Great article.

I have long suspected that it was a dead end, because at most you get a slurry that you then have to process. We already have that, the slurry is just made of vegetables. Growing animal cells in a way is way more complex then mashing peas or beans and make processed food from that.

Or you know, be unafraid to try tofu.

In the famous locomotive competition where Rocket beat Novelty (or was it the other way around?), other locomotives also participated. Some broke down and one was disqualified for containing a horse instead of a steam engine. Feels like there are lots of hidden horses today, and they are rewarded instead of disqualified.

This was so stupid.

A hijacking happens when passengers overflow into the cockpit from the cabin.

Oh no! A little kid has been invited to have a look! Passenger overflow! Hijacking!

His attempt at solution isn't as cringe worthy, if one overlooks the reasoning. Separating the cabin from the pilots is a way of preventing hijacking that has been attempted, but it has problems. Notably if the pilots get acute medical emergency or indeed if the pilot steer the plane into the ground.

Some ten years ago a french pilot locked out his second and ran the plane into the ground. For increased safety the after 911 the door to the cabin could only be opened from the inside.

I have so far seen two working AI applications that actually makes sense, both in a hospital setting:

1. Assisting oncologists in reading cancer images. Still the oncologists that makes the call, but it seems to be of use to them.
2. Creating a first draft when transcribing dictated notes. Listening and correcting is apparently faster for most people than listening and writing from scratch.

These two are nifty, but it doesn't make a multi billion dollar industry.

In other words the bubble is bursting and the value / waste ratio looks extremely low.

Say what you want about the Tulip bubble, but at least tulips are pretty.

Why is it art from artists who made their last work in 1912? Modern copyright lasts life plus X, where X has been increasing and is now mostly 70, though some stopped at 50. So why 1912? Did US copyright change that year?

Having worked in an IT department in 2020, it wasn't just random. Zoom was stable for large meetings and scaled pretty smoothly up to a thousand participants. And it's a standalone product and it had better moderator tools.

MS Teams often got problems over around 50 to 80 participants. Google Meet worked better but its max was way lower than Zoom (250?). I tried a couple of other competitors, but none that matched up (including Jitsi, unfortunately).

So if you were at an IT department in an organization that needed to have large meetings and were looking for a quick solution that also worked for your large meetings , Zoom was in 2020 the best choice. And big organisations choices means everyone has to learn that software, so soon enough everyone knows how to use Zoom.

They were at the right place, had the better product, gained a dominant position. And now they are tossing all that away. C'est la late stage capitalism!

Colour me unsurprisinged. For my sins ( mostly for the sin of being helpful and knowing my way around computers) I have ended up as a moderator of various Facebook pages (for nice enough causes), and the last year there has been a stream of scam attempts. They all claim to be Meta and threaten to delete the page - mostly for alleged copyright violations - unless you follow the link...

I of course block and delete (to avoid anyone else of the moderators falling for it), but it's quite obvious that Meta doesn't care that scammers impersonate them on their own platform, or they would have done something about it.

So I find this par for the course.

The world has enough for everyone's need, just not for everyone's greed.

On average we humans use too much, yes. I don't know if WWF (not the wrestling one) still does their yearly report, but anyway they used to and the only part of the world that in average was over carrying capacity was the West (the first world, the golden billion). And within countries there are also stark differences.

Placing the blame on the poor billions of the world is at best ignorant and at worst racist (not saying that you are, but placing the blame on poor people with more pigments has been very common). Placing it on the billionaires is more fitting, though really it's societal structure that upholds the growth obsession and produces billionaires. But at least the billionaires has power, and in general fights every attempt at making things slightly better, which makes it more fitting to blame them.

The combination of the mother being all "I got raised by hippies, which I hated so I am doing the opposite", "we are very rational", " our kids will obviously be like us, only better". Can't they put these pieces together?

Well, with that many children, at least one will write a book about how their childhood sucked.

Chapter 1, I am so cold When I think about my childhood, I think about freezing...

Chapter 12, Stop hitting me dad!

And so on.

Back in the late 90s tech boom days McDonalds declared that they would sell hamburgers over the Internet. Remember, this was before smartphones, hell it was before Nokia flip phones with rudimentary browser and email. Most people who had internet access at all used it either at work, school or the family computer with dial up modem.

McDonalds' stock price rose by 50%.

I remember it because I thought this was so stupid that it must mean that the bust was near. I was just of years. The market can stay stupid longer than you can believe it, or however it was Keynes put it.

Notably missing: grabbing a couple of millions and run of to a non extradition country.

He is so sure he can get out on top that running away doesn't even hit his brainstorm top 19 list. He doesn't write the list on paper and burn it later, because for it to backfire he would need to fail.

Insane confidence man.

We can not allow a spam bot gap to develop!