Some people have vertigo and dizziness due to a medical condition, or a side effect of a drug they're taking (antidepressants, for example). For these people, seeing the motion of the aircraft (via the window) helps avoid the nausea of motion sickness, and makes the difference between a pleasant trip and hours of nausea and possibly vomiting.

If Delta is going to lie about window seats, this means I can't fly Delta.

You misunderstand institutional security. The end sought is not true security, but rather, plausible deniability. The institutional users want to be able to point to this SBOM and say, "It passed all our security audits", not "Our analysis missed the security vulnerability which brought down our systems." No one in a large institution wants to take the blame for the inevitable security vulnerabiliity, so things like the SBOM provide the requisite blame deflection back to the package maintainer. This way, nobody is held to account, and everyone keeps their jobs.

Seemingly idiotic corporate decisions are much more easily understood when one realizes that a corporation is largely a machine for avoiding responsibility.

Perhaps you'd like to live in China or North Korea where you can be randomly apprehended and harassed by the police just "because you look a bit sus".

Versus the United States, where a US citizen born in the US can be deported to country they've never been to, where they don't speak the language, just because they look like an illegal immigrant?!

I don't like communism or socialism, but I can't deny that the Western world is having a Soviet Moment, with Britain and the US leading the way in violating civil rights.

If the Earth identifies as a cool planet, who are we to say otherwise?

Every perspective employer will look at your experience and they will agree that you're valuable and capable of doing good work and profitable work for them but they will also fully expect you to hang around just long enough to get a little bit of experience and then leave.

What this implies is that as soon as someone gains valuable experience, every other employer in the area is willing to offer them more money. Which says very loudly they want to pay below-market rates for labor, and they don't give raises, ever. If I could take a year of experience and make more money anywhere else, nobody at the company is paid for more than a year of experience. Your kid trained for a career with no future.

Like most, I didn't go to college for four years to get a career that didn't pay raises past the first year. I suspect your kid made a bad choice of career field, because apparently - as you describe it - none of the employers in the field want to pay for more than a year of experience. This is precisely the attitude (and employers) graduates are hoping to avoid by getting a degree. Nobody puts in four years of effort with the expectation that they'll be treated like unskilled labor. Yet this is exactly the employer attitude you describe. People have started to realize that the problem all along wasn't a matter of skilled/unskilled labor, but that employers viewed employees as disposable, and rather than train them, made unreasonable demands in the first place.

The problem isn't whether or where you got your degree, but the attitude toward employees imparted by the CEO's alma mater.

NASA has been able to make rockets that don't blow up since the 1960's.

Why can't the Australians do it? Was that knowledge filed away in a locked cabinet somewhere, or has rocket science made no strides in the past half century? Why isn't rocket design a "trivial" problem in engineering?

If they took the same approach to computer science, the Australians would still be trying to refine silicon from sand.

Growing up in the Midwest, we were very much aware that nuclear war could end humanity's existence with scarcely more than a half hour of warning. Climate change is positively tame by comparison.

What these researchers misunderstand is that most people are not so privileged that climate change even makes the list of their concerns. It's not that they don't care, but that they just don't have the time or money to do anything effective.

The average person cannot afford an electric car.

The average person doesn't own a home, but if they did would still be unable to afford solar panels.

The average person can't work from home, because their employer insists they come into the office.

The average person can't live without a car, because America was designed and zoned for car traffic. If every American decided to use public transportation tomorrow, there wouldn't be enough trains or busses for everyone.

The average person can't grow their own food, because they don't own (enough) land. Even if they did, modern agriculture - from fertilizers to harvesting and transportation - depends on diesel fuel.

Given that most governments are owned by the fossil fuel companies, it is rather naive to expect governments to do anything more than token measures to address climate change.

It strikes me as a bit odd that people who are rather astute at predicting climate 50 to 100 years into the future can't predict that, in spite of their polemics, nothing meaningful will be done about climate change. Individuals lack the power, and governments lack the incentive. It seems to me that the old joke about consulting rings true for climate science: if you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem.

In fact, the best thing to do is to use the gaps between cars to absorb speed differences so as to allow ALL traffic to flow more smoothly

I agree with you, and I find that this is easier to do in a manual because the acceleration is instantaneous. I have found that I don't have to accelerate as hard if the response is immediate, versus delayed. I don't have to brake as hard because I start slowing as soon as I back off the gas.

With most automatics, the off-pedal cruising speed is 20 to 25 mph, which means that driving any slower than that requires riding the brake. From behind, a slow, steadily moving automatic appears the same as one which is stopping, or stopped. So they create a situation in which drivers behind a steady 15mph automatic vehicle have a harder time estimating traffic speed - which leads to the inevitable traffic accordion.

Many years ago, when Motorola was in buyout talks with Google, they used Google docs extensively. One can only wonder if Google got a better deal because they were able to read Motorola's internal discussions. I don't know if they used Google docs for the discussions, but I do know there were quite a few people at the company who expressed no concern for the possibility that Google docs could leak proprietary information.

One of my vehicles has an automatic transmission, and the other, a manual. The car with the automatic transmission has about twice the horsepower of the manual, but drives as if it's twice as heavy.

What I've noticed is that when driving the manual in heavy traffic, I use the brakes much less than with the automatic; one pedal both brakes and accelerates. Because I can keep the engine in its power band when crawling along in traffic, I get instant acceleration when traffic speeds up again. But with the automatic, the "delay, downshift, overaccelerate" conniption fit of the automatic transmission often allows other drivers the space to cut in front of me.

So instead of teaching people to write concise, to-the-point emails, we instead let them ramble on and use AI to communicate what they really intended to say.

This doesn't solve the TLDR problem, it only makes it worse by encouraging people to waste time writing emails that others simply won't read.

In other words, information known to most graduates of the physical sciences, but somehow illegal to disseminate outside of the collegiate environment...

I find it rather curious that Britain has not only made certain knowledge illegal, but has managed to convince the press that merely knowing certain things can threaten their very safety.

If a model produces better answers when it is given more time to think, one can presume that it doesn't understand when it has actually found the answer to a problem, but is instead weighing incomplete options against the time remaining.

A truly thinking agent would recognize when it has the solution to a problem, and would be able to signal that it needed more time to complete the answer if it hasn't found the answer and has options yet unexplored. And it would also be able to understand if it had not reached a correct answer after trying all of its possible options. It seems that what passes for deep thinking here is nothing more than tuning time constraints so that the agent gets most of the answers correct, rather than actually building an agent which can recognize when it is right, when it is wrong, and when it needs more time.

We in America just experienced an election in which an adulterous convicted felon managed to out argue the best the Democratic party had to offer.

Pandering used to be illegal in politics, but it seems some laws just aren't enforced anymore. Even Plato recognized that rhetoric could be used to manipulate and deceive, rather than pursue truth.

AI just makes it easier to do what the wealthy have done for ages.

The days are coming when no one will make movies anymore, but will instead type a prompt into a movie service, and an AI will generate an entire film in realtime.

Think, "NetAI, play me a movie in which the lead character is a big city powerful attorney who returns to her home town at Christmas and reluctantly falls in love with the boy she rejected in high school, who has since become independently wealthy running a winery."