"Vertical Takeoff and Landing aircraft are on track to provide urban air transit within the next few years, targeting the high-margin commuters who traditionally buy premium vehicles."
Okay. So... flying cars? Don't think so. Robotaxis make sense where taxis make sense and you can get by without a car already. The demographic decline is real.
There's the simple physics of a vtol craft when landing needing to push down a lot of a air very fast just to lift an average human - plus the weight of the craft itself. There's a reason helicopters today don't land on street corners even if there's no rotor clearance issues. And these "personal" VTOLs don't seem any lighter than a helicopter of a similar size - for example the "Air One" is twice the mass of a Robinson R22 - ~400 vs ~970 kg empty.
The idea that they would be common enough to seriously disrupt "personal transport", even restricting to the "premium" market as it's known today is crazy. Imagine a fancy party where every 10 seconds everyone on the red carpet is being blown away by the backwash of someone landing - also disrupting everyone else trying to land there at the same time.
They are talking about unmanned drones that operate as flying taxis. They have them in China. We will never have flying cars after 9/11 showed how flying objects can damage property.
It's not 9/11 that will kill it but people not wanting 2 tons of metal flying overhead. The occasional helicopter is one thing. Having hundreds of these flying around, when one can clip a building from a gust of wind and go plummeting into bystanders is a no-go.
Not to mention the noise. Residential neighborhoods will ban these immediately (and some won't have a choice because they have, you know, trees.)
> If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
The US is a "christian" nation which has been doing this for decades, even centuries at this point. As recently as a few weeks ago and the official government seems to be pretty joyous about it. I'm pretty sure it's the same "god". Not sure who this god guy is but he seems like an asshole who can justify anything.
> embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes
"happens sometimes" is in the passive voice. What if you live in a war zone and the war isn't far away? Are the people stockpiling AR-15's in the US legitimate military targets? There's a fun 80's movie about Cuba invading the US that you should watch some time. Is that "pro terrorist propaganda"?
It gave me strong vibes too. It’s the writing style. I’ve seen OpenAI write just like this. Doesn’t mean it’s bad. There’s a few other markers. Note “silly” in quotes and over use if that word. Once would be enough. But also this is very very typical. The bolting and short quite direct and a bit repetitive statements “it absolutely does not solve “dumped a bag of candy on a messy kitchen table and took a dramatic iPhone shot.”
Real example programs are where the joke becomes a language
I didn’t want this to stop at “hello world with candy colors.”” The over use of quoting. The bold. It’s not like a human wouldn’t write this. But it’s unusual for a human to do this imho. All the same - it feels novel. And at the end of the day it’s a neat idea. It’s just we enter this new brave world where things written like this give you the ick. “Where do the ai learn this from?” Well I wouldn’t mind betting the author asked it to be written in a hn style post.
Yeah, the scam is to inflate the value of your properties, then claim a write-off when it fails. For "some reason" you can even use other people's money for the investments and claim the losses for yourself. Then you can use that as a deduction when you actually make money again. One scammer in particular pulled this trick for 10 years, rolling it forward and filing a $916 million loss with the IRS in 1995.
The word "challenge" in the article title is clickbait. I guess the assumption challenged is that this measurable effect is for humans only because we are so special? Good as a headline for a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution. It's pretty obvious that our auditory and visual systems are older than humanity as a species. I'd be surprised if the results were anything but confirming. Chickens are not going to learn English. Other species use sound to communicate and that this effect is measurable is pretty cool.
But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language. It's a theory that mistakenly thinks that hard problem in language is coming up with words for objects instead of the actually hard problem of combining words in a systematic way.
> But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language.
Do you have a source on that? Because I would expect anyone studying sound symbolism to find the bouba-kiki effect extremely important which is probably why it's such a widely cited study, also inside linguistics.
It's hard to find a source for that kind of negative statement.
Kiki-bouba is important for sound-symbolism definitely! But sound-symbolism is marginal when it comes to language. Iconicity and similar things are very interesting phenomena but they're not the difficult part of language at all and they're not necessary parts of language.
I obviously don't know your background but out of the linguists that I know and have met while doing my degrees in linguistics, I don't know of anyone who would say that the kiki-bouba effect is not important — anything, in fact, that challenges the notion that sound-meaning relations are completely arbitrary is interesting because it might give us clues about the origins of language, not to mention that it lends support to other, related hypotheses about sound-symbolism.
I'm not sure what you mean by "not necessary parts of language", but I would love to hear what you think the necessary parts of language are. Not to mention, what is "the difficult part of language" then?
The Bouba kiki effect doesn't challenge the arbitrariness of the sign because arbitrary doesn't mean uniformly distributed. The effect shows that there's a preference between the two but it doesn't contradict the fact that either could be a perfectly fine label.
The difficult part of language is the fact we can build entirely novel meanings out of a relatively small finite set of words. Bouba kiki has no bearing on the way words are composed.
> The difficult part of language is the fact we can build entirely novel meanings out of a relatively small finite set of words.
So are you saying that we've got e.g. neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition and typology down? Or do you simply mean "interesting to you" when you say "difficult"? Because in my experience, pretty much every subject in linguistics (and most other sciences) is easy if you don't understand it and surprisingly difficult once you start to get a grasp of it.
> Bouba kiki has no bearing on the way words are composed.
It literally shows a preference best described by sound-symbolism so it most certainly has a bearing on how words are composed. Just because the relation between sound and meaning _can_ be arbitrary, showing that in some cases it's not entirely so is extremely valuable for evolutionary linguistics.
> a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution
This isn't true anywhere in the world except Turkey. Even the second least "evolution believing" country in the world, USA, has 54% of the general public accepting evolution and only 31% believing in creationism, as of 2009.
The mainline opposing view to evolution seems to be that one guy made all living beings over the course of a week. Common brain structures should be even less surprising in that scenario. That'd just be God taking what works and reusing it, either refining it for a more intelligent species or removing parts that are not needed but leaving some of the supporting infrastructure around
After all, lazy engineers are made in God's image /s
I think the problem is just not enough training on that specific language because it's proprietary. Most useful Mathematica code is on someone's personal computer, not GitHub. They can build up a useful set of training data, some benchmarks, a contest for the AI companies to score high on, because they do love that kind of thing.
But for most internet applications (as opposed to "math" stuff) I would think Python is still a better language choice.
Yes they did, and that's the problem. Some people support this. It's easier to rile up hatred than to fix any real problems. When you spend years framing ALL immigration as illegal, you get a lot of people (like some of my family members) who will say "well, they ARE here illegally so they just need to enforce the law". And yes there are illegal immigrants in this country, but I don't think this kind of violence is the right solution.
Of course tables are hit or miss - but learning how to carry a dead table is a fun challenge in and of itself. My city has a fairly extensive WhatsApp group for timelefters, usually all of the various tables meet up after for drinks and more socializing.
People are free to knock themselves out with Bazel if they’re into that kind of masochism, but having it as the ONLY way to build your OSS project is a big no.
The problem with "the language tooling is already a build system" is that cross-language dependency chains are a thing. The moment you need a Rust or Zig file to be regenerated and recompiled when a JSON schema or .proto file is updated, you're outside what most of those language-specific toolchains can support. This is where Bazel absolutely shines.
If all of your dependencies need to use the same build system as your project then your build system/process is defect anyway. It should be possible to invoke a foreign build system as part of your build.
Okay. So... flying cars? Don't think so. Robotaxis make sense where taxis make sense and you can get by without a car already. The demographic decline is real.