shadowgovt
The vertical speed of the plane alone at last reported speed indication exceeds the speed of neuron transmission along myelated nerve tissue. This impact event is mechanically impossible to feel.
You can see the macroscopic deformation fail to transit the body of the impacting object with enough speed to make gross deformation happen as it collides. The front of the rocket body is literally turning to a vapor at the impact site, and the tail assembly is 100% fine.
I don't intend to listen to the audio. Second-hand, it sounds as though they did absolutely everything they could after hitting the cell, and the only way to have avoided this whole situation was "Don't fly that route that day."
... a problem that, in general, we see more often in private-jet and single-engine aviation than commercial-carrier aviation. Far more incentives to make a really, really bad call... And when the bad call happens, the Venn diagram of victims and responsible parties tends to have a lot more overlap, so there's, practically speaking, fewer consequences to discourage such bad decisionmaking in the future (can't meaningfully punish the dead, and the dead can't learn from experience what a bad call "smells" like on the lead-up to it).
In this case though, it sounds like the icing was much worse than they thought and fatally compromised the aerodynamics of the wings, and then the overspeed would have torn at the wings and fuselage... In that circumstance, you're no longer flying a plane, you're riding a javelin.
Training would generally still encourage the pilots to apply power; in the worst-case scenario (here), failing to apply power would not have made the crash survivably slower, so the sum total of best bad actions is still "Apply power and hope you're not in the worst-case scenario."
But yes, that's a lot of kinetic mass dead-stopping on a hard surface and 1 to 2 kiloliters of jet fuel.
It's every performer in the episode hitting on all cylinders on a script that is doing what science fiction is for.
ETA: Having poked at it a bit, I have just learned that Morgan Gendel and Peter Allen Fields shared a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation for that script... The first time a Star Trek script won a Hugo since the previous award to Harlan Ellison for the script for City on the Edge of Forever. Nice to know there's a semi-objective metric by which the episodes are already rated as equivalently impactful.
Human beings have lived for tens of thousands of years in communities where the work was "being alive" and the large task was "being human." People in medieval villages had friends and loved ones in spite of being illiterate and only having subsistence skills.
If anything, hyper-specialized labor and the divorcing of geographic proximity from the tasks people undertake have been undermining this traditional modality of living. I would anticipate in the absence of those pressures it might very well come back.
I might agree that it's possible the pressure to form cities goes down, though the author seems guilty of the Singularity thinking of just assuming the super-smart AI magically solves the logistics, transportation, and energy challenges in a way that distributes people... Not impossible, but I think a bit unlikely. If it happens though, there would be advantages... Cities are relative hotbeds of human-transmitted disease, even with modern hygiene and vaccination, and spreading us out a bit could actually make us healthier on average (... maybe. Unless the magic AI doesn't actually solve the logistics issue and non-proximity to a population center implies lack of access to resources or the skilled hands of people the robots haven't replaced yet).
Enterprises actively do not want Cloud provider's services distinguished by anything other than speed, cost, and reliability, because features imply lock-in. They'd rather have someone else's computer as bare-metal and run features atop that.
That's a recipe for racing to the bottom in the cloud space against the other providers, where the wins are very raw: what hardware did you predict two years ago you needed today, what breakthroughs in information structuring have your competitors not yet implemented in their own clouds, etc.
It's raw capitalistic competition, and that's good for consumers... But companies don't want that because it's a path to net-neutral revenue in the long-term, which is not how you put your stock on the moon.
This isn't Google search diminishing; Google is serving more search results this year. This is their other ventures catching up to their oldest one.
I remember 10 years ago that Google was extremely paranoid about having the whole company propped up on one revenue tent-pole.
US immigration policy used to be simply... Less. You could pretty much come and go as you please along the southern border. So people did, and therefore there were simply fewer issues because folks didn't feel the need to "sneak in," not when getting in and out of the country was as easy as a day-pass. People would live in Mexico and work a job in a border city.
The tightening of the rules began in (if I recall correctly) the '80s, and with it the actual crisis; if you could come and go as you please, it was no issue to live in Mexico, but people, when forced to choose, stayed where the economic productivity was.
To meet the unrealistic (practically, per resources) targets for arrest and deportation that the administration set for itself, they greatly loosened the training constraints and qualifications for new ICE agents.
