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It is an amazing feat and can put the US on excellent footing.

But I’m not sure it is a fair comparison because the Space Shuttle also returned a crew with each launch. Starlink can afford to pay the cost of lost cargo, or diminished fuel reserves for sub-optimal launch altitude, on launch failure.

Still, I hope it continues on this excellent path and doesn’t fall into the complacency trap that skydivers have to watch for. It would be great if the Falcon 9 launches can fund the eventual completion of Starship, and that Starship goes on to become the first fully and rapidly reusable - and hopefully safest - ship.

I think the tone of the article was really strong and, to me, it seemed biased because they repeated multiple times that “the buyers only care about looks.”

A more in-depth article might point to the CyberLandr, and until I went 4x4 camping, camped out of a truck, I didn’t realize how awesome a CyberLandr might be, or how nice it is that “Mother Nature’s pin striping” is a solved problem for a stainless steel skin. Or how nice it would be to do all that without all the engine noise (I get accused of “not being a car person” simply because I like peace and quiet - but EVs are cars so why can’t we love those too?).

I think the article intentionally mischaracterizes the reasons for wanting a CyberTruck, and prescribes that “you must be a shallow person who doesn’t care about practicality or reliability.”

Well thank you for telling me who I am!

Oh and why would anyone slander Tesla? It’s not like they are a publicly traded company where slander and praise affect the share or option prices. Surely they couldn’t have ulterior motives.

We don’t need to recreate Bell Labs.

We have SpaceX and Starlink - that’s where innovation is happening. Compare Dishy to the Starlink Mini (which can run off a power bank), or the first live-feed (no radio blackout period) on orbital re-entry. And they costed much less than ULA and provided much more to the public. Practically saved Ukraine (try defending your country with no communications). Or Tesla who has made EVs (and charging stations) an actual thing. Or Neuralink who’s allowed a quadriplegic to use a computer like you and I.

We don’t need giant monopolies like Microsoft who - what did they deliver over the past 3 decades? A knockoff of the Mac. OSes full of vulnerabilities that require antivirus and firewalls. Clippy. Nearly killed Apple (who gave us the first usable GUI, all our songs in our pocket, and the first actually smart smartphone.)

What does Microsoft do that is innovative? They buy actual innovative companies (they “own” OpenAI for all intents and purposes). But also open source dotnet. Typescript. LINQ and EF. And I hate to hand them the trophy, but the Surface Pro is a real computer - the iPad Pro can’t do real work like build you an App or site with VS Code - it can’t even run Apple’s own XCode.

We don’t need giant monopolies. Plenty that smaller companies can do to outmaneuver incumbents. SpaceX will figure out passenger planes before anyone at the ULA will figure out how to make their spacecraft not leak.

Exactly what happened to me. These bastards planned that. That’s why they’re one of the richest companies in the world, because they knew how to trip their customers into buying shit they didn’t need to buy. And pricing RAM and Storage way, way out of proportion to the cost.

Don’t forget - they solder in the flash too even though there is no technical reason to do so.

Unless “impossibly far profit margin” is a technical requirement.

They will maliciously comply. They might even have 4 sockets for the 512-bit wide systems. But then they’ll keep the SSD devices soldered - just like they’ve done for a long time. Or cover them with epoxy, or rig it with explosives. That’ll show you for trying to upgrade! How dare you ruin the beautiful fat profit margin that our MBAs worked so hard to design in?!?

I tested Llama-3-70b-8192 on Groq against ChatGPT 4, and while Groq ran it super fast, it hallucinated one answer, and didn’t get the logic correct on another question.

So, ChatGPT 4 is still more reliable for my use case. But if I were to want an LLM to process data, summarize, and so forth, Llama-3 on Groq is very fast.

Questions:

Do you know anything about Intel Hala Point?

Groq: bullshit, but admitted it when I called it out. ChatGPT: did a Bing search (it knew what it didn’t know).

Question 2a (separate chat): If you’re in Canada, what’s the best way to use a TFSA?

2b: Okay, if your portfolio has some tech stocks, some cash cows, and some government bonds, which should be allocated to the TFSA?

The reason I chose Question 2 is that most banks are happy to recommend bad products if it benefits them. Llama-3’s answer reflects the bank bullshit. ChatGPT 4 gives the advice your trustworthy and financially savvy friend would give you.

Follow-on questions for Llama-3:

2c: You have it backwards.

2d: Why did you get it backwards? Were you influenced by the glut of “advice” proffered by banks?

If only all tech news were this way. Then I’d waste no cycles on hot garbage.

They’re really light and last a long time, but are not rechargeable.

The time value of money is always more than inflation. The classic simple example is that if you need food today, the money for food is worth much more today than it is worth a year from now.

Therefore to ask someone to surrender money today, they have to give you more money to return it to you next year.

This isn’t the same as growth (ie you’re doing a job, but next year they expect you to make 25% more sales, or else…)

If we had a better Blue Bin system it might work. Remove tags at home and place in compartment of Blue Bin, and at the recycling centre they get sorted out and sent back to the retailers.

But if we really could scale RFID tag production down to 1 cent each, then we’d likely just throw them out. Not that I’m a fan of throwing away silicon…

Sam Bankman-Fried defrauded people. He didn’t intentionally create a digital black market, where everything from hit jobs, narcotics, poison, weapons, and human trafficking could (and were) conducted.

And since there are many well-known marketplaces for legal activities (eBay, Craigslist, Kijiji, Facebook Marketplace, AutoTrader.com, need I go on?) then the only defining feature was that this was a black market.

One cannot “accidentally” do this. So yes, aiding and abetting countless crimes and possibly murder —> life sentence.

In that context do you still find it unjust?

Scam Bankrun-Fraud? Couldn’t happen to a nicer person.