64
points
sseagull
Joined 2,222 karma
- > a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all the way to the ground.
There’s probably a lot that match, but sounds like Colgan Air 3407 in 2009 (the last major commercial airline crash in the US before the mid-air collision earlier this year in DC)
- I went there and saw two hairs, and yeah thought it was a nice funny touch.
I then went back to HN and turns out one of the hairs was real and I needed to clean my laptop screen :)
- That’s starting to change though
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-31/meta-xai-...
(Archive link: https://archive.ph/NBNEu)
- OpenAI "spent" more on sales/marketing and equity compensation than that:
"Other significant costs included $2 billion spent on sales and marketing, nearly doubling what OpenAI spent on sales and marketing in all of 2024. Though not a cash expense, OpenAI also spent nearly $2.5 billion on stock-based equity compensation in the first six months of 2025"
("spent" because the equity is not cash-based)
- I’ve always found the pioneer, settler, town planner model to be a great way of thinking about this. Successful, long-term projects or organizations eventually can use all 3 types.
Maybe vibe coding replaces some pioneering work, but that still leaves a lot for settlers to do.
(I admit I’m generally in the settler category)
https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...
- This made an impression on me:
https://www.spend-elon-fortune.com/
Buying all this stuff that seems expensive, but then seeing that it barely makes a dent in a truly wealthy person’s fortune.
Of course, he wants even more…
- I'm somewhat split on this issue.
We already do have different kinds of organizations. We have "research universities" (R1 or R2) that give out PhDs and are somewhat like you describe. And then we have Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs) that focus more on education.
The risk you can run into is that dedicated education institutions can fall behind current trends, especially in fast-moving areas like tech. Sometimes the best educators are those that "practice what they preach", and you begin to lose that if you stick them in classrooms all day.
On the other hand, some of the best researchers are terrible teachers, especially those who don't really care about it and just want to focus on bringing in funding.
I think the split you have could work, however there must be a lot of incentive for cross-pollination of some sort, or else the teaching side isn't preparing students enough for the research (or industry) side.
- I think the key part is "spirit" of the 1st amendment.
A better way to put it is that even if the 1st amendment doesn't apply, it's still against the ideal of "free speech"
- > You can still buy the console that can read physical games and buy the physical games and never plug it on the internet, right?
I'm not positive this is possible. I seem to remember times when trying to play a newer game on the Switch required a system update, even though I had the physical card. I might be misremembering, though.
- Spot on, but this in particular
> people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare
For some reason I don't see this mentioned as often, but I've always felt it a significant root cause (among many of course).
Childcare is really expensive, but it used to be "free". I grew up with grandparents/aunts/uncles/older cousins available to baby sit me. But now very much of my cohort have moved away from our home region for better jobs. My nearest family is a 4 hour drive away.
Combine this with a strong individuality streak (less reliance on neighbors and community) and you have to turn to very expensive childcare.
Raising children without that support is very daunting, at least to me.
- As a high school teacher would say:
“The good Lord gave you two eyes, two ears, but only one mouth”
- Not in Rust, but I've seen it with Python in scientific computing. Someone needs to do some minor matrix math, so they install numpy. Numpy isn't so bad, but if installing it via conda it pulls in MKL, which sits at 171MB right now (although I have memories of it being bigger in the past). It also pulls in intel-openmp, which is 17MB.
Just so you can multiply matrices or something.
- 29 points
- > that indirect rates being cut to 15% for Dept. of Energy grants
I've got some bad news - NSF basically announced the same thing today
- 8 points
- As if review timelines aren't already way too long. I'm currently waiting 9 months for a small $250k grant (edit: waiting to hear if I've even gotten it. I barely remember what the proposal was about now).
I can tell you most scientists are just trying to do their jobs, studying hard stuff. Unfortunately, we do not really have the resources to fight anything.
Tough situation, and lots of scientists are pretty frightened. Many junior scientists (myself included) are looking at leaving the country.
- Theoretically, if you can make Trump happy and show you are on his side, Trump could make that case disappear.
Or, more realistically, Trump will still screw them over anyway, scorpion & frog style.
Large companies are bending over backwards to curry favor with Trump (see Meta settling and paying millions on a case they were winning and almost certainly would win).
- “There are reports of Musk staffers on the CDC campus today, and yesterday an NSF official said at an internal meeting that the agency is apparently planning to lay off up to half its staff over the next two months.”
This country is completely turning its back on science and education and there is basically nothing that can be done right now. It’s very depressing.
Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.