Sounds like copium to me. Nuclear fission has lost the PR war, the economic war, and the tech war, and now you're hoping you can bring it back from the dead by slagging the competition with baseless hyperbole. Well, good luck with that; but it sure looks like that race has already been called. I still have hope for nuclear fusion, FWIW.

We know that the self-driving car companies have provided us with data that they say indicates that... but it's in their economic interest to convince us of that, and it's straightforward to lie with statistics if that is what you want to do. ... and even if we accept that "modern AI cars get into far fewer accidents than humans do", it's not clear that safety record extends to the LIDAR-shunning, camera-dependent Tesla implementation. Musk is making an aggressive bet that adequate safety can be achieved by a camera-only system; other companies think otherwise and have designed their systems accordingly. Time will tell who is correct.

Surely Tesla's supporters could debunk the whole thing by setting up their own tests that demonstrate FSD successfully detecting and avoiding the 'kids'? It's not terribly a difficult test to perform, and positive demonstration of correct functionality would be more convincing than just accusing other peoples' tests of being rigged/flawed/dishonest.

The exact values of "a bit" and "humans" are worth examining. Is it enough for them to just be better than the average human driver, or do they need to be as good as or better than the best human drivers? And if so, how much better is "enough better" to offset the social cost and complexity overhead of integrating the new technology into the road system?

... and yet, sporks are used only rarely, mostly by campers or at picnics, both of which are specialized niche use-cases where minimizing the amount of gear to transport justifies the necessary compromises in usability.

So, his analogy is exactly right. Most people don't want to use a spork, and will only use one in situations where access to a separate spoon and a fork isn't an easy option.

I can think of one reason -- supporting that would at least double the amount of QA they needed to do to validate each new release of either MacOS or iOS. That would be a pretty significant amount of overhead to support a configuration that most people didn't ask for and don't want.

OTOH if macOS was informally "ported" to the iPad by some non-Apple group, Apple might just look the other way and say "that's not supported by us, if you do it, no warranty, YMMV, good luck".

Don't forget the second-order effects of overruling your engineers' better judgement: your best talent gets frustrated with their work being sabotaged, and quit your company to work for one of your competitors instead.... leaving you with the less-talented engineers who are still willing/forced to put up with your bad ideas. Now you have bad ideas, implemented badly.

Meh. Boeing's recent safety record is worse than Airbus's, but flying with either of them is still significantly safer than driving a car, which nobody thinks twice about doing.

"So we're going to put out everything that we think is of the highest quality"

Let us know when you start.

I won't consider another browser until I can have the bookmarks toolbar next to the address field instead of under it, and have separators in the bookmark lists. Firefox compact mode (has to be enabled with "browser.compactmode.show" in about:config) with the bookmark folders between the address field and the extension icons is perfect, takes very little vertical screen space away from the web content.

That I can have browser-specific proxy settings instead of being forced to using system wide proxy is also a killer feature for me, because it allows me to transparently access my home NAS stuff from Firefox (and Firefox only) via an ssh tunnel on my work laptop (my work browser is Chrome).

The interesting part is the human psychology behind it, i.e. what causes (allegedly) intelligent people to perform a necessary test, and then simply ignore the results of that test when the results aren't what they had hoped for? Were they imagining that the ocean would just give them a pass because they had made an effort?

I don't think the Chinese government has a whole lot of motivation to make life easier for gullible Americans at the moment.

Yes, how can we tell the difference between a true random number generator, and a device that is simply reading the next entry from a very long one-time-pad that our mortal enemies also have a copy of, and therefore can trivially "predict" future results from, no matter how perfectly random they are?

There are plenty of crappy scripting languages out there. Why did Python rise to dominance over AppleScript and Visual Basic and bash and MS-DOS .bat files and Perl and Tcl and all the rest?

I suggest that it's because Python is significantly less crappy than its competition.

Seems like not-enough-people is a relatively straightforward problem to solve, if your country isn't completely awful. You just invite some immigrants in, and presto, you've got more people. There are plenty of people around the world looking for stable, decent places to live, so sourcing shouldn't be a problem.

Too-many-people is a much trickier problem, since nobody wants to be voted off the island.