class3shock

The author interprets this:

“What we’ve done at SpaceX is we’ve taken a team that has been able to achieve a market share in mass to orbit that is almost 90 percent,” - Now, he said, SpaceX was applying that same team to the deployment of terrestrial compute.

As, "The question is whether Musk would devote his Falcon engineering team solely to Starship. Perhaps not."

This is not really the right conclusion IMO. It does not take the same kind or size of engineering team that Falcon took to develop or support to build cooling systems for data centers. The data center work is going to be a small side project for a small number of engineers in a small number of disciplines.

The larger point of the government not having control of its own launch capability has been an issue since an American rocket was designed with a Russian engine - Atlas V.

If I use a gun to break into a company and steal data I'm arrested, if an ai company does it, it's legal.

Why am I being singled out?

Who do you think knows the most about a business? The experts at the leading companies in that business? Or McKinsey? Assuming the sane answer is the experts at the company, why is McKinsey being hired?

I find McMaster awesome for product discovery. I can go and just start scrolling, see a interesting category and start digging into what is there. How on earth is Amazon better for this? Instead of just scrolling down and starting to click I have to open the side menu, expand categories, click on industrial & scientific, click on show all, get smacked in the face by a full page add, and then I get a nonsensical mix of lists of categories, new products, then back to a list of categories to hopefully get to where I want to go.

You need help finding something? On McMaster, scroll down, click contact and send a message. On Amazon? Google to find out where the shortest path to getting assistance that they have buried under a dozen submenus.

I will admit, there is one superior thing for product discovery, which is of course their paper catalog.

"So why isn't our software 10x better?"

The answer has nothing to do with rationing. When all software is designed to grab the most attention, serve the most adds, collect the most data, deliver the maximum amount of the cheapest content and generally be as exploitive of its users as possible, no amount of rationing or not rationing will effect it.

McMaster Carr, a company worth a little over a billion, sells metal, bolts, casters, and many other industrial bits and bobs. Their website is infinitely better than Amazons. Why? It has nothing to do with rationing and everything to do with trying to actual deliver a good customer experience.

Self driving in a winter storm? Self driving in torrential rain? Self driving when mud covers a sensor it needs? Self driving if it hits someone? Pretty sure Tesla would say you were driving it then.

Out of curiosity, I know you can't do it on HAM frequencies but is there such a thing as encrypted walkie talkies that are legal?

Passkeys are a trap and are awful. And before someone says they are "more secure", meaningfully more secure than a unique email and unique incredibly long password for each account? Because multiple password managers can set that up now in a few seconds with 1/100 the friction of a passkey.

I hope anyone who is promoting these things has to help and elderly relative do something in an account they are having trouble accessing where they had to use a passkey to set it up. Or try giving your spouse access to a health account they need to access in a hurry. Or make a physical backup that a family member can use in case something happens to you and or your computer.

True, in my mind when I'm thinking of it I don't see it so much as an individual thing but I do talk about it that way.

Every good writer was at one point a not good writer, writing badly written stuff, gaining the experience and skill to eventually become a good writer.

"Why would it be impossible?"

Because this is what happens when new tools are introduced? The cheap digital camera displaced tons of photographers, the computer displaces typists, etc. so yes, it seems impossible that a tool that makes producing written content cheaply won't displace writers.

This is a really cool site and they seem cool.

I'm curious what people think about the following:

The idea of living off-grid, of having your own little self sufficient homestead, a cabin in the woods, a small farm, etc. doesn't seem to work without having a bunch of cash up front, another source of income, or turning it into a engine for running classes or making content. Where it is "self-sufficient" is generally where, to put it bluntly, it has to be because people are poor and don't have a choice.

I'm not familiar with sailing self sufficiency but in permaculture in the US, it seems the only people doing it successfully fund it via running classes, trainings, writing a book, making content, etc. or they do it essentially as a hobby funded by another career, family money, etc. The closest I've seen that does work is CSA's (community supported agriculture) but with those, as with most farming related work, there is generally ten underpaid laborers with no actual stake in the farm to one owner who gets by (also see woofing).

I'm not sure where I'm going with this but I thought given the topic there might be some people who visit with thoughts on it. Maybe it would be better to treat it as a goal of how to live ones life even if it isn't self-sufficient? I don't know. I just know there always seems to be a dichotomy between imagined and real in self-sufficiency that I struggle with.

"Imagine that a future AI system proposes a radically new design for a one terawatt nuclear fusion power plant."

I propose we enact a new law that makes it so ai engineers can only fly on ai designed planes powered by ai designed engines flown by ai. Maybe then we'll get some real progress out of this slop producing crapware or the problem will be solved a different way.

I wonder how many fields will have to suffer through their collective work being sloppily copied or used as a basis for generative slop before we figure out we aren't getting AGI just Artificial General Slop.