Casey Neistat. Back when he was doing his daily vlog thing a lot of it was really interesting, covering him and his wife trying to make shit happen in the city as he was running and riding his powered skateboard around Manhattan. At some point his audience started drifting younger, way way younger, and I don't know if it was him or me but I just kind of lost interest. It didn't feel new anymore.

That might be me to be honest. I actually don't watch YouTube that much at all anymore, unless I'm looking for something specific. Their recommendation algorithm is garbage and it is so obviously going for raw time suck engagement that it leaves me with a bunch of unfulfilling clickbait / ragebait where I could watch it for an hour and then just want my hour back so I end up not returning. The whole platform used to be more full of interesting genuinely entertaining and educational videos, now it just feels like a giant time sink. And every other video is now some paid sponsorship or plug where the creator is basically just whoring out their own influence. Case in point, look up reviews of laser engravers. Every single one that I could find, especially of a couple major brands, the creator got the laser hardware for free. Some of them are just advertisements that reuse the manufacturer's own stock footage, and some seem more like real reviews, but for one or two brands I literally could not find one video where the creator wasn't sponsored by the laser manufacturer.

This thing is way too half baked to be in production. A day or two ago somebody asked Google how to deal with depression and the stupid AI recommended they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge because apparently some redditor had said that at some point. The answers are so hilariously wrong as to go beyond funny and into dangerous.

There's actually a really good explanation for this.

This is a mixing pump. It mixes ethanol into the fuel. Because the mixing happens before the part of the pump that measures how much is being dispensed, you need at least a few gallons to fully flush things out and get somewhere close to what you're actually buying.

Nobody is going to come arrest you if you buy 2 gallons of gas. But the gas you get me not be the mix you wanted.

So it's an ugly, heavy fragmentation bomb that looks like it was made from spare parts found at an auto parts supplier.

Other than the fact that it's especially ugly, how is this different than any other standard military frag bomb or grenade?

To understand Boeing's situation you have to understand McDonnell Douglas. And we go back to the DC-10 cargo door issue.

That's a long read, so here's the short version. The DC-10 cargo door was held on from the outside by rotating latches; when fully engaged the pressure inside the aircraft would push the latches closed so the door was VERY secure, but if the latches weren't fully engaged the pressure would push the latches open. The telltale showing the cargo operator that the latch was fully engaged wasn't connected to the latch, but rather the handle, which was itself connected to the latch via a spring. If the operator pushed the latch closed too hard or too fast, the spring would bend, and the telltale would show the door as latched, even though it wasn't.

If the door flies open in flight that means explosive decompression of the cargo area. That means the pressure of the air in the passenger cabin pushing down on the floor is huge, measured in tons per square meter. It's worth noting that the control cables that carry movement from the yoke to the rudder/elevator control surfaces in the tail go through the floor.

One of these failed on a mostly empty flight. The floor buckled and a few seats were sucked down through the floor and out of the airplane. The pilots lost all rudder control but miraculously were able to land the jet without further injury. FAA investigated and found the problem, Douglas made a 'gentleman's agreement' with FAA that they would fix this quietly without an embarrassing Airworthiness Directive (forcing all operators to comply and damaging Douglas's reputation). At all points, the priority for Douglas management was avoiding bad reputation and excess expense, not making sure the aircraft were safe.

A European operator then wasn't subscribed to Douglas's maintenance service so the update never happened. And another one failed- this one on a VERY full flight with ~350 people on it. The added weight on the floor caused a much larger section of the floor to fail, the control lines were all severed, and the plane crashed with no survivors.

In the 1990s, McDonnell Douglas and Boeing merged. The Boeing management team (mostly engineers) was replaced with the Douglas management team (bean counters). Their headquarters then moved from Seattle (where they build planes) to Washington, DC (where they lobby for federal contracts).

Granted it's 30 years after that merge, but it's pretty obvious the same management strategy is still in charge.
Take the 787 Dreamliner. Their strategy there was reduce all the expensive engineers, instead just write the specs and outsource design and build of entire subsystems. It had lots of teething problems, I've heard reports that some parts with tolerances measured in tenths of a millimeter were off by half an inch or more (and that was the reject pile, ones off by less were ground down and hammered into place). Other than some battery problems the aircraft has been pretty safe though.
And now take the MAX product line. A few years back you had issues with MCAS- a computer that makes the new jet fly like the old jet so pilots won't need retraining, even though the new jet ISN'T like the old jet and flies quite differently and if MCAS fails you'll have a very different beast on your hands (none of this was mentioned in the operation manual). That caused some crashes.

Now you have this door plug issue. It's worth noting that Boeing has outsourced assembly of the entire fuselage to another company, who (from what I've read) is constantly pressured to increase production and decrease costs. NOT a safety culture.

