Fruit flies like a banana

Efficiency schmischiency. I see your 3% and raise you the abolition of SUVs.

I see your motor-brush maintenance burden with my washer fluid, tyres, brakes, seals bearings bulbs filters etc etc. Then I raise you control modules that send your car to three garages and the scrapyard. Cars have wear items, you heard it here first.

Anecdata: I implement most of my behaviours on a kilo of fatty meat and neurotransmitters. It's not a great stack; it has a massive attack surface. It's also orchestrated by an endocrine layer, which is precisely the wrong way round.

I didn't select this architecture, I was instantiated with it, and there isn't a nice migration path.

Zaibatsus - Meta, Condé Nast - outgun me and my biological peers by many orders of magnitude. They can attack vulns that should have been patched in the Precambrian, they have research departments, and they can A/B on millions. We're lambs to the slaughter.

Brain modules cannot be unloaded, so if you were compiled with `addictable=on` then you have no defence-in-depth against an entire class of attacks. If they get through the gate, they have a good chance at persistence.

Hth you understand the difficulties faced by bio-organism admins.

Otherwise, 110MB would hint at a fascinating engineering culture at the motherboard manufacturer.

But ysk your reasoning is circular. They wouldn't have held a second ref because they're bad, they're bad because they wouldn't have held a second ref.

The existence of Remain MPs is immaterial because the governing party purged all the seniors and whipped the rest.

We left with no deal. Legislation, my arse.

> pathetic

Oh dear

If you mean Versailles, there was a little kerfuffle leading up to that, called WWI.

You're allowed to think that Lisbon warranted referenda in the member states, but it's a minority opinion.

On Brexit, you should question your sources:

> in the three years that followed everything possible was done to reverse the decision.

This is a disingenuous use of the passive voice. Lots of _Remain voters_ did everything possible - i.e. tweets and marches. The government didn't take a blind bit of notice.

The government triggered Article 50 and then called a snap election - a damming order of events. They rammed it through.

> A majority of the British people voted to leave

Not by a mile, lol. The turnout was 37% and the result was 52% leave. Less than 20% of the electorate voted Leave.

Weakest mandate since the hung parliament of 1912, which only lasted a few months.

The electoral reform ref of 2010 got a 60% turnout. For the status quo. On a fringe issue. 37% is pathetic.

However. Culture war tropes get posted in even the most abstract discussion, so banning top-level posts won't keep it out.

Furthermore, technology is inherently political to the degree that it is transformative. The Facebook algorithm was always political, it just took time for that to become apparent. I'm trying to illustrate another kind of toxicity, that of engineering archetypes refusing to consider the political impact of their engineering decisions. Technologists in transformative fields should not be putting their heads in the sand. I don't want HN to devolve to red/green political rage, but there are political discussions that belong here.

Lastly, social sciences may well be dismal, but they can still illuminate, and politics is a valid subject of study. This site is predicated on curiosity, and areas of politics are on topic for that. Humanity is a system that bears analysis and can even be engineered.

Engineer archetypes hate politics and refuse to think about it. For most engineering, there is negligible political dimension. But culturally-transformative technology is inherently political to the degree it's transformative. Altman recognises this.

He is working towards a social goal, and attracting support to achieve it. Yes, he is a political leader.

I'm fumbling at the concept of a library surface not being self-describing but I suspect I lack some concepts; does this thought lead anywhere? Can anyone give me a clue?

Humans are sapient; industrialists and politicians have intent. But the incentive structure is an evolved system, and that's what selects these people. The result is that humanity, collectively, is amoebic. We are probably doomed to expand until we have a population crash or until another species arises to keep us in check.

Have you experienced that failure mode yourself? How alarming was it? Do you think it's a reasonable trade-off for the benefits?

I put this less strongly since boeing contracted MBA cancer and yolo'd the 737-max, but that aside, the civil aviation engineering field controls risks to a fault. Commercial pilots are selected to follow checklists without deviation. I allow them the grace to implement steer-by-wire.

Ford kept selling Pintos with exploding fuel tanks, Toyota sold priuses with runaway acceleration defects, and depending on region maybe the worst twenty per cent of drivers ought to be operating nothing more dangerous than shirt buttons. No matter how good the plan is, those people shouldn't be anywhere near it.

To condense that, i might use a phrase like "blind-buying future option space"

Whether Musk deserves that credit is a moot point. I haven't trusted a thing he's said for years, and studying him for revealed intent can't get past "clown on drugs" without violating occam's razor.