I recall reading that obsessions are a common symptom of dementia.

Indeed, these are way better than a simple opinion poll if your goal is an actual prediction. People who are good at making predictions will be rewarded and continue to participate, those who are just going by vibes or whatever will lose money and hopefully learn to stay away. "Insider information" is kind of the point of markets like this, it's a way to surface that information to the outside world.

Even though most of the things he says will never happen it's still worth noting that this is where American discourse has reached. Their president can freely threaten to forcibly annex former allies simply because he wants their territory, and yet for some reason this isn't an impeachable action. It's not even a top headline.

Are those normal people, though?

"How dare AI companies pirate books to train their AIs! They should be paying for their training data!"

...

"Not like that!"

This bit of clickbait outrage has been making the rounds for weeks now. They're using the standard approach to bulk scanning books. The "rare editions" they're scanning are rare because nobody is interested in them. It's stuff like old guidebooks from a particular town fair in 1970 or a book on crochet in early colonial Kansas or whatever, they were sitting in warehouses and would have eventually been pulped if not bought in bulk. This is their one shot at preservation, frankly. And they're doing this because the law requires them to do it.

Uh huh.

Scott Manley did a video that went through the numbers and formulae to calculate how cooling works for these sorts of satellites. Unsurprisingly, the professional satellite designers who think this is a reasonable thing appear to be correct about it.

There's a lot of misinformation circulating about how it's impossible to cool things effectively in space, but it's really not a complicated or new field. I think people mostly just want it to not work and stop there.

Yes, but nevertheless there are limits. As I said. It's not going to explode the moment a molecule gets on the wrong side of the envelope. Proper ventilation can keep the concentration outside that range. Note how even though the Hindenburg was abysmally designed from a safety standpoint it still lasted a long time before anything set it off.

DRM is suddenly popular and people think it will work this time.

Good ventilation is the main one I'm aware of. Hydrogen is only flammable when there's a particular range of mixture with oxygen. If it's too dilute then it won't burn, and the same in the other direction with not enough oxygen mixed inside the hydrogen. So a leak that goes straight into the outside air is not really super dangerous, the hydrogen shoots up and away and quickly dilutes to non-flammability.

In Hindenburg's case there were multiple internal gas bladders contained by the aerodynamic outer envelope, held in place with frames and with walkways and other gaps between, so there were a lot of spaces for a mixture of air and hydrogen to accumulate and reach the right mix to burn. They had no way to reliably detect that this was happening, back then they didn't have sensors and relied on crewmen literally walking around listening for hissing sounds or "shimmering" air where gas of different densities were mixing. Since Hindenburg was originally intended to use helium lifting gas it wouldn't have been a problem, but switching to hydrogen should have caused a complete redesign to eliminate these internal spaces and ventilate better. And in a modern airship sprinkle the thing with sensors so you can immediately know if there's a leak.

The actual ignition of the Hindenburg is thought to have been due to a static discharge spark. Hindenburg's outer skin was somewhat insulated from its inner framework and the air and ship were charged due to a thunderstorm that had recently passed by. When the crew dropped ropes to the ground this grounded the inner framework and caused sparks between the outer envelope and the framework as it tried to dump its charge into the ground as well. Again not a problem for a helium airship, but something that should have been subject to a redesign for a hydrogen one. Make sure the whole ship is properly grounded and then there won't be charge differences to cause sparks inside it.

Note that there's a theory that was proposed a while back that Hindenburg's outer envelope was super flammable in its own right and was the actual source of most of the fire. It was made of cotton painted with cellulose acetate butyrate along with iron oxide and fine aluminum powder - similar in composition to thermite or solid rocket fuel. But tests were done with recreations of the material and although it was indeed flammable it didn't burn anywhere near fast enough to account for the speed with which the Hindenburg was destroyed. Probably still something to avoid with modern materials, though. Don't make your hydrogen airship out of stuff that could catch fire.

Yeah, "something bad happened" doesn't always mean "and therefore someone must be to blame." Sometimes life just sucks.

I'm not seeing the face-eating leopard aspect of this story. The essence of the "leopards ate my face" meme is not merely "someone experienced consequences," It's that someone actively supported, advocated for, or enabled a policy or system, and is then shocked when that same policy or system harms them.