randallsquared

A lot of people have recently started smoking with the expectation that cancer will soon be a nonissue. He just promised not to use AI for the coding itself, but for fixing problems created along the way... ;)

> Sometimes I really wanna skip 10 years into the future and see where all this eventually leads.

Either the desert of the real, or something unimaginable to Mk 1 humans.

So, what I heard was "No, and here is a good reason it should be 'yes, some'."

Consider that many do not believe they were lying.

It's not about communism vs a free market, but about a change even more radical than that: leaving aside "made by a human" labeling, and even if there were no other changes to power structures or economies and no AI doom, what does a world look like if the cost of having something done falls to a few cents of electricity and its burden? Growing crops still takes a lot of land and other resources...

I was thinking about Accelerando the other day: in 2026 it's clear that it predicted a lot of things bizarrely well, but that contrasts with Stross' later disbelief that our current world's technology could exist, which seems to have persisted into the current day.

Pournelle was using a microcomputer to write, then, as was Gerrold. Word processors of the time didn't try to keep a whole chapter in memory, and Pournelle famously started using a home computer to write novels in 1977.

The launches themselves can be made roughly neutral by producing the methane and LOX from the atmosphere using solar power. For an hourly cadence, that would require as much solar as a third of all US installed commercial solar, but the US is already adding that much every few years, and accelerating, so it doesn't seem impossible. That's best-case, of course, but given that, all the combustion products would balance out propellant generation.

Reentry of dead satellites and other debris does seem like it's eventually going to be more of an issue, so that will be something to work on.

I wouldn't count on any warp drive breakthroughs, potentially ever, but the whole solar system is still out there for living and industrial space.

> Think on the order of "One succesful launch, delivery, and re-entry/recovery per day".

Given that they have largely relied on reusability rather than strongly ramping up production of boosters for Falcon 9, and given that they have performed 3 launches in a single day, one launch per day is clearly achievable without any further advances, and without even using Starship.

To be clear, the stated goal for Starship is one launch per hour throughout the year, which would still be a tiny number compared to, say, airline flights, but quite impressive for orbital flight.

> getting into the plausible tech realm

Except bringing an asteroid all the way down to the ISS. That part was uncharacteristically thoughtless, I think.

We could all stand to think about this a little Moore.

> they attacked DEI as a concept rather than just the corruption they claimed existed

People who crusade against DEI generally think that the concept is corruption, rather than being an unrelated side matter.

> There were already laws on the books against hiring discrimination.

Those are exactly the laws being used to attack DEI practices, though they were by consensus not previously wielded against clear violations that were intended virtuously.

What are you talking about? HN was a site for people aspiring to BE the rich, in the sense that it was operated by and revolves around a startup accelerator.

While this can be useful in extreme situations, such as a production system that can't be taken offline even momentarily, it has always felt like a footgun to me: a way to make critical changes that are recorded nowhere and flow through no change process. Lisps are full of these really powerful features that should be used sparingly, but are held up as reasons to use it. I wrote a fair amount of CL a couple decades ago, but always felt that "pause, inspect, stop, edit, start" was safer than "pause, inspect, edit, restart". Some corollary of Kernighan's Law, there.

Pangram is at least on some text very unreliable. From the story a while back about the mother at the ball game: when she wrote a medium or substack essay about it, various people in that thread (including myself) used pangram on the essay, and came back all over the place. 100% (both ways!), 20-something, 60-something, etc. It was eye-opening about how to take claims that something is AI-written or human-written.