When people who maintain this separation travel for work, do they just bring both along? My laptop is often the heaviest thing in my bag, I'd hate to bring two.
I very rarely use my personal laptop. I stream on my phone, if I want a bigger screen, I either cast or use the app on the TV. So for me it's work laptop and two phones, not bad at all for the peace of mind. I literally turn off work. I used to run mixed, and I really wish I had changed earlier.
I don’t do those also on my vacations, but that’s only about 1/10 of my travels. And I don’t travel because of work, basically only for personal reasons.
My understanding is that Civil Law (most of the world excluding UK, US, AU) is like a program: you feed it a situation, it outputs a decision, every once in a while you edit it.
Common Law (UK, US) isn't really a program, but you could stretch and say it's a state machine that has been running since the country started. Every interaction sets a new precedent and changes the state. But the programming analogy falls apart because no one in the right mind would design such a program.
LLMs might actually be the best example of such a program though: Common Law is basically one long chat with an LLM, hundreds of years long.
Before LLMs came along, a Common Law system seemed to have a finite time limit before it's co-opted by wealthy people with the resources to read the whole history. Now I think maybe can push it a bit further.
Imagine the headlines though! (says your will boss, or bosses boss)
It's still stupid, but they are imagining the news:
> This guy said "it's probably fine" right before Flight 1337 explodes over the Atlantic.
Now personally I'd actually be willing to take that risk: the odds are so overwhelmingly in favor of it being a dumb prank; you might as well refuse to take a shower for fear of slipping on the soap.
But all it takes is one person up the chain of command to say "this would be bad PR" and you've lost your job.
That Amazon releases this seems to be consistent with the trend the original linked article mentioned: these big tech companies are happy to warn people of the apocalypse they are causing.
It helps not to think of corporations as a single coherent consciousness: hypothetically everyone who works there, from top to bottom, can believe that what they are doing is harmful, but also feel powerless to fight the hand of the market.
In practice I doubt the entire management structure agrees on that, some honestly believe they are doing good, but there's nothing stopping EvilCorp from emerging from a bunch of perfectly good people who are "just doing their job".
I think the point is that AI was here 40 years ago [1].
LLMs/RAGs/Transformers are the newish thing that's here to stay.
I've seen my colleagues vocabulary regress from "training transformers" to just "using AI", without clarifying if are using claude or actually building a network. I was recently told that no one says "vibe coding" any more (now it "agentic AI", I was told). My colleague who does ML research was told he was the only one at his workplace that wasn't doing AI.
So the problem isn't the technology (a lot of the technology is great), it's that the discussion around it has been dumbed down by hype.
I'm fine with math, but that doesn't make it less annoying.
The real advantage of metric is that you only have to do math once to calculate something. A cc is a ml is a gram. A liter is a cubic decimeter is a kg. It's just easy. A deep lake over a few square km? O(1) GT. Understanding orders of magnitude is a useful trait in a democracy.
You hit the nail on the head here though:
> My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.
Like any language, as long as you're translating you're loosing. Post signs in km and report temperature as C and everyone will understand it in less than a decade. A few years after I had a metric thermometer in my car C seemed easy.
It's not like the US failed to think of this. In the 80s they were posting signs in km. But back then there was a real economic cost to conversion for factories and machines. Now that's mostly gone, what remains is cultural resistance.
We have a saying in the US, "a pint's a pound, the world around." As the other post mentions, not everything has the same density, but a lot of stuff is pretty close to water.
The ironic thing is that an Imperial pint of water weighs more than a pound.
Estimate as water and fudge it a bit. Conveniently the fudge factor is just the specific gravity and is already tabulated as such in a lot of fields.
But it turns out that water is a pretty good bet most of the time:
- Settled snow is around 0.25
- Dried wood is around 0.5
- Soil is around 1.2
- Rock is around 2.5
Which is pretty good if you want to answer "how much does that truck / ship / mountain / lake weigh?".
Of course there are some anomalies: Tungsten is around 20, but it's not like imperial units help here, and the name literally translates to "heavy rock".
Using real-life calculators to add? Calculate the Flag. I don't think it is dead at all. It's like mixing in board game / escape room / science / engineeer/ medical research elements.
I'll always remember my middle school science teaching telling us that nuclear fusion violates conservation of mass because the 2 protons in a pair of hydrogen nuclei combine to make helium with 4 nucleons. It's not true, but that's not the point.
