I’m sorry for your loss

Doritos are triangles so sure

The heads up display isn’t something you see in front of you like most planes. The helmets are the heads up display, like augmented reality.

There are cameras all over the plane to help you see through the aircraft (see ground targets through the floor, nearby aircraft through your wing). Think of the resolution and bitrate needed to make it useful!

Just like how an apache gunner can simply look at a target to aim the gun at them you can do the same thing. And if you can’t hit it it’s still marked for every allied plane in the airspace to see. If you are out of missiles but you are tracking an enemy plane miles ahead, you can send the data to an F-15 miles behind you and let their missiles lock and fire from farther than they can engage alone.

With that in mind the radar is awesome letting it see threats from greater distances than the opposition, with the stealth capabilities good enough to keep them from easily doing the same.

I’m sure there are other surprises too, but the military obviously wants to keep those a secret

It would suck if poison ivy tea tasted really good

I genuinely think the best practical use of AI, especially language models is malicious manipulation. Propaganda/advertising bots. There’s a joke that reddit is mostly bots. I know there’s some countermeasures to sniff them out but think about it.

I’ll keep reddit as the example because I know it best. Comments are simple puns, one liner jokes, or flawed/edgy opinions. But people also go to reddit for advice/recommendations that you can’t really get elsewhere.

Using an LLM AI I could in theory make tons of convincing recommendations. I get payed by a corporation or state entity to convince lurkers to choose brand A over brand B, to support or disown a political stance or to make it seem like tons of people support it when really few do.

And if it’s factually incorrect so what? It was just some kind stranger™ on the internet

All I know is that I use socials to get away from political bullshit

When it was sms compatible it was a suuuuper easy sell for my family

“It’s way more secure when you text me but you can still text everyone else you know too. And we can still use it through wifi if cell service isn’t working for me.”

There’s something to that I think.

I ride a mountain bike. Not because I do hardcore mountain biking but because the flat country roads I ride are so full of potholes or simply unpaved it might as well be a trail. So I ride a bike that I know can handle the works parts of my riding. But I know I’m not riding the best bike for the majority of my use case.

Kinda (note I’m saying kinda) the same thing with trucks. People want potential capability wether or not they actually use it like it was supposed to. They use it for the same shitty roads, bad weather, and every so often actually moving things from place to place.

But they are way overkill for most people and most of them know it. There is a market for small trucks that is being ignored and I hope that changes in the future.

My area’s mall is pretty nice and like most malls it’s got plenty of area to walk, stores to explore, enough security to deter people from doing anything too crazy. It’s a great spot for middle school and high school kids! But if you don’t have a car how do you even get there?

There’s suburbs all around so it should be in easy biking distance and moderate walking distance. But it’s surrounded by 4 lane roads without a single crosswalk or even sidewalks. Busses don’t run there either.

So thanks to decades of car only design best non motorized way to get there is to take a kayak…yes a kayak…and use a creek to get to the area behind the mall and walk in from there. I only know that because my parents did it once to see if it could be done.

It would potentially fall under “fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine” that would make it inadmissable for actual court cases but otherwise there’s nothing to stop people from gathering information that is available to the public

Sometimes it feels like we’re running in rhombicosidodecahedrons

We can always do the “nothing beyond my immediate observation can be trusted” method like the flat earthers do

It also goes to show how laws made during the moral panic don’t go away even decades after that panic fades.

This is often in mind when responsible gun owners are critical of more gun laws. The govt won’t go “that was silly of us here’s your bit of freedom back” even if a law objectively had zero positive effect