https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tse6mq/ua_...

> If you develop the skill of judging information by its merit rather than source..

Did you read example #1? I'm not talking about some piece of code from an LLM that you can verify or some political opinion that you can take with a grain of salt, but information that you can only gain and/or judge through expertise:

If you're not a physicist yourself, you can't judge "information by its merit" on specific physics topics, because you don't have a solid baseline.

Similarly, in growing plants, each plant has its own peculiarities, and only people experienced in growing it can tell you anything useful - it's knowledge accumulated by trial and error. Not knowledge that your "great discerning mind" can assess on its own. Even a botanist can't tell you the ideal growing conditions of a plant that they've never studied before.

1) Some time ago I was searching for growing information about a specific and uncommonly-grown plant, and was led to a top-ranked website with long pages containing everything about it, including other plants. Surprised at how prolific the writing was, I spent more than an hour on the website, taking notes, etc. Every few paragraphs it would include an amazon affiliate link to something topical, which I thought was fair. Until I realized that the links near the bottom of the page were looking more random. Then it hit me, the website is all AI-generated, and the affiliate links themselves are also AI-chosen. And everything new I "learned" from that site was now useless because I had no way to know what was grounded in actual agricultural experience and what was hallucinated.

2) Recently I did a youtube search for a book I had just finished reading, looking for some reviews. Came across a channel that was reading the book as new audio (i.e. not the original published audiobook). I thought it was a fan making it. The voice was beautiful, soothing, and natural with all kinds of relevant emotions correctly included. I started listening to the book again, until I noticed a consistent error in word ordering being made every few lines. Then it hit me! The channel even included one upload with a video recording of a seemingly-real person reading with that voice. Both the audio and video are AI-generated, but very hard to tell.

3) Next to those videos, YT recommended many strange/new channels. One had the photo and the exact voice of a famous (and now very old) physicist, with tens of clickbaity titles about controversial topics in the domain. The only tell was that the voice was too vigorous and consistently energetic, while if you've listened to that physicist before, you know his cadence is slower. At first I thought maybe the channel is reading one of his books; no, the content itself was AI-generated, maybe based on his books. There was a lot of engagement, with many comments like "mind blown" and "learned so much today".

Both #1 and #3 are harmful, because you think you're learning from a reliable source but you end up learning hallucinated nothings. #2 I didn't mind much, still enjoyed the new voice, and even preferred it over my original audible version.

Elaborate? You heat your knives after every sharpening?

> "We know that richer communities and schools will be able to afford more advanced AI models," Winthrop says, "and we know those more advanced AI models are more accurate. Which means that this is the first time in ed-tech history that schools will have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources."

... and am somehow reminded of the movie Gattaca.

So ubiquitous surveillance, literally overhead, without any need to have a nearby/local charging/physical-management station/crew?

> After power companies, we will service rail, road, telecom, real estate and other inspection markets.

Oh?

> After building drones for the Air Force and DARPA, ...

Oh

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46414837

Points: 113

# Comments: 163

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprekar%27s_routine

https://x.com/TeamYouTube/status/1985378776562168037

For everyone else: the first paragraph appears to be a quote of C.S. Lewis around 1945 [0], and the second, of Thomas Jefferson in 1807 [1].

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/502048-why-you-fool-it-s-th...

[1] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...

Rough summary of the available public information:

- They had an accident in 2023 injuring, by not stopping instantly, a passerby who was hit by another car.

- They were investigated and then California temporarily suspended their license to drive around.

- By the end of 2023 there was a massive layoff, including top executives leaving. There were claims that the operation was too human-dependent / required too much human interventions.

- In 2024 there were some news that they were starting up again (outside CA maybe).

- In Dec 2024, GM dropped their funding altogether and gave up on self-driving / robotaxi, refocusing on driver assistance instead. Some analysts claimed that was in part (in addition to finances) due to politics and them not wanting to face off with Tesla under the new administration.

It always seemed to me that something was missing from the overall picture:

- While second to Waymo, they still seemed already far ahead from others; maybe they were, say, 90% there.

- Others, like Tesla, had many accidents, including fatal ones. But for those the gauntlet was not thrown that quickly. It is expected that self-driving cars will have accidents as they continue to improve; why would one such incident, that wasn't even fatal, have such a dramatic response?

- Sure it's possible that Cruise was just a row in a spreadsheet to some finance higher-ups at GM, and it was dropped like that because it wasn't making them money yet. But to drop such a multi-year investment has to have been something else, a deeper problem:

- E.g. Did they realize/decide that the technical architecture was somehow flawed and there was an unbreakable barrier that prevents them from achieving that remaining 10%?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888265

Points: 4

# Comments: 4

> Its landing module, which weighs 495 kilograms (1,091 lb), is highly likely to reach the surface of Earth in one piece as it was designed to withstand 300 G's of acceleration and 100 atmospheres of pressure.

Awesome! I don't know how you can design for 300 G's of acceleration!

[0] https://chatgpt.com/share/68143a97-9424-800e-b43a-ea9690485b...

I've always found it fascinating that I could plant many spice seeds (e.g. mustard) as long as their container said "not irradiated", and they would sprout and grow just fine, several years after buying them. I.e. they are still technically alive, and can stay as such for many years, which is just amazing life resilience.

That said,

> ...except that as these organisms are simpler than seeds...

I wouldn't say any animal that can move around to be simpler than seeds. IMHO by any definition animals are a big jump up in complexity over plants.