But he was a great teacher anyway. He was engaging and kept the kids in line and learning. I eventually learned the truth, and most of my classmates forgot about it. Teaching, like flying a plane or driving a train, might become more about keeping watch over a small group of people and ensuring that things don't go off the rails, and that's fine.
This one feels less sinister than some other things at least to me, personally. You can reasonably doubt that the conservation of mass is violated and find out the truth based on that. But understanding more complex biology or historical context for some things? Granted, many of these things seem to be low stakes, but I'm sure there are some there are not (sex ed comes to mind).
Yes, together with mass-energy equivalency it would form a coherent argument, and then also a correct one - but the thing is that if incomplete, it still might sound funky enough to you to research it if you care.
I think it helps that it's a very narrow field to look at, compared to fuzzy and big-picture view of social studies, for example. So much room to be confidently wrong... And sadly I can't think of a solution, LLMs or not.
He was right that it violates conservation of mass. He was completely wrong that it violated it by adding 2 atomic mass units when hydrogen fuses.
In reality heavier isotopes of hydrogen fuse, conserving the total number of nucleons, but the resulting hydrogen has a lower rest mass than the parent particles. The extra mass is released as energy and the total energy is conserved.
By his logic the system either violated energy conservation (by creating nucleons while releasing energy) or was endothermic (creating nucleons from the surrounding energy).
There actually is a law of conservation of mass (it's the same law, because mass is energy) and it only appears violated if you forget about the particles that are zooming away at the speed of light. Of course the mass of a system changes if mass can flow in and out.
When you put a photon in a stationary box, the "relativistic mass" of the photon becomes part of the "rest mass" of the photon-box system. You can't ignore it.
I had a chemistry teacher who insisted that the fissile isotope of Uranium was U-238 not U-235. I challenged him on this multiple times and he refused to budge on this. I get that it's a simple mistake to make (it seems like U-238 is bigger so intuitively ought to be less stable) but he could have just looked it up and he didn't, I guess he was just so confident about it that he thought there was no way he could have been wrong about it.
I mean fusion and fission do violate conservation of mass and conservation of energy, they just don't violate conservation of mass and energy, right? We thought mass was strictly conserved until Einstein, and then we updated our understanding.
The game was shareware and he'd show up to ask you to pay the fee. After the trial period he'd start lobbing missiles at you. There was a basic editor you could open to adjust all the ship stats and weapons, so while you couldn't turn him friendly you could at least de-claw him.
I remember thinking it was weird how "easy" it was to work around, but it's hard to imagine the studio would care much: a pre-internet 14 year who loved the game that much is probably more useful as an ambassador than a paying customer.
I did something similar for the sequel Escape Velocity Override when I was a kid. It also had the same Captain Hector. Though in my case I buffed my own ship's armor and shields instead. I was not very good at the game (still am not to be honest), so I kind of needed that anyway to get through it.
I also remember that in EV Override you needed to stay below a certain amount of money to not trigger Captain Hector, and I would set the system clock back so it wouldn't think that the trial period had passed.
There are two modern spiritual successors to the EV games that might interest you if you haven't heard of them. Both are open source and have a decent amount of content (but aren't complete): Endless Sky, and Naev. Where the former is much closer to the old EV games in feel.
But in this case I was hacking the shareware payment enforcement. Rather than shutting down completely the game would send an invincible and fairly destructive enemy (Hector) after you. It was really a clever trick from the developers to make the game mostly unplayable if you didn't pay after the trial period.
Ahh it didn't click that this was shareware enforcement, thanks. I guess back in those days developers weren't really fussed about payment, because paying was really hard (mailing in checks, and nobody had credit cards).
Many of them (us) made software for the love of it, and didn't care if it was cracked. I never got a single sale from my software but I didn't care.
I'm pretty sure I eventually either payed or ran one of those keygen-and-virus.exe scripts. At least I also remember Hector thanking me for paying.
It got me thinking: could I somehow pay them now? There's some sad news here: one of the original creators, Peter Cartwright, passed away [1] in 2026 :(
His project to remaster EV: Override, Cosmic Frontier, was fully funded after his death though!
And Hamamatsu (and some others) still produce and sell photomultiplier tubes.
The microchannel plate PMTs are pretty nifty things [1]. You can get single-digit picosecond time resolution out of them.
[1]: https://www.hamamatsu.com/us/en/product/optical-sensors/pmt/...
When people who maintain this separation travel for work, do they just bring both along? My laptop is often the heaviest thing in my bag, I'd hate to bring two.
[late edit: I meant work travel]
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