I don't see a major difference between Musk's extremely over optimistic timelines and moving fast and breaking things both lead to the same result, lots of "learning opportunities" a.k.a explosions. I can only re-emphasize that with modern software and AI tools at their disposal I'd expect Musk and his genius squad at SpaceX to get starship done with far fewer "learning opportunities" than they have done so far, unless the efficacy of AI, the genius level of Musk and the abilties of his SpaceX genius squad have all been over-hyped but the article says it better than I can:

SpaceX’s Starship saga is another emblem of this phenomenon. Yes, progress requires trial and error. But we must stop measuring success by launch views and splashy animation reels. When the same core systems fail in similar ways, time after time, we must ask whether this is aggressive iteration or just poorly managed ambition. Failure alone isn’t innovation. Only failure followed by measurable, demonstrable improvement is. For contrast, look at the F-1 engine that powered the Saturn V — still the most powerful rocket engine ever flown. Its early prototypes suffered from catastrophic combustion instability. The engines literally tore themselves apart in violent explosions. But instead of rushing to launch, NASA and Rocketdyne engineers dedicated engineering talent analyzing high-speed film, instrumenting combustion chambers and systematically redesigning injector patterns. They solved it — not through luck, not through iteration by crashes — but through engineering discipline. The result? A rocket that flew 13 times without a single engine failure. That’s how space is done. Not with bravado and broken boosters, but with precision, patience and a refusal to accept “good enough.”

What TFA is doing is not unfairly attacking Elon Musk's genius and the engineering team at SpaceX, the author is correctly lamenting the complete absence of engineering discipline and a culture of rushing to launch without solving all the problems first i.e. "throw money at the problem, move fast and break things!".

Apart from Musks endless hype mongering and over promising, developing anything space based is where history shows that going a bit slow and steady tends to wins the race. Musk is trying to do what he always does: "Move fast and break things!!", his cultists love it and will argue for it being the best way to do anything to their dying breath. What the article is saying is in essence:

50 years ago, we did this. We sent humans to the moon, not once but repeatedly, and brought them back. With less computational power than your phone, using analog systems and slide rules, we achieved feats of incredible precision, