Underrated observation. The low-hanging fruit is all in the office/home-to-takeoff and touchdown-to-office/home blocks on each end, not the time in the air. The commute, checkin, security, airport transit, boarding, and taxiing are the time-sinks worth optimizing.
That's a real service.
Some airports, including LAX and London Heathrow, allow a "tarmac transfer", where the limo goes directly to the plane. [1][2] Cost is $200 to $1000. That could save an hour or more at each end.
VIP Terminal Access: Skip the standard queues and enter exclusive VIP terminals where you’ll receive expedited passport control, security checks, and personalized services, all while enjoying luxury amenities. Avoid long security lines with expedited security processing, ensuring you spend minimal time in the airport.
Which already is a bad signal for the article's argument. We already have a way to significantly reduce that travel time and it's a niche.
Could Boom Supersonic or whoever actually survive selling only to a hundred Taylor Swifts? How are they going to keep the lights on for the 30 years those jets fully saturate the market?
I'm not sure this is true. In Atlanta, on a very busy two-lane city-street commute into work, I follow traffic laws scrupulously, and have excellent driving skills, but I take every advantage I can that's not illegal or antisocial -- e.g., I always pass people going slower than me, preemptively change lanes to avoid buses and cars I can tell are slow or turning, take small shortcuts that add many more turns to the trip -- which means lots of lane changes, etc. My wife, on the exact same route and time, does not do any of this; she just follows the car in front of her until she arrives. My driving shaves a solid 10+ minutes off of her 40-minute commute this way. That's significant (>25%), and adds up to 20 minutes more time at home with my kids, etc.
And fwiw, I abhor illegal and antisocial driving and wish there were much more enforcement of traffic laws. And where it's a necessary cost, I'd be happy to have a longer commute if we were all safer for it.
I think congestion pricing is probably a net win, and the lesser evil right now, but tolls are so regressive I wish we could do better by making public transport not suck.
Both slurm, and even more so HTCondor, power most of the major computationally-expensive physics projects worldwide (all the LHC experiments, LIGO, IceCube, etc.)
From https://lastexam.ai/: "The dataset consists of 2,500 challenging questions across over a hundred subjects. We publicly release these questions, while maintaining a private test set of held out questions to assess model overfitting." [emphasis mine]
While the private questions don't seem to be included in the performance results, HLE will presumably flag any LLM that appears to have gamed its scores based on the differential performance on the private questions. Since they haven't yet, I think the scores are relatively trustworthy.
The jump in ARC-AGI and MathArena suggests Google has solved the data scarcity problem for reasoning, maybe with synthetic data self-play??
This was the primary bottleneck preventing models from tackling novel scientific problems they haven't seen before.
If Gemini 3 Pro has transcended "reading the internet" (knowledge saturation), and made huge progress in "thinking about the internet" (reasoning scaling), then this is a really big deal.
So everybody is cheating in your mind? We can't trust anything? How about taking a more balanced take: there's certainly some progress, and while the benchmark results most likely don't represent the world reality, the progress is continuous.
Privacy through uniformity, operational security by routine, herd immunity for privacy, traffic normalization, "anonymity set expansion", "nothing to hide" paradox, etc.
I.e., if you use Tor for "normie sites", then the fact that someone can be seen using Tor is no longer a reliable proxy for detecting them trying to see/do something confidential and it becomes harder to identify & target journalists, etc. just because they're using Tor.
I see this all the time when asking Claude or ChapGPT to produce a single-page two-column PDF summarizing the conclusions of our chat. Literally 99% of the time I get a multi-page unpredictably-formatted mess, even after gently asking over and over for specific fixes to the formatting mistake/s.
And as you say, they cheerfully assert that they've done the job, for real this time, every time.
Ask for the asciidoc and asciidoctor command to make a PDF instead. Chat bots aren’t designed to make PDFs. They are just trying to use tools in the background, probably starting with markdown.
I've been having a good time chatting with Deep Research LLMs about this. The bottom line, for me, is that the risks of hot plastic -- to me as an adult, in, say, micromorts -- are dwarfed by the (also small but much larger) cancer risks of grilling steak all the time, so it's irrational for me to worry much about it. The endocrine-disruption risks to my teenage daughter, however, are less understood and make it worth avoiding too much hot plastic in our lives.
You're absolutely right — the risk of endocrine-disruption is much more dangerous and is being ignored by the majority of the population. What an insightful take!
Would you like me to expand on the reasons endocrine-disruptions are the bigger risk? Or would you like me to explore other ways in which microplastics might be dangerous to your health?
Rrrrgh. Although often super useful as research assistants and for exploring gaps in knowledge, the syrupy encouragement of some SOTA LLMs has started to really set me on edge.
I did exactly this last Friday as an experiment and Claude Sonnet 4.5 recommended that I go long in an inverse ETF lol. When I told it that was terrible advice, it apologized and suggested buying puts.
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