I’m about to go to sleep. I’ll sleep better knowing I have $19, but probably wouldn’t sleep at all knowing $7 billion is showing up tomorrow. I don’t think I’m cut out for the billionaire life, but I’m prepared to try.

Oh boy… So, they took off from a test facility adjacent to Plattsburgh International Airport. I don’t see it stated, but I give it 98% they landed where they took off. Plattsburgh has some of the lowest residential and commercial electricity costs in the country, so that $5 nets them about 110kWh of juice.

They also reached a maximum altitude of 1,100 feet with a plane that weighs in excess of 25,000 pounds. Lifting 25,000 pounds up to 1,100 feet takes 37 million joules of added potential energy, or a bit above 10 kWh.

The entire remaining 100kWh of energy budget is the equivalent of accelerating the 25,000 pound aircraft up to 252 meters/second at perfect efficiency in a vacuum. This flight was not going very high, and it was not going very fast.

If the economics of their hybrid idea work out, it’ll be fantastic, but the attempt at marketing over transparency here doesn’t fill me with optimism.

A coworker of mine made the worst code base in the world. Beginning as soon as it was allowed, he used generative AI to work faster, add more documentation, review his MRs, write tests, and make changes to embrace industry norms.

It went great until this code was actually deployed. It turns out that he more than doubled the size of the code base, and made the worst code ever written by humans even worse. It has become superhuman levels of bad. The code AI wrote for him is going to produce the singularity of stupid, out of which hyper-anti-intelligence will emerge, and grow to consume every compute resource for the remainder of time.

In related news, yes, I could end my use of AI.

I searched a bit, the main thing I can find is that 7 days ago, Mamdani appeared on stage at an event in Staten Island, where he only got 23% of the vote. Multiple (at least 4) people booed him, and he left the podium/stage after roughly a minute during which he thanked various people.

So… He went to a borough where he wasn’t very popular, and he still isn’t very popular there, I guess? This is just like the ending of my own relationship’s honeymoon phase, when my sister in law that has never liked me, still didn’t like me after I got married.

If Apple made a phone that could move around and take pictures of things, and the user asked it to take a picture of the trees outside, and it went to the trees outside and took peeping Tom photos of their neighbor, does the fact that the user asked it to take a picture of some kind make them responsible for whatever irrational and vaguely related thing it does based on the way Apple made the phone?

Should Toyota be held responsible if they make a car where turning the wheel left makes the car turn left 99.99% of the time, and the remaining 0.01% it locks the accelerator, and steers towards the nearest orphan? They put a sticker on the dashboard to warn that sometimes it does that, and you need to be alert to turn off the engine, just in case. They also sell a version with no windows and no driver’s seat.

If a gun explodes in someone’s hands, and injures them, is the manufacturer responsible?

In the 1812 German version (and German versions since then), the queen asks who is “schönste” in the land. That’s definitely pretty, beautiful, or attractive, rather than pale, white, or brilliant.

We need 12 billion people to subscribe to ultra-premium-plus-plus-super AI accounts to deliver on the expected subscription revenue that is the basis for the stock price. The fact that many ordinary people aren’t paying AI agents to watch movies for them, and read the news for them and engage in deep research across a range of topics… They’re practically engaging in a boycott.

Processing all the text as tokens is too much work, so the AI will just read the headline and the first 3 paragraphs, then hallucinate the rest of the details.

That’s known as PEBCAK: Problem Exists Between Cart And Kiosk

I think she’s Ariana Minuta now.

This relates to the thing I am most confused by in today’s business climate. Companies face brutal competition, and tremendous pressure to “innovate” (screw the customer more), and yet every ounce of research on the question suggests that rather than pushing people to work longer and longer hours, they can get the most out of their workforce by mandating proper sleep, time walking/in nature/exercise, non-continuous working periods, and comfort items like faster computers, better chairs, higher quality food, etc.

Why isn’t any company ruthlessly pursuing efficiency by giving bonuses for sleeping well? It would be super creepy and authoritarian to mandate sleep monitoring, but I don’t see why that stops them, when it doesn’t appear to in any other direction. Or even simpler, requiring shorter working hours, but expecting the same/more output?

Is it this exact attitude, that somehow happy workers with free time will get up to no good, or become depressed, or feel less committed or something?

No one knows why some CEOs succeed so much, and others fail so hard. Rather than admit that they are guessing, executive suites and boards of directors both engage in mystical thinking, and then shed as much blame/yank as much credit as they can get away with. CEOs are where they are because of a social club, and not because they have any specific demonstrable skills, high intelligence, overwhelming empathy, insight into the future of business, unmatched creativity, etc.

Hallucinating that CEOs know what they should be doing, and the “more hours worked means more things got done” thinking are the largest and most damaging mental viruses of the corporate world.

Laugh it off, then send it in, I think.

It depends. It looks like the orange portal is being moved by a hydraulic cylinder (aka laminar flow), which means the relative positions and velocities of things moving through the orange portal are conserved, and A is correct.

If instead that’s (yuck) an air fired cylinder… Then it’s going to be B.

If the movement is handled by a threaded rod, then the box will emerge from the blue portal spinning, and (perhaps contrary to expectations) if the orange portal is moving because of gravity, then the bouyant force of the box progressing through the portal will stop it from falling further, and the box will end up just less than halfway (because of the angle) through the blue portal.

I wrote in, and they gave me a 100% refund, and said I could keep the software. They must know how badly they fucked up.

Yeah, what were they thinking, using Ubuntu in 2011?

80% of the time, they’re wrong every time.

Disclaimer: I have only seen the trailers. Multiple things were from substantially incorrect regions or time periods. They could have at least tried.

Also, I bought a Nolan movie to watch at home once, and the sound balancing was complete garbage. It was disappointing that he let his pretentiousness make his movie unwatchable. Maybe someday he’ll understand what art is for.

Unless the people in my life that watch more movies than I do say it’s really good, I won’t see it, but also won’t be reviewing it for Rotten Tomatoes.

I used to eat at my desk, until I read research that showed you are more productive when you take a real break, time away from the work context, etc. Now I’m in a position to exploit a team of people by making them take a real break, too. Same with vacation, I’ve had to chew people out for checking in on work when they’re meant to be optimizing their brains.

Research also shows that walking breaks, and 7 hour work days help total productivity, so I’m trying to make those happen… But corporate culture is strongly indoctrinated into the “I spent more time on it, there must be more accomplished” cult… Even though what we produce is code. Sigh.

Did you tell it to not make any mistakes, and double check its work, and write valid, comprehensive integration tests and stand up a development environment, and make a team of QA agents to verify that the development environment is running correctly?

Not doing that is a recipe for disaster. Oh, and tell it to make backups.