William Sears

@SawyerMerritt Elon’s assets are stock, not cash piles. Meanwhile, Elon's companies are creating value for society. Gates and MacKenzie Scott demonstrate: massive good intentions don’t ensure good outcomes. Effective large-scale philanthropy is difficult. Forbes misses that point.

Accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy is pretty philanthropic. Giving low income/rural or disaster/storm hit areas access to high-speed internet via Starlink is pretty philanthropic. Giving disabled people the ability to control computers & robotic arms with their thoughts is pretty philanthropic. @elonmusk's companies are doing more to improve quality of human life than any "charitable" giving from any other billionaire on that list.

@davepl1968 Sodium vapor lamps are desirable for astronomers because the light is concentrated in two close wavelengths making it relatively easy to filter.

I'm old enough to remember before cities had a sodium glow and everything looked like a Michael Mann film. You don't want yellow. You don't want blue. You want 2700K. [ Technically, the human eye is more sensitive to red, I get that, I'm talking aesthetics, not energy consumption ].

@MarkChangizi Framing is everything, as your post demonstrates.

— The Suicide Button — No need for a Red button at all. Just have a single (Blue) button labeled, “Press me to commit suicide by midnight.” And then in fine print it says, “Guaranteed to work unless more than 50% of humans end up pressing their button.” Are you suggesting it’s now selfish to not press the button? Because that’s exactly the Red button answer in the equivalent Res/Blue button case.

@peterrhague If you believe that everyone understands game theory and will confidently pick the Nash optimum, then you (and everyone else) picks red. Otherwise, if you are confident that most people don't feel that way, you pick blue to save everyone. Difficult choice really.

Amazing how lots of self appointed game theory experts confidently asserting that blue is the stupid choice. But every time this poll is run blue wins. Not only is the “game theory” answer predicting the wrong outcome, its explanatory power is based on it being able to predict the right answer. So it’s doubly wrong.

@waitbutwhy This isn’t classic prisoner’s dilemma. Everyone should press red here—that way everyone survives and takes no risk.

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

@JonBbC_TechGeek AI4 hardware should have a longer useful lifetime if it's sufficient for unsupervised driving. My experience suggests it is likely, with most of my interventions coming from map quality and lack of training to avoid car damage from following trucks on highways.

Let’s be honest. AI4 is cooked. Back in 2019 and 2020, people raved about HW3 in a very similar way, and it was hyped even more than AI4 (by Elon and Tesla). Based on history, the maximum life cycle for a computer like this is 4 years. Guess what? AI4 is approaching the end of its lifecycle. I know this is a hard pill to swallow, and I know this post could have a negative impact on Tesla in the short run due to the Osborne Effect, but it makes literally zero sense to buy an AI4 car right now. The only exception that’s possibly valid is if you can afford TWO new cars in the next 2-3 years. In that case, knock yourself out! You totally deserve it.

@wholemars I do it once a year. It's pretty seamless for me except for moving my 2FA credentials. There is a security vs. convenience tradeoff here.

Apple is losing billions of years to their data transfer process. People don't want to buy a new phone because setting it up is so much work. Needs to be a dead simple perfect transfer, no need to log into everything again, and you can start using the new phone right away.

@RichardHanania AI is a force multiplier. It’s a critic and fact-checker that sharpens your logic. A tool for developing and transmitting ideas—not to replace thinking, but to refine it. It should be used to think and communicate mire clearly.

Will AI degrade thinking skills? I see no reason why it has to. Judging what AI tells you still requires thinking skills. If you care about that, you have more tools to get things right. If you don't care, it doesn't matter anyway. richardhanania.com/p/bring-on-the…

@TB1Kinobe I'd love to hear a deeper understanding about what you regret now? The environment this creates? The aesthetics? Something about the homes themselves? So many possibilities.

25 years ago after engineering school I was involved in a residential construction project where speed was the focus. I did not know the scale or how widespread it would get. None of us did We were young. I have been out of it for over 10 years now with the deepest regrets of contributing to this process at a high level. I don't care if anyone sees this or even gets one like I just wanted to say I'm sorry.

