As for ac, it would be nice if there were more electric AC systems in traditional vehicles. Near instant heat/cool

Electric A/C, maybe. But in anything with a gas engine, it really just doesn’t make sense to have electric heat, since the engine is already such a prolific source of free waste heat. And waiting a minute or two for it to warm up is a small price to pay for the massive efficiency of having all your heating energy being basically ‘free’.

and could be enabled with the engine off with a suitable battery for extended stops like when parked

Would only make sense in hybrid vehicles, IMO, since they already have a large battery that could be used for this.

Hybrid vehicles already make much better use of engine start/stop anyway.

But electric A/C and heat are already becoming fairly common on hybrid vehicles, I think – especially on plug-in hybrids or ones with an ‘EV mode’ that can drive on electric only for a limited range.

Paying attention to a trans man’s feelings would only give them feelings of gender dysphoria.

Honestly, not that bad of an idea, really. Since a lot of people are out there habitually disabling the feature on every drive, it doesn’t necessarily reflect the real-world emissions the car will produce when operated by real-world people.

Though I bet this regime’s reasons are much less noble. More likely just considering stop/start to be ‘woke’ and discouraging it for that reason.

(And, yeah, I understand why people do it. It’s a bit annoying feeling the car turn on and off. Your air conditioning can stop working at stoplights or when stopped in traffic. And some cars – especially the worse implementations – have a noticeable jolt and delay when starting again from a stop.)

All that said, I bet it won’t really change much. Manufacturers will still keep including it – not to meet emissions requirements, but because it makes their EPA-rated fuel economy better, and rated fuel economy is something that helps them sell more cars.

To be fair, though, they need to log a certain amount of flight time just to meet pilot training requirements, so this sortie could probably just be counted against that.

(Same thing with flyovers at sporting events and such. Those are actually done as practice bombing runs – gives pilots practice at flying over a specific target at a specific time.)

Impossible. He was hanging out at my house at that time, playing Legend of Zelda and eating boneless chicken wings.

XXY?

XYY?

XXX?

XXYY?

What about them? There are real people with all of those combinations as well.

Does anybody?

Later games just show you a series of pictures and ask which one you look like.

They’ll still choose your gender pronouns based on which picture you choose, though.

the question of whether evolutionary pressure on the timescale of human generations can keep up with our technological advancement

As long as people exist who could/would refuse it, and as long as there are enough of them to form a viable breeding population, evolution will bring the species through it.

Waiting for random beneficial mutations usually takes a long, long time. But if the beneficial mutations are already in a population, the population can adapt extremely quickly. If all the individuals without that mutation died off quickly (or at least didn’t produce offspring) then that mutation would be in basically 100% of the population within one generation. A rather smaller generation than the previous ones, sure, but they would have less competition and more room to grow. (Though, thanks to recessive genetics, you’re likely to still see individuals popping up without that beneficial mutation occasionally for a long time to come. But those throwbacks will become more and more rare as time goes on.)

That’s a vast oversimplification, though. Because it’s very unlikely that the ability to resist the temptation of ‘wireheading’ comes down to the presence or absence of a single particular gene.

Since mouse studies have already been done, it would be interesting to do it with a large, long-running experiment on an entire breeding population of mice, to see if there are any mice that are capable of surviving and reproducing under those conditions (and if so, do they show any evidence of evolving to become more resistant?)

I found another great tool to remove Windows AI “”“features”“”.

It’s called Linux.

AI “assistants” stealing slightly more data than usual… Who would have thought?