The notion of “PhD-level research” is too vague to be useful anyways. Is it equivalent to a preprint, a poster, a workshop paper, a conference paper, a journal submission, or a book? Is it expected to pass peer review in a prestigious venue, a mid-tier venue, or simply any venue at all?
There’s wildly varying levels of quality among these options, even though they could all reasonably be called “PhD-level research.”
I'm a professor who trains PhDs in cryptography, and I can say that it genuinely does have knowledge equivalent to a PhD student. Unfortunately I've never gotten it to produce a novel result. And occasionally it does frightening stuff, like swapping the + and * in a polynomial evaluation when I ask it to format a LaTeX algorithm.
It makes sense if you view the HOV lane primarily as a way to reduce emissions, not traffic. This is also why e.g. single-rider motorcycles are often allowed to use HOV lanes as well.
> buying an EV does not actually reduce emissions like magic, unless the owner drives that car for a looooong time. Like 10-15+ years.
I find this timeframe surprising. I did some quick searches and there are models like GREET that suggest the break-even point is much sooner than that in the US. It is difficult to know for certain, of course, as there are many variables.
Regardless, it is of course better to incentivize long-term ownership as well. I think of HOV access as similar to a tax deduction on purchase. It’s a cheap way to provide a carrot for initial EV adoption.
> Google spends something around 30 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine across many platforms. You can spend the same amount and tomorrow your search engine will have 88.9% of searches.
It is a widely held belief that users don’t change the defaults, and I’m not asserting it’s wrong in general, but why doesn’t it apply to web browsers?
As an (unhappy) Windows user, I note that Microsoft pushes Edge aggressively, with each major Windows update “helpfully” offering to “optimize my computer” by making it the default browser again. However, Edge market share is only ~12% on desktop [0], despite the fact it is significantly more work to install Chrome than it is to change a mere default setting. Is that just because desktop users are more willing to jump through hoops?
Chrome didn't get its marketshare out of thin air either. It paid other software to be bundled just like malware apps, and automatically configured itself to be the default browser.
It also prominently advertised itself on the Google home page, which would probably cost many many billions of dollars if a non-Google browser wanted to do the same thing. On top of that, if you used another modern browser like Firefox, Google websites had popups that you should upgrade your outdated browser to Chrome.
Once Chrome on desktop was popular, then came the "oopses". [1] Accidentally breaking Google websites on non-Chrome browsers left and right.
After Android became popular, it's not hard to guess which browser they shipped by default on millions of devices. Device manufacturers weren't allowed to remove Chrome if they wanted to have working Google Play Services and access to the Google Play Store. I think recently in the EU manufacturers are allowed to remove Chrome and keep Play Services because Google got fined 4 billion euros.
The rejection message doesn’t seem to be accurate. I tried “happy person” as a prompt in AI Studio and it generated a happy human without any complaints.
It’s possible that they relaxed the safety filtering to allow humans but forgot to update the error message.
If the federal government is about granting rights, does that imply the default state is “no rights”? That seems objectively worse.