@airmainengineer I would never question a pilot's decision to go around, but from this vantage point it looked like the traffic conflict wouldn't prevent a safe landing. Could have been a a crosswind issue as well. The separation certainly didn't look right to me.

Would you land in this case?

@MormonNational @BrainyMarsupial @SteveStuWill Nall data shows weather is implicated in roughly 25% of all fatal accidents. But loss of control fatal accidents are more common.

@wlmsears @BrainyMarsupial @SteveStuWill Most accidents are from flying in weather you shouldn't fly in If you actually listen to the weather report then single engine planes are safer than cars.

“A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying. A person who took a 500 mile flight every day for a year would have a fatality risk of 1 in 85,000.” stevestewartwilliams.com/p/love-blindne…

@BrainyMarsupial @SteveStuWill Hate to admit it, but you are correct. Average fatality rate might put it around a third of motorcycle risk, and much higher than cars. In favor of small planes: A pilot has more control over these risks than a motorcycle rider, and serious injury risk is lower.

@SteveStuWill Private planes aren't included on this list but they would be second.

@preston_holland Why, say compared to a PC-12 or small jet?

Hacker Golf’s favorite airplane: The King Air.

@arundsharma @lemire Rust's type abstractions are considerably more powerful and flexible than the ones provided by conventional object-oriented languages."

@wlmsears @lemire Rust has a strong anti-OOP stance that feels unnecessary. You can be pro-ECS without being anti-OOP.

@arundsharma @lemire This one is better. As you noted, Rust can reasonably be viewed as descending from C++. One of C++'s most important contributions—object lifetimes—is featured prominently in Rust.

@lemire Prompt: Make an infographic showing the following languages and their relations: C, C++, C#, Java, Swift, Go, Rust, Zig Also include ML and Lisp.

@ronsterd89 I punched quite a few of these in the 1960s. It is one line of a Fortran program. That how programmers used to enter their code.

My grandson found this in a textbook we bought at Halfprice Books. He asked me if this is “what library cards looked like”, but I actually don’t know what it might be from. Any clue? There is nothing on the back.

@IvanJaros @igor_os777 I am still a fan of single character arguments.

Unix’s tar command—short for “tape archive”—is infamous for confusing rookies who’ve never touched a magnetic tape cartridge. Even today, countless newbies naively run tar commands with odd flags, having no idea they’re emulating ancient, spool-driven tape archives from a bygone computing era. Ask a fresh sysadmin about tapes, and they’ll stare blankly. Yet their fingers instinctively type tar xvf, carrying forward a fossilized command structure—like mechanical muscle-memory left behind by generations of now-retired Unix greybeards.

@thetripathi58 Having lived through these eras, this feels pretty accurate to me. The foundational skills built in the Dot-Com era have proven durable. Specific knowledge of tools and APIs will be less and less valuable.

I asked Claude which era of tech workers faced the most brutal market conditions, and who actually had the hardest path to building real wealth in their lifetime: - The Dot-Com Pioneers (1995-2001) - The Web 2.0 Builders (2004-2010) - The Mobile App Gold Rush (2010-2016) - The SaaS Boom (2016-2021) - The AI Pivot (2022-Present) And this is what Claude concluded

@kareem_carr It's a huge productivity enhancer. For simple, non-critical stuff like tools and test programs Claude is writing almost all of it. I then use a co-pilot to review the code. For critical production code, we're not quite there yet. I use it for idea generation and API reference.

I keep hearing that software engineers don’t write much code anymore and it’s mostly AI now. Can any software engineers confirm how true this is? Do you just drink coffee and watch Claude code all day now?

@DrKnowItAll16 He has a point. I never got to the point where I could put up with traffic without feeling stressed. A benefit of FSD that makes it worth every penny.

Hayden came home from his first drive through Atlanta on his own today. He was irate and said he couldn’t believe anyone would ever put up with the traffic. I said, welcome to adulthood, my son.