Hypothetically possible... but an incredibly risky way to get someone to kill themselves. I mean it's not the "take the bank manager's family hostage" gambit because the potential victims can never know what could have happened.

Yet, you still need to convince the person you're serious, and if you manage that, well then they might just go to the FBI and now you're in piles of trouble (especially if you follow through, which the person would realize).

And again, even under duress I suspect it's pretty hard to get a non-suicidal person to kill themselves. Especially if there's no real motive. Like did they think he was going to say something incredibly damaging on that 3rd day that he hadn't said in the 7 years since he first filed his complaint?

How about an alternate theory. The guy who had been under severe stress for years, possibly around the time of the trial he considered suicide but decided against it and in a moment of resolution that he would live he made a call where he declared he wouldn't kill himself.

Then, sometime later, the suicidal thoughts returned, and when faced with the prospect of more testimony he killed himself.

That's probably not exactly what happened, but it makes a lot more sense than the conspiracy theories.

The hotel staff literally heard the shot at 9:42 am.

And how do you imagine that hit worked? Can you even contrive a movie scene that doesn't sound ridiculous and needlessly depend on good luck? I mean just go stand in a hotel parking lot, just how sure are you that not only is no one is watching you at that moment, but no one is going to walk to a window or wander around a corner to see what was up with that gunshot they just heard?

Investigate for sure, but people suffering anxiety and PTSD, about to go into court for an extremely stressful deposition sometimes do kill themselves.

Boeing still bears a lot of responsibility for his death as they were literally trying to apply enough pressure to break his spirit so he wouldn't talk. But it's very unlikely they pulled the trigger.

Also, I'm not a professional hitman, but if I were to murder someone and stage it as a suicide, I'd do it at night. I'd fire the gun and slip out the door or window, or I'd maybe even spike their drink if I knew the pharmacology well enough.

I wouldn't shoot them at 9:42am in a hotel parking lot. There's a LOT of ways for someone to see you in that scenario.

Putin's Nuclear policy is very clear. Allow lower level politicians to make big nuclear threats. And even make slightly vague and indirect threats yourself.

But don't say anything that would clearly commit you to using Nukes as part of your conquest of Ukraine (and holding of currently occupied territories) so you don't have to backtrack if things go south.

For some married couples, once in a billion years is "all the time".

"Two Lifeforms Merge Into One Organism For First Time In a Billion Years" ...the first time that we know of, anyway.

A couple of weeks from now some pissed off coder will release a Windows widget that removes the watermark.

I was relieved when the Windows 11 Checker came back and said one of my special-purpose PCs "couldn't upgrade to Win 11" because of the hardware.

Me: Excellent, thank you.

There's already an app you can use to make consensual nude images, it's called a camera.

If you need generative AI to create the nude then it's non-consensual or a very weird edge case of people making their own fake nudes.

Possibly. But I expect I suspect they can convert existing plants to EV or plug-in hybrids, so this could instead be an indication that they expect sales to grow by 240k vehicles, and all that growth is to be represented by EVs.

In the short term it seems like plug-in hybrids will win the day. For city driving with home charging they're almost as good as an EV (you just need to plug in a bit more). And for highway driving they're as good as an ICE. The full scale EV transition will probably only come when range + charging speed + infrastructure is sufficient so ICE's no longer have a big highway advantage.

Based on what? Musk's tweets?

Waymo and Cruise delivered a self-driving taxi years ahead of Tesla. And among level 2 cars on the consumer market Tesla is only middle of the pack. As for level 3 self-driving consumer cars, there's only one and it isn't Tesla.

Tesla was the first to put it in vehicles, and it's arguably the most aggressive in pushing the tech, but I don't see evidence that they're the best. And honestly, I think the reason is Musk. He's a smart guy, but he doesn't know ML as much as he thinks he does. Basically every researcher in the field thinks LIDAR is the answer, but Elon Musk's liked the idea of CV so Telsa is going CV only. And because LLMs are so successful he thinks he can do the same with self-driving, but neural networks are fundamentally probabilistic, which is fine for writing suggestions but not self-driving.

Just watch this review from a Tesla fan, too close to the curb, too aggressive making a left turn in front of a bus, missed a turn signal, crossed centre line when it didn't need to, waffles coming up to turning lanes, risked getting stuck on the train tracks. And that's in just 7 minutes of driving! You think they're close to full autonomy?

It's far from clear that Musk isn't pushing Tesla into a self-driving dead end.