Analogies to the German Sturmabteilung of the '20s and '30s are not entirely inaccurate.
One is that America is exceptional. It's a huge country with massive wealth, resources, and land. It fundamentally lacks the back-pressures that some other countries have against immigration - in fact, it currently has a declining birthrate amongst its native populace and needs labor-age people to backstop an economic inversion.
The other, regarding ICE specifically, is simple trust. People know that the executive branch is, at this time, extremely white-supremacist-adjacent if not just actual white supremacists (Stephen Miller is currently the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), so any claimed purpose for immigration crackdowns is fighting an uphill battle against the presumption that (a) the actual reason is racial segregation (you'll note a disproportionate enforcement on Latinos as opposed to native Germans or Italians or Slovakians) and (b) this administration will not treat people in its care humanely (because they don't follow rules as a general principle).
(a) is the larger "national identity" issue that makes it difficult to build a coherent national immigration policy (because even some good ideas meet an uphill battle against "Does that stop us from serving as the keepers of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?"). But what you're likely observing is (b); American intelligentsia is looking at current events out their window and hearing the echoes of clergy in Europe before and during World War II reading from the book of Exodus and asking their congregation "Who are today's midwives?"
A critical mass of people pushing back against fascism leave a country, and that country tends to devolve into the kind of place that starts wars with its neighbors.
This is why I always turn my head and squint at Americans fleeing to Canada, as if an America that fully embraced everything they see it doing wouldn't come right after Canada next.
We never had the right to tell the future what to do. That was never part of the deal. We barely have the right to tell other people what to do with the ideas we breathe into the world, and that right was only carved into the US Constitution (and English common law before it) because it was believed that it heavily incentivized creating more ideas.
In the era where information flows as freely as it does... I'm not even sure that incentive works the way it was intended to anymore.
When I'm thinking about this, I usually flip the script: why should Disney have the right to tell everyone what they're allowed to do and not do with a picture and audio of a cartoon mouse for a person's actual entire life?
Sadly, we'll never know.
... Which, if enforced vigorously, means new raw AI can only be trained by those who can afford the raw material.
The Court just handed Anthropic and other VC-backed AI projects a significant moat.
His thinking is quite simple on this... There's absolutely nothing he could do, practically, to prevent you from feeding the questions straight to an AI and having it kick out the answers. But since this is a self-taught, self-selected course... His advice is to not do that until you get well and truly stuck, and only then will you have enough attempts built up to compare to the answer to understand the concept you're missing.
I think it's a decent middle ground for an online published self taught course. But I don't know that such an approach works in terms of, say, a Carnegie Mellon University being able to continue to charge the tuition it does for the courses that aren't self-taught.
One could argue that this is just more layers of LLM, but at the end of that argument is the observation that a 2-layer neural network with a nonlinear transform between the layers is a universal function; yes, but nobody does that because it's unrealistic to do so.
However, it's good to keep perspective here. We don't know enough about what consciousness or reason (inside our own brains) really are to make claims that LLMs do those things.
One could, perhaps, make the case that the inherent randomness in the LLM algorithm makes it a fundamentally different thing than an expert system.
... but we've had Monte Carlo analysis as a tool for ages too.
I'm not sure we promote the thing to "not a tool" by gluing a Monte Carlo algorithm onto an expert system.
To take a big step back from the LLM question and look at a similar space that perhaps sheds light on the question...
A lot of chip design these days involves a step where the desired circuit is described in a goals-and-constraints-oriented language and then fed to a layout algoirthm that is semi-deterministic and attempts to solve the optimization function based on specified goals (like fabrication cost, size, or power consumption).
The output of this process is a chip you can fab. The process is random (it's an important industry-standard step to capture the input seed, because if the chip ends up in something audited and the auditing firm needs to know how the chip was made, it's not good enough to shrug and say "Enh, we rolled some dice," they need the layout schema deterministically reproducible too).
I don't, generally, think anyone considers the fact we use these in the hardware space to be anything but using yet another tool. It's a tool that searches a solutions domain much faster than a human could doing something not too dissimilar from what a human would do (with perhaps a little human intuition thrown on the top to avoid obviously-pessimistic branches of exploration, but you can bake those shortcuts into the tool also).
If you don't know if you can hot-swap your certs, you probably can't.