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Well, Disney and Pfizer are canonical megacorps, and they don't want to deal with this bullshit at all. Right wing derangement is bad for most large scale businesses. And it's hard to get people competent enough to get shit done to go along with stuff that's particularly hateful or stupid...

That's a misunderstanding of the economics of content creation. When you were getting hundreds of channels in a cable bundle, it was priced knowing that any given household may only watch a few of those at the once, and maybe only a dozen unique ones a month. Everyone was paying for just the...

Oh, I think she understands the assignment. Carry water for Elon as long as feasible while accumulating paychecks and golden parachute eligibility, versus the ongoing reputational harm that would impair future employment. It's a quite similar game theory problem as "should I be Press Secretary...

It is remarkable that over a quarter of humans didn't successfully identity other humans! A forced-choice test where an Interrogator interacts with an AI and a human and picks which one is more likely to be human would probably (hopefully!) have a much higher accuracy rate.

And for scale, a single Marvel movie has a VFX budget >>$30M. That's honestly a pretty niche/boutique sized business when it comes to the entertainment industry. Or gaming.

Weta is almost certainly focused on Unreal 5 like pretty much the rest of Hollywood. A big underlying reason for the Unity pivot is that Unity wasn't winning much market share in the lucrative niches. As someone who engages a lot with the Hollywood technical community, it is staggering how...

And the root of much VC funding, so it has its pros and cons. Great ideas that don't have a plausible path to great profits have to bootstrap instead of getting advance funding.

When you’re making Mark Zuckerberg look like the prophesied savior, it’s time to question whether you are on the path you want to be on.

“It’s not MY fault people took me at my word!!!”

I've had several models of the Fire Cube, going back to the original launch, and they're all still working fine. When I get a new one I just pass the old ones down to an older TV. They're ARM SoCs with better-than-average thermals. I don't know why they wouldn't be quite reliable. Another...

I've been remote for 24 years, at the same job almost 12. I see I have three old laptops and two old desktops that have been replaced by new models stacked up, and a couple of others went in for repair and got replaced instead.

Couldn't you do just that? Amazon Fire products haven't prevented loading other OSes on them historically.

The big issue with the GE/Microsoft style stack ranking is that teams had to fire the X% lowest rank employees every year, regardless of whether it was more Magnificent Seven or Dirty Dozen. So the best way to get promoted was to be the best performer on a bad team. A better employee on a much...

Oh, no human can actually race a CRT beam! Each line takes 0.07 ms to draw (480 lines at 30 fps for NTSC, or 576 lines at 25 fps for PAL). Some video experts are able to tell the difference between frame scan (all lines are from the same moment in time) and line scan (each line is captured that...

Except a lot of those problems are likely to be fatal, though, right? There's nothing breathable or edible available except at the end of supply chain. If there is a shelter cave in, the surface isn't habitable. There are so many plausible single points of failure that could easily wipe out an...

And, hopefully, some deterrence by showing how those violent fantasies of save-the-world heroism actually result in long years in prison. One common thing about the alt-right conspiracy fandom is that they are mostly people who are not good at doing actual things in the real world. Conspiracy...

It is almost standard to try to portray the victimizer as also a victim themselves in defending someone against prosecution for horrible criminal acts that they clearly did. It's not close to enough to keep him from being convicted (a trespasser inflicting a grievous head injury on a defenseless...

Fortunately the real world is based on scientific processes, not the narrative demands of fiction. If CRISPR goes horribly wrong, it will be in a less dramatic but more surprising way. Like "oh, we turned off that gene which prevents X condition, but bladder cancer rates went up by 35%."

Great point: far from all problems have a genetic basis, so gene editing won't address a whole lot of health issues. It's a small minority of illnesses where a single or a few genes make or break a condition. More commonly it's a whole bunch of genes that maybe impact things a few percentage...

It's hard to discriminate between those. And fundamentally, it doesn't really matter from a medical or public policy perspective. The drug offers significant net improvements in health outcomes that far outweigh side effects. We approve all sorts of drugs despite not having a clear understanding...