Nobody can even come up with a coherent reason for any of these proposals to exist. Even the ISS is more of a political instrument than a real science thing. NASA likes to say its about studying how to help humans live in space, but those results were in decades ago: more than a few months in zero-g wrecks people. So why are we still trying to build old modular Soyuz/Mir derivatives instead of trying to figure out the minimum spin humans need to stay healthy? Because the whole point is to do familiar safe things while providing full time jobs for ground control.

I think you're right about the humanities. If you want to talk humanities with an LLM, they're more than capable. But that doesn't mean they're going to take the humanities from humans, all they'll do is make the humanities more accessible to normals. They're great at breaking down complex subjects without feeling judgemental or elitist. They're also excellent for extremely personalized recommendations, not just explanations. I've gotten amazing book recommendations over the past year or two, discussing in detail what I liked, didn't like, didn't understand, etc.

Unfair to clowns, a noble profession.

Leave it to the British to beat the Germans at their own game.

There were 32 SR-71s, 13 A-12s and 2 M-21s. That's 47 total I believe, making your figure off by about 300%, which incidentally is how much cooler the SR-71 is relative to the Mig, on account of it looking incredibly exotic and elegant instead of like a pointy sky tractor. Being faster is just icing on the cake.

Smart people can hit the ground running if they're freed from the need to first learn the intricacies of a new language. We're going to see an explosion in the number of people writing software as clever people who invested their time in something other than learning to program are now able to write software for themselves.

If the administration decides to end this stupid war just so they can cash out some profitable bets... I don't even know what I would think. The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt.

Safety / incident data collection and publishing from the FAA and NTSB are basically live, you'll get incidents logged within days at most and preliminary reports usually within a few weeks. What lags the most are data analysis and interpretations, but major newspapers should probably be prepared to do their own data analysis if they're making grand proclaiments like the collapse of an industry...

I'm not saying the article's thesis is wrong, much of it rings true to me, but we have very comprehensive data and statistics concerning air travel so I'm deeply unimpressed by this article instead hanging its argument on a hodgepodge list of incidents instead of digging into the data to get some proper numbers.

If the government would like to pay me to also not build wind turbines, hit me up. I mean, I wasn't going to build any in the first place, but I think this makes me qualified to continue not building any.