throwaway287391

> The busses lock down with a PIN when they get out of the seat (generated that morning at the depot) so you can't take it out of neutral anyways to try to steal it.

Huh, it would never have occurred to me to raise the objection "but someone could steal the bus while the driver is in the bathroom!" Why does the bus need to stay in neutral with a special system of daily rotating PINs, rather than having the driver take their key to the bathroom with them?

> Donald Trump Jr. Got A Kalshi Stake For Free— Now It Could Be Worth Billions As Prediction Market Platform Eyes $40 Billion Valuation

> Kalshi handed him equity worth roughly $300,000 when he joined as a strategic adviser in early 2025. ... Kalshi granted him the stake when the company was valued at under $2 billion — less than a tenth of its $22 billion valuation in a funding round last month ...

Um, how does a $300K stake at an "under $2 billion" valuation become "worth billions" with a 10-50x valuation increase?

(Disclaimer: I'm not defending the Trump family in any way, the administration has been absurdly and blatantly corrupt.)

> You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.

Could you explain this? I understand that for things like emissions regulations on cars, where it’s very expensive to invest R&D and production capacity into different SKUs for different markets. I can’t see why it would help in other markets in this case though (beyond potentially inspiring similar regulations elsewhere).

A bunch of these appear to be 9x9-ish? (B, P, Q, R, Z, 0, most of the non-alphanumerics...)

I really doubt it's that, as opposed to the maintenance cost of an extra flow to a boarding pass. Or perhaps just a perceived complexity/annoyance cost when something breaks in the desktop flow here and there.

I'd think it's only maybe 5-10% of customers at most who both use desktop over mobile to get their boarding pass and use an ad-blocker on desktop. And honestly I don't remember ever seeing an ad (even on Ryanair) when getting my boarding pass on mobile. OTOH I distinctly remember seeing many giant ads on printed boarding passes, most often on printed boarding passes brandished by other customers (usually printed in full color!). I'd think that's hugely more valuable as advertising real estate than the iota of additional data they get to collect on a few adblock users who have been forced to use mobile.

I guess it may be because I've only had a US passport but have primarily taken Ryanair to fly between the UK (where I live) and elsewhere in Europe, which is potentially an edge case they don't care to handle well. I recently gained UK citizenship / a passport so perhaps this will get easier for me going forward.

Either way, I stand by my main complaint about Ryanair letting late arrivers jump the queue even if I only have to "suffer" from it when I'm checking bags.

"99.9% of our passengers don't break the rules, they don't get penalised. The 0.1% of the guys who delay the boarding process, the guys who are there delaying the departure of the aircraft because their bag doesn't fit in the overhead (cabin), they are going to pay and we're going to eliminate them."

Somehow I doubt the compliance rate is anywhere near 99.9% -- that's roughly 1 passenger breaking the rules every 5 flights? Would they really be investing so much (including having the CEO spend time on air to rant) in catching the delinquents if that's the scale of the problem?

As someone who mostly follows the rules, the thing that really bothers me about Ryanair and the like are, I'll get to the airport at least 2 hours early as I'm supposed to, and then there'll be a massive hour+ long check-in queue (which I have to wait in just to show my passport, even if I'm not checking bags, since online check in never seems to work when I need to enter passport info), and all the while they'll have staff shouting "Anyone going to <destination of flight that closes boarding in 20-30 minutes>?" and shepherding those passengers to the front of the queue. It irritates me to no end -- why the hell should I bother arriving early if I'm just going to be punished with a longer wait for it?

> But obviously in hindsight, it was the most expensive mistake I've made in my life.

Maybe a tiresome pedantic response, but this is only a "mistake" to the same extent that it was a mistake for [everyone in the world who had the required funds] not to buy 100 BTC in 2015. If you can overcome the cognitive biases (endowment effect, loss aversion, etc.), the fact that you previously owned the 100 BTC has no real bearing on the situation, beyond transaction fees and a couple hours max saved by holding (doing nothing) vs. buying.

That's kind of expected for a research intern -- internships are most commonly done within 1-2 years before graduation. But in any case, the fact that the first author is an intern is just the cherry on top for me -- my comment would be the same modulo the "especially" remark if all the authors were full time research staff.

As someone who used to write academic ML papers, it's funny to me that people are treating this academic style paper written by a few Apple researchers as Apple's official company-wide stance, especially given the first author was an intern.

I suppose it's "fair" since it's published on the Apple website with the authors' Apple affiliations, but historically speaking, at least in ML where publication is relatively fast-paced and low-overhead, academic papers by small teams of individual researchers have in no way reflected the opinions of e.g. the executives of a large company. I would not be particularly surprised to see another team of Apple researchers publishing a paper in the coming weeks with the opposite take, for example.

"There's nothing to prevent any state from funding the universities in their states."

I would've thought one major issue is that a much larger chunk of tax revenue is collected by the IRS than by any state. From googling, CA has the highest state income tax rate but still collects <5% of US federal tax revenue, while having >10% of the population. ~2.5x'ing state taxes to attain similar per-capita revenue would probably lead to a fair number of people leaving the state, or at least get the party who passed that tax hike (presumably Democrats) voted out in the next state election.

OTOH the NSF annual budget is $10B/year, in theory "easily" fundable by CA alone with its $220B/year in tax revenue, in the worst case with a 5% tax increase. The NSF isn't the only federal agency that funds research (seems to provide around 25% of federal research funding) but it is probably enough for one state, even the most productive one. So maybe it really is doable.