> what other possible explanation is there for someone putting a PIN visible on their phone that wipes it while crossing a border?

Two obvious answers:

1. It's for the general case of lost/stolen phone.

2. It's for the owner. I can't remember numbers I don't type in, might as well keep it visible on the device.

No because they used that point to say they have sympathy for the idea of innovating aircraft.

They are not saying "hold my beer while I put the industry to rights!"

I don't see how having a marginal amount of single-engine aviation flight experience is relevant to Dunning-Kruger.

If anything, it's taught me how little I know about "real flying" compared to CFD and systems engineering.

Commercial aviation is conservative because aviation is "hard" and mistakes in aviation are "extremely costly".

It's a lot like saying, "as someone 5 hours into driver's ed in my mom's honda civic, I believe that future stability control algorithms in self-driving cars..."

Or the difference between a (noob) software user and a software engineer.

No. I'm, in essence, saying the opposite. To use your analogy "as someone with 5 hours into driver's ed in my mom's civic I now realize how hard driving actually is and why ALL cars still have 4 wheels, still use a steering wheel, and still have seat-belts".

People with a handful of hours towards a private pilot's license have no (zero, zip, nada) expertise or insight when it comes to the design and manufacture of commercial airliners. You might feel like you do, but it has no basis in fact, because the constraints that really matter are things that engineers have spent a hundred years working out by trial and error (and crashing a lot of aircraft).

We wouldn't take airliner design advice today from the Wright brothers, either.

When I worked in flight test you realize how much pilots don't know anything. It's exactly like a car driver vs. automotive engineer.

That's not what your original comment says at all. You're pontificating on future aircraft configurations while you're just learning the ABC's of being an enduser of said products. Being a learning pilot confers zero expertise on conceptual design. It probably gives you less expertise than being a longtime aviation journalist like Bill Sweetman.

No, it's not. They're saying "as someone with a small amount of insider experience, even I can see how everything is super conservative and no one wants to innovate".

> There's a reason all modern silo based (and submarine) ICBMs are solids.

Believe it or not, here in 2026, this is incorrect!

Those crazy Russians:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-29RMU_Sineva

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-29RMU2_Lajner

UDMH + nitrogen tetroxide.

I would not want to be a Russian submariner. For all sorts of reasons.

To be fair, while these missiles are still in service they're obsolete and are slated for retirement the coming decade.

The most recent started service in 2014. They may in fact be obsolete but not because they are old by soviet standards.

1.5M civilians already live in Bahrain. This usage makes the term "war zone" meaningless.

Taiwan has been self governing for longer than almost everyone that lives there has been alive. It's also a vibrant democracy.

If you care about democracy and human rights, it's morally reprehensible NOT to support Taiwan. We can debate the ethics of intervening in strongman dictatorships like Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran, but Taiwan is clear.

Cool, and it's morally reprehensible to NOT support drastic action to curb the worst effects of climate change, and start trying our very best to prepare our children and grandchildren for an adulthood where they will be clawing back minor things we take for granted even in today's world of regular continent spanning forest fire smoke pollution.

> 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

The question is really whether 640k is enough to last you until your next hardware upgrade.

OP's take seems to be unfairly critical. I wasn't at the MIT or Georgia Tech lectures (Gene Ray spoke once at each) but it sounds like the audience was pretty respectful, all things considered. He was given uninterrupted time to explain his ideas, then question and answer. No shouting.

Ray didn't convince anyone. No surprise. But he apparently wrote to someone "They treated me like Einstein" so it can't have been too unpleasant.

A quote from the Georgia Tech student paper, from a participant: "I’m glad we live in a society where people like Gene Ray are not locked up and beaten, but instead respected in their own way."

Honestly it sounds like the best possible case for someone with seriously nutty ideas (and possibly some mental illness). Bit of a modern day Emperor Norton. The rationalists did ok here.

I'm not even sure it was the rationalists, just ordinary MIT/Georgia Tech students. But my understanding (I wasn't there obviously) is like you say that Gene Ray was not invited to speak so he could be easily humiliated by people larping the superior intellects, but instead treated with curiosity and respect even if it was clear like you say that his ideas were a little bit mad. Tbh I think people were just fascinated to find someone with such outlandish ideas who was so entirely caught up with their own creation.

So I think the author is maybe overreacting in that one. The rest, what he says about "rationalists" going after flat earthers and intelligent designers etc with a list of logical fallacies at hand, for sport, that's very true.

You seem to be banging on a stereotype. Yudkowsky doesn't speak for everyone (not even everyone on lesswrong) and AI safety/paranoia is an incredibly polarizing issue.

There's a loosely structured community of people who self-identify as "rationalist". There are some general themes of belief but no coherent platform, per-se. Some of them are nutjobs. Maybe at an elevated rate from general society, but not dramatically so.

People can and will use LLMs to curate the training data for the next generation. I expect they already do.