This paragraph is the most ChatGPT of paragraphs:

As Tesla continues to refine its products, it’s crucial to address these concerns and ensure the reliability of its vehicles. The abandoned Cybertruck incident serves as a reminder that even the most innovative technologies can encounter setbacks, emphasising the importance of rigorous testing and quality assurance.

After Elon started Elonning

I’ll steal that one. You can have “the Xührer” in return.

I’m guessing they’ll comply with India’s censorship demands in order to not get locked out of a large and potentially lucrative market. The fact that state governments can also demand ISP follow their own censorship rules might make things a bit more complicated:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India

The Model X is notorious for this. I know a doctor who just had to fix his Model X’s suspension for “thousands” (his words). He also complained that you can never ever reach anyone at Tesla, that parts are impossible to get and that you have to expect repair appointments to be pushed back at least a few times, often mere days beforehand.

At least the batteries seem to last forever, even on his very early Model S, even after hundreds of thousands of kilometers. There’s barely any degradation. Then again, this mirrors other EVs, even much cheaper ones without active cooling. EV battery packs usually outlast the cars they are in, which is why there’s a thriving market of second-hand batteries that are used for all sorts of applications, from converting normal cars into EVs to storing solar power at night.

It also worked exceptionally well in The Death of Stalin. I think this is just part of a general shift for media set in Eastern Europe.

This reminds me: In countries like Russia and China, it’s not unusual for police to just randomly stop people and search their phones, at which point even locally stored data isn’t safe anymore. This could happen in America as well.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Trump dismantled the team in China that monitored the exact market where the virus originated from. He then ignored the handbook for combating the pandemic that the Obama administration had created for precisely this kind of virus, deliberately stalled the federal response, because he erroneously believed that the virus would kill more Democrats than Republicans, knowingly spread lies about masks and vaccines and on top of all of that, enriched himself and his cronies when he did finally respond. Crucially however, the world is organized in such a way that without an adult at the helm in the US, the global response to the virus was disjointed and disorganized, since so many systems depend on a competent American government in charge.

Except that I know first-hand that German government institutions are already using this exact tool in order to make up for the chronic lack of translators. They are translating texts into languages they don’t speak, which means there’s no going over the output to correct for mistakes.

That’s a very good answer.

If I’m getting this right, this was a novel that you perhaps mentioned to your loved one, but a language barrier prevented them from reading it. They then suggested the use of an LLM to translate it, which you used as foundation to build upon. If I may ask, which story did you translate (it has to be good if you spent this much work on it) and which LLM did you use?

I can’t see anything wrong with this. I’ve used this kind of approach using all sorts of machine translation tools going back over 20 years (not for entire books though). Let the computer do its thing, then fix mistakes - but this was always noncommercial, private use for myself, friends and relatives, as well as the occasional friendly online community. Although, I’ve also done entirely manual work, with no machine translation at all in situations when I wanted the best possible quality or where complexity and nuance made anything else impossible - like with a long list of “whisper jokes” from Nazi Germany, subversive jokes that people told each other under the punishment of death that require a ton of context no translation tool could possibly have.

The point here is though that this is very different from a publisher doing this commercially - and you and I both know that these companies will not even allow for the bare minimum of time spent fixing mistakes made by the translation tools.

Did you inform your readers that most of the translation was done by the LLM?

The thing is, many physical patents are also describing extremely simple mechanisms or mere ideas for them. I don’t think your criteria reflect reality, as much as I wish they did.

If at least one million American COVID deaths (plus countless millions worldwide) that he directly caused weren’t enough of a wake up call, then I don’t know what is.

Everything the Nazi party did in Germany was legal.

This is a common myth (just like “Hitler was elected”), but not true at all. The Nazi regime knowingly committed countless crimes that were illegal under their own laws, from corruption to mass murder - and after the war, Nazi officials were (at least sometimes) persecuted by German courts using laws that were in effect from 1933 to 1945 (since they couldn’t be persecuted for laws that didn’t yet exist, at least not by German courts).

The key lesson here is different, but still highly relevant: Most of the laws of the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic (which in turn had inherited most of its laws from the German Empire, laws that are still largely in effect today), remained intact during the Nazi regime (which, among other things, allowed e.g. two parties to settle a legal dispute in a manner that was barely different from before the Nazis’ rise to power, provided none of the parties was Jewish, of course), but the appointed persecutors and judges were instructed to employ “gesundes Volksempfinden” (difficult to translate, but it’s roughly “healthy people’s subjective interpretation [of the law]”), which was just a fancy way of saying that both old and new laws had to be bent according to the directive of the regime (but the regime insisted that this was how “normal German people” would see the law). There were only a few attempts of both civil and military persecutors to act against crimes committed in the name of the regime, most of them unsuccessful and especially near the end of the war, show trials and kangaroo courts that made a mockery of legal procedure became commonplace.

Judges appointed by Trump have already used questionable to downright illegal procedural tricks to get him out of trouble. This should have been a warning of what’s to come, how more and more appointed judges will both refuse to persecute crimes committed by Trump and his administration while at the same time weaponizing existing laws to use against his opponents, until even this pseudo-legal abuse of state institutions isn’t even necessary anymore.

Here’s another important lesson from Nazi Germany: Within days of Hitler coming to power, so called “wild concentration camps” were created all over Germany. Political opponents, journalists, lawyers, Jews and often times simply people who were personal enemies of local Nazi figures were imprisoned, tortured and sometimes killed in a chaotic and uncontrolled manner. These camps were only temporary, but within weeks, a legalization of concentration camp system followed. New legal camps were built, “wild” camps closed or converted within years. The entire process was no secret, with multi-page spreads in newspapers praising them as “hard, but necessary labor camps that turn enemies of the state into useful people”. It was a sanitized portrayal, but even from the officially released photos you could tell that these were places of terror. Importantly, the torture and murder happening there was never legal and a state secret. Courts could now sentence people to be imprisoned at these camps - and anyone who was released (which was most victims, these weren’t death camps yet) had to sign that they wouldn’t talk about what they experienced or else they would be imprisoned again. I could imagine something similar happening in the US as part of the already broadly announced terror campaign against undocumented immigrants.

Technically it does, but not locally in the age of national governments. Before you’re saying it, the moment it stops being a local movement, it would work even less and lead to the organized repression I mentioned. To support my point, see how harsh government reaction has been to activists merely gluing themselves to the street (not to mention, how most people were happy about this crackdown).

And no, I doubt “The Revolution” that magically solves all of our problems (unlike most revolutions) will be started by anti-AV riots.

Eh, compared to what mainstream Republicanism is like now, he might as well be Ike.

How would self-driving taxis do this any better than taxis that already exist and aren’t relying on large tech corporations?

Singular acts of violence don’t work, organized violence doesn’t work either and will only lead to organized repression in response. The actual solution is to elect local representatives who are willing to prevent the nightmare scenario from the video from happening.

If you want to see a real-world example of this: Toppling over rental e-scooters didn’t get them removed from cities, but petitioning municipal governments to ban them did.

This is precisely the kind of niche, but vital use case that even places that have otherwise already completely banned cars (like certain islands) allow cars for. Nobody will ever take this away.

What matters is that TI has an effective monopoly on scientific and graphic calculators in the US in particular, which means that it’s the platform that matters to most. It’s irrelevant whether or not some alternative is better. It’s also extremely widely supported by software and tutorials.

I can’t imagine there being many comparable jobs for aerospace engineers in India.