This is what Tesla does. Elon Musk has been selling FSD for more than 10 years and a huge chunk of Teslas have computers too old to run the current best model, which IIRC is already transformer-based.

Because having to offer upgrades to so many cars is expensive, Tesla puts a distilled model on older cars that performs worse and has no redundancy.

Time will tell if he can get away with this (hopefully not) but you are describing a system that's near-L4 and already exists today.

You need a fairly modern laptop to change the screen refresh rate like you're describing. Older laptops do 60Hz (or whatever) refreshes at all times, they can't change refresh rates like that. The compositor should only paint relevant pixels on the screen.

I'm sure that some spinners are horrible and peg the CPU, but unless your machine is older than ~2018 there is something wrong with your setup if spinners (and not intense operations behind them) cause your battery to suffer.

I'm not describing anything about screen refresh rates, which I'm pretty sure are 60 Hz on my laptop even when the CPU+GPU are at 0% and don't draw anything. Compute != monitor refresh.

Compositing is fast and energy efficient. The screen should not be doing a full refresh of the entire display for an isolated change.

The problem is not that these lawsuits are being won by plaintiffs but rather that the sheer volume of lawsuits can increase prices a ton.

This is why a new 1500lb Cessna has the same starting price as a house. When things fly, the liability laws get much more onerous.

Obviously it bothers employees to have to deal with abuse. It's crazy to suggest otherwise, nobody likes being yelled at.

IMO this rule is not good but there is a trade-off being made either way.

It is unfortunately true. Sr/Staff making a tech salary outearns all but the most specialized doctors. Even if you exclude FAANG that's true (other companies have to offer FAANG salaries to get FAANG talent).

You have to be living in a VHCOL to get that, but if you make >$300k TC you are outearning most doctors.

> You have to be living in a VHCOL to get that, but if you make >$300k TC you are outearning most doctors.

Damn really? Years ago I saw a post of someone asking for advice. They had been offered two positions on in SF at ~$500,000 another in Minnesota at $300,000. Granted they were an anesthesiologist, but a few years back I met a doctor in a bar (lol) and they were telling me you can clear half a million as a GP if you're willing to work in rural states with a big shortage.

ER docs, of whom I know many in my town, with a median city household income of $79K, median home price of $529K, are all in a range of $300-500K. Anesthesiology, $600K+.

> Anesthesiology, $600K+. Good $DEITY. To me that one number explains the entire state of the USA's health system. An anaesthesiologist is a life and death job, but it isn't a complex one compared to say an air traffic controller. In a competitive market, the amount paid to both wouldn't be too much different.

There must be one mother of a guild protecting anaesthesiologists supply in the USA. Where I live, the governments (ie the people who are supposed to represent the other 99.999% of people who aren't anaesthesiologists) ruthlessly crush such behaviour in any profession that lets it become a real problem. We've fired most airline pilots and imported them, live without electricity for a while, imported doctors from anywhere and everywhere until the medical admission boards got the hint.

The USA really needs to get itself a decent democracy, where the pollies actually represent the people who elected them.

Very few software engineers make more than $300k a year. That's top ~1%.

Volatility is a natural consequence of weather, blight, etc., etc.

To reduce volatility you would need to actually stabilize the supply of onions.

What futures do is allow traders to shift risk from the future to the present. By pricing that risk, it's possible for people who depend on onions to pay a little more now in exchange for a guarantee about the future.

It's not magically going to make onions less volatile (although high risk prices can spur investment which might) but it can reduce disruptions caused by volatility.

The classic example of this is futures on jet fuel which allow airlines to weather random wars in the middle east, OPEC shenanigans, etc. Ticket prices are higher this way, but the existential threat of being forced to cancel a bunch of flights is gone.

Oh you’re talking supply volatility, where most of us are talking price volatility.

As long as demand remains inelastic, the two are the same.

If there is a supply shortage prices will rise; no amount of futures trading can create resources out of thin air.

> It wouldn't bum me out so much but it clearly does nothing but hinder progress

I don't know if this is true. Lots of this stuff is inherently expensive - clinical trials, research into vast numbers of compounds, and then mass-producing the drug are all things that cannot be feasibly done without at least millions of dollars.

The US and China are the current world leaders in biotech, and it's because both of them have massive infrastructure to funnel billions of dollars into research.

Yeah, the IP law could be reformed (I am a big believer in reducing IP protections in general) but the truth is that SOME FORM of protection is necessary to convince people with money to fund this kind of research. The government is simply not capable of this level of spending for such uncertain rewards; it doesn't have the proper incentives to recognize and promote good research while defunding useless research.

I would hate to live in a world where questions of "legal or illegal" are "impossible to define."

A US citizen cannot be denied entry into the country for ANY reason. A valid US passport is prima facie evidence of citizenship so once you show it the worst that can happen is you getting arrested.

That's the theoretical worst that should happen. The theoretical worst that could happen is far worse than that.

I remember reading about narrow exceptions, but a quick search suggests I was mistaken.

Aircraft can already receive traffic and weather information over ADS-B. Larger or more modern aircraft even have onboard collision avoidance systems that supersede ATC when necessary and also carry weather radars themselves.

Additionally, there are human factors to consider. One commonly read-out piece of data is the local altimeter setting which ensures that all aircraft under the control of the same facility have a common reference - you generally don't set your altimeter to the area you're in, but rather to the setting of where you're going. Airplanes already automatically receive that data, but selecting the exact setting requires manual intervention for precisely this reason.

Add in the need to allow older airplanes to keep flying, the need to be robust to signal jamming, and the inherent safety issues with packing an airplane full of gas and hundreds of people, and it quickly becomes clear that full automation is inadvisable.