. The "AI" answer included this hallucinated statement: "Harrison and Calista began dating Liam when he was around eight months old, and they have been together ever since."

I got this when I threw a Magic 8 Ball at NASA, though it has gained an additional profanity here. It's almost like particle physics revealing an excited state of a turdon.

I studied Spanish in US grades 6-12. Even by grade 8, teachers who had experience in Peace Corps or other foreign service, noted at least the existence of variations of pronunciations and cadence. Yo/Joe was specifically called out, as was a tendency for rapid cadence in Cuban speech. Exposure to Los Angeles street Spanish brought some additional knowledge of diverse profanities. Lesson of greatest enduring value: teachers who had been in Spain during the Franco era, had a tendency to look around and lower their voices before relating certain experiences.

Philosophy and linguistics are the realms best qualified to assess ethics, and source and inferential soundness for whatever is passing as "AI" this week. Philosophers are not lavishly paid, and train for skepticism and rigor. I trust their perspective on issues of ethics and soundness, more than I would trust that of anyone engulfed in the hype, cash, and gigawatt tsunami. I worked for a poorly funded MA Phil. years ago, who believed that corporations should have a philosopher on staff for guidance in ethics.

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This is not a joke. My local CSU campus, after 20+ years of bad management and fancy construction projects amidst declining enrollment, has abruptly discontinued the Physics major and the Philosophy major, among others.

My mom, child in Texas, had malaria. A kid in my childhood California neighborhood had disabling brain damage from Western Equine Encephalitis. Mosquitos are not only a distant threat.

If I have read everything correctly, Lip-Bu Tan, current CEO of Intel, is listed as an investor in Cerebras.

0 + ki: imaginary chickens (and bats) are especially suspicious

My gauge figure from reading 1980s accounts, was 1 in 7 startups making it to be a continuing business or acquired, and 1 in 30 to IPO. I have been at 2 acquired, 1 acquired/IPO'd, and 1 that IPO'd directly, though I joined not long before IPO, and one where I joined not long after IPO.. Of these, both acquired ran for one product line life cycle, acquired/I|PO'd failed after an industry direction change incompatible with a fundamental design decision in the product, both direct IPOs are still operating.

The people who I saw shaving while crawling in commute traffic on the 405 in Los Angeles long ago, would be forced to switch from electric razors to blade razors.

Not always. My first assignment at a new job (realtime embedded, safety critical) was to join a code review on a piece of software that needed to run at millisecond rates.

The code was written by a moderately experienced person whose previous experience was in aerospace ground systems in FORTRAN. This was C code for a very tightly constrained device, 8 bit microprocessor, with a fairly rudimentary compiler. The code being reviewed was array-rich and looked a lot like FORTRAN.

I did a BOTEC calculation very late the night before the review, and determined that the code was far from being able to meet the realtime requirements. At an opportune moment about 2/3 through the scheduled time, I raised my hand and presented my analysis. The meeting collapsed into 4 people and a blackboard.

It took the best developer in the company (and with direct experience in the specific problem domain, which I lacked) a full year to implement and verify the task in a mixture of C and carefully hand-tuned assembly ISR code.

It can be argued that this should have happened earlier at a design review. I was not there at design time, but perhaps the fact that I was not yet in the project cultural momentum, was an advantage toward skepticism. That advantage might be shared by automation, but how much would automation know about the specific problem domain, processor, and compiler capabilities?