Also their particleboard and cardboard furniture should be banned. Furniture should not dissolve when a drink gets spilled on it.

Dr. Abernethy, who passed in 2021, is probably known in the aerospace world more for Weibull analysis (1) than his J58 work, atleast that was the case for me before finding this. Anyone who is an enthusiast of the SR-71 will find it interesting.

(1) A type of analysis used widely to predict failures with limited test or field data.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321569

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Hard to make a case in 2026 that you can be oblivious to the potential of AI to do unexpected things that could impact other people.

"Did people know the machine was dangerous and didn't care, or did they not anticipate such a behavior?"

This framing of the issue as binary being either intentional negligence or blissful ignorance is not how liability works. If you are working with something potentially dangerous and impactful to society you no longer get to say "I didn't know" because we as a society hold you to a higher standard for getting the privilege of working with the potentially dangerous and impactful thing. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, pilots, truck drivers, etc. are all examples of this.

A trucker whose brakes fail causing a crash is liable even if the failure wasn't caused by intentional negligence because we hold them responsible to make sure they won't fail to begin with. A programmer and company whose safety measures fail resulting in a program hacking another company should absolutely be held accountable.

https://www.zillow.com/home-values/11267/edison-nj/ https://www.zillow.com/home-values/12447/los-angeles-ca/

Might be opposite sides of the country but CA and NJ are lock step when it comes to making it unaffordable for younger generations to buy homes.

Stargate Universe once, Atlantis twice, and SG-1 six times!

Thank you for the thoughts and references.

What does "support" mean in this context?

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-fear-ai-permanent...

Apparently you don't.

"These are real problems mathematicians and computer scientists have been working on and were unable to make progress on."

Who says no one was making progress? Who says openai has made progress? How would anyone not working on these specific problems, witho the time to dig into openai's claims, be able to tell? Why should this not be lumped in with all the other ai hype being pushed?

"The mathematicians I know are saying that the latest crop of models is changing the way people do research math, I think that's a pretty big deal."

Who? And doing what?

We have been hearing the "this generation of models is the one" type talk for years and the only concrete "big deals" are what? A tool for college students to write papers? A replacement for, now enshitified, google search? The fact that now you can fake tons of stuff to support a position or claim tons of stuff that goes against your position is fake?

"Today the reflex is back."

To do what? Ban export of AI? Are you sure? Because it seems, so far, there has been some personal motivated government restrictions due to people not bending the knee and industry moves and clamoring about dangers to generate hype.

"The fears have changed."

Yeah, people are fearful that the entirety of the internet has been hoovered up and people are using that data to make tech that they are promoting by saying it will eliminate a huge percentage of jobs and is exceedingly dangerous. At the same time as they do that, they refuse to take any accountability for the negative effects their tech has or will have, avoid any over sight, and laugh at the idea of discussing that maybe such a consequential tech doesn't belong in the hands of a few tech bros whose only qualification for owning it is being rich.

"The worry is now cyber capability, biology and models that do things nobody asked them to do."

No, we are being sold those worries (really, really hard) but these are not "peoples" worries. They aren't even real governments worries. They are the worries being peddled to try and work some deal where the taxpayers end up holding the bag of hot air that is the AI economy.

This post is so frustrating because AI is the antithesis of everything the people fighting for cryptography access, working on opensource, pushing for a the sort of web that is beneficial to all, were working against. A giant concentration of power enriching the few at the expense of many.

1. 4-5x faster deployment than on land

- Not that this will ever be built but if it were, I assume Newport News or Electric Boat would be fitting the nuclear reactor (unless they cheap out and go with an import). Given they are booked solid until the 2040s somehow this company is even slower than the nuclear industry at building land based plants.

2. 1.5 GW deployed per year

- Starting in which year?

3. 1.1 PUE seawater cooling, modeled.

- Well there you have it, they modeled it, so it's basically already built.

4. 20-40 year infrastructure life

- Remind me how many 20 year old servers are currently running AI workloads? Oh, I guess that just means the ships and the nuclear reactor. I mean I guess that's good, it's not like a building on land would last that long...

Oh but I guess they will just be using LNG to start with, thank goodness that is alot easier to get than nuclear. In fact now is a really good time to start this as I heard there's some companies looking to offload a few LNG tankers somewhere in the gulf for a steal!

Prediction markets are obviously, blatantly, gambling. There is no "greyness", we've skipped the slippery slope and gone straight to the bottom of the ravine.

The corrupting influence they are having on society has been obvious from the start and was predicted by anyone with any familiarity of the effects of "traditional" gambling on people. Except the author apparently, because they had seen precisely what gambling can do to people and still pushed this.

"The dream was that markets would surface useful information"

The dream was that the markets would make the people who owned them stupid amounts of money like any casino owner. Pretending otherwise is self-delusion at it's finest but the author seems good at that.

Check the marketing literature for any college and you will find that is not true.

The only people doing degrees for knowledge and prestige are the filthy rich and while they may make up a significant percentage of students at the top 5 schools, they make up a tiny percentage of all college students.

The last point is where I end up aswell though and I think no matter how you look at it colleges are doing a disservice to young people and taxpayers pushing worthless degrees backed by government loans that they (the colleges) don't have to worry about repaying.