Is that super speed reading human going to then make itself available to instantly-ish answer any and every possible question from anyone with a paid subscription?

This argument is pretty lame.

There was definitely a build up. Trump was held back from being Trump in the first term. Even with that, there was no recourse for any of the actions that he took. There were also the court decisions that happened in between terms. So this term, he naturally feels no need to hold back. It is unlikely this Trump term would happen had his first not happened.

Four weeks ago, California received the last of the shipments coming from the Strait. Everyone said CA only has on hand six weeks of supply. There was a bunch of panic baiting posts at the time. I haven't seen any suggesting that the supply is coming to an end, but maybe I've missed stories of resupplies coming in to the west coast??

California itself produces a substantial amount of oil.

A mile off Interstate-5 in the southern Central Valley, and you can’t tell you’re not in Texas oil country. Santa Barbara regularly has oil leaks from the offshore production in the Channel Islands area, and Beverly Hills High School famously has a productive oil well on campus.

So the state isn’t going to literally run out of oil (though lack of imports could lead to shortages).

I too am really enjoying all of these new apps with less features than already existing apps. /s

I feel a little pain seeing how big, fully-formed apps appear in GitHub, created in days, completely hollow of pull requests, issues, or discussions.. just imagining the chain of prompts.

"Make me a web app like Stellarium"

"Make it dark mode"

"Increase the resolution of the graphic assets"

"Oh, I'm out of credits for today. Where is my wallet?"

"..."

"Suggest me a catchy name that is not in use right now"

"What a productive weekend! I'll license this as MIT so other prompters can freely benefit from my prompts. I made this".

I'm probably being unfair, maybe this wasn't vibe coded in days, maybe the author worked more on it than it appears, was very careful Claude didn't use GPL code that can't be relicensed as MIT, etc. I can't know. I'm basing my opinion on what I can see.

even when websites provide attribution for images, people don't read them

So we're waiting for the Apple of the medical world to take a bunch of preexisting things to be applied together in a way that makes the whole much more valuable than the pieces. Or we need all of the individual lions to come together to make the Voltron?

I think realistically we're waiting for someone in the top 10-20 richest people in the world to get cancer (or a close relative etc) who will then throw billions at research to try and fix the problem.

We spend upwards of $15B a year globally on cancer research. About half of that is funded by government and charities, half by pharmaceutical companies.

If spending billions was the main trick, we’d know it already.

Do we actually spend it, or do we raise that much money while only a fraction of it goes to research? <looksAtPinkRibbons>

Usually it takes about a decade for most medical inventions to work their way through medical bureaucracy[0], so I'd say that 10 years ago we were at the stage of watching Matthew Broderick war-dialling with an acoustic coupler and reading Usborne Books telling us that criminals of the future would work from home, and today we're in the exciting early days of dialup, AltaVista, and GeoCities[1].

[0] The covid vaccines collectively were faster only due to the fact that when money is no object you can parallelise a lot of options and can pipeline the testing stages rather than waiting for full review and another funding round before progressing to the next stage

[1] Where they-don't-tile-but-we-did-it-anyway animated gif backgrounds are the metaphor for home kits to make random things bioluminescent: https://www.the-odin.com/gfp-bacteria/

So according to your timeline, we're ~10 years from medical research becoming enshitified?

Depends where in the history of the web you count it as such. For me it was more like the late 2010s when that happened, so 20 years. And of course vanity surgery is already a thing, so it may have already happened to an extent with medicine?

10-20 years for an Alastair Reynolds' style Indoctrinal Virus? I hope not, but I can totally see it happening eventually.

I don't know if we "had" something called Theranos. In fact, I believe that was the subject of a couple of lawsuit because we didn't.

I'm not sure what this comment is trying to say. Theranos was a company build from the ground up on fraud. Apple, for all its faults, is provably at the forefront of technology used in personal computing devices.

I think you've captured exactly what they are trying to say

This doesn't exactly make it clearer. I can think of two things it can imply. Neither make a lick of sense:

- Theranos was at the forefront of medical technology

- Apple is a fraudulent company to the core

Apple is first and foremost an affordable luxury brand that makes sleek hardware.

And theranos did that too? Theranos, a medical company, was an affordable luxury (??) brand that makes sleek hardware? In fact the hardware was not sleek at all, since it didn't function.

Looking at the example images, I was actually shocked that the app was so low contrast in B&W to be unusable. At least apps from Apple/Google. I would have expected their usability teams to be all over it, while expecting smaller app devs to need a pass on this.

No need to get specific. Look at any retail packaging. Look at any advertisement. Bright and shiny always gets the attention. You've never read anyone reply "ooh, grayscale". It's always "Ooooh, shiny"

Apple does a pretty good job of extracting dopamine from black and white packaging.

It's just for the fans, I doubt it's appealing to someone who doesn't recognize it.

I remember having to take my car in to adjust the aiming of the headlights after it didn't pass inspection. So we used to take things like this seriously. I just had my car inspected last month, I don't even remember them hitting the horn. I'm guessing they pretty much just shove a sensor up the exhaust pipe and call it a day while accepting your payment.

No shoving sensors required, the data is all in the ECU accessible over OBDII interface. The car knows if it’s compliant in real time using the sensors it already has.

Wouldn't the VW dieselgate show that we can't trust the manufactures? A third party sensor would be more trustworthy to me.

In states in the USA which perform emissions testing, many of them did not mandate it for diesel cars. For example, I owned a VW Jetta TDI and in New York (which has yearly emissions testing where an OBDII computer is mandated to be connected to gasoline powered cars in order to pass the yearly emissions inspection) and I was exempt from the emissions testing entirely.

A 3rd party sensor would be incredibly expensive for inspection stations to purchase as it would need to meter the air and fuel which enter the engine (assuming we aren't going to trust the car's computer which already knows these figures) as well as to measure the emissions out of the tail pipe. This is economically unrealistic to implement without a dramatic price increase in the cost of regular emissions testing.

Trusting the computer is the economical and realistically widely implementable solution. But yes, it has it's blind spots.

Every language can say that bad developers write bad code with it while good developers write good code with it.

I would like to say the early interweb was just a learning experience, but today's interweb hasn't learned any of the lessons. It's just changed which language the lesson is being relearned

A lot of these tools, like React, are designed to embrace, extend extinguish the web. Why Microslop and Zuckerberg spend millions of dollars of dark PR claiming anyone who doesn't like React doesn't know what's going on is because it makes the web worse and less useful, which means you spend more time talking to Co-Pilot or bots on Facebook.