From some reports I've read, procedure at the other company was to make the bolts on the door plug 'finger tight' for transport, because not all customers would want the door plug, some would want the actual emergency exit door. So that means with a little bit of vibration on those bolts, the door plug is only held in place by gravity and prayers.

FAA is now supposedly doing some kind of major audit of Boeing manufacturing, and is considering no longer allowing Boeing to self-certify their quality control processes. I'm quite sure it'll turn up a lot of dirt.
What I HOPE happens is that the market, both the stock market and the aircraft market, heavily punish Boeing and/or demand that their management be replaced. I'm not holding my breath though.

IMHO, the problem with Google isn't SEO. It's Google. When Google was great, it would find exactly what you were searching for. The whole point was to get you off of Google and on to whatever site you were looking for as quickly as possible. Over the last several years, their search has increasingly been drinking the 'engagement algorithm' Kool-Aid. Now Google doesn't search for what you ask, it searches for what it thinks you are trying to find. Which is fucking useless because I know exactly what I'm trying to find and that's exactly what I typed in. Selecting verbatim search and putting things in quotes helps. But it's still displays tons of irrelevant stuff that doesn't include what I searched for.

It's actually easy to point to exactly when the downfall started. Years ago Google was trying to make a social network called Google+ that would compete with Facebook. Before this, a + operator in the search field meant only show results that contain that particular term. But they wanted people to search for Google+, so they changed it so the plus sign became a searchable term and quotes were necessary to include a term or phrase. That was the moment Google decided that search wasn't their most important product. And it's been slow downhill ever since.

Amazon monitors and logs and analyzes everything. As a company they are all about data. If they find something that will get the package out the door one half second faster, they'll spend millions rolling it out everywhere.

If he doesn't have the data, there is zero chance that means the data doesn't exist. That means the data paints a very different picture and he has chosen to ignore it.

That's great. Build it. Until this hits the showroom floor, I don't care. Electric cars have been consistently 10 years away for the past like 30 or 40 years. For every other automaker, electric cars are now here today. Except Toyota, where they are still 10 years away. And for me, The electric car isn't 10 years away, it's parked in my driveway. So as far as I'm concerned, this is all just press bullshit to try and discredit current EVs and buy Toyota time to continue pushing gas and hybrid.

And as for the whole thing of people not buying EVs, that's twofold. One, people are hurting right now, and people in bad economic condition get really price conscious. The second gas prices go up they'll all be trading their gas guzzlers for EVs. Second, the simple fact is a lot of EVs on the road kind of suck. And other than Tesla, the public charging infrastructure is awful so if you like road trips you're going to have a bad time. Given that in another year other automakers will mostly be switching to Tesla charge ports, unless you're buying a Tesla there's some logic in waiting.

Real bonehead move on behalf of the OpenAI board. The guy is emergency fired in what is basically a shock to everybody including him, then the company panics and realizes they just lost their star racehorse and starts talking about getting him back. It's fucking brain dead. When they fired him, he probably had a hundred job offers before he even made it down to the lobby. Even if whatever he did is truly awful, any company with AI ambitions would kill to have him on their payroll.

MS did well executing quickly here. They took a perfect opportunity to onboard an experienced AI team for pennies vs. what buying the rest of OpenAI would cost. And whatever Sam and his team build next is going to be 100% theirs. Wouldn't be surprised if there's an open job offer for OpenAI employees looking to follow Altman, with the promise of essentially unlimited resources to develop whatever and respect from management. For a talented AI researcher that's a tempting offer.

This is easy.

As long as I'm getting food and the T-Rex isn't, just sit in the hut and wait.
T-Rex will pass out of hunger and thirst. Once it stops moving I wait a day or two then finish the job with the knife.

As I see it, this whole debacle is as much proof as I or anyone should need that DeSantis is unfit to be president.
When the state's largest employer, one who had supported him in the past on many issues, dared oppose him on one single issue that had taken the national stage (where they could do nothing other than oppose or be seen as discriminatory), he decided to punish them. Not in any way that was even a little bit effective, but in a punitive and immature and ineffective way that has replaced an effective good government agency with a politicized useless committee.
His actions say to me that he is neither a good representative of Florida's people, nor a wise leader, nor even an effective politician. He is a child who had a temper tantrum when he didn't get his way, so he tried to smash his favorite toy and didn't even break it.
We can do better. We have to do better than that, for the good of the nation.

Good. I have no desire for more war. However, China has made it clear they consider Taiwan to be part of their territory. Taiwan is an important country for the rest of the world as a great many of the world's computer chips are made there. This is a vital supply that the rest of the world does not want China to control. If Taiwan is defenseless, if China can conquer them easily and quickly, they are much more likely to do it. If Taiwan has sharp teeth, if conquering Taiwan would mean a bloody war, China is more likely to leave them alone. So if a few billion dollars worth of missiles helps keep Taiwan independent, I think it's money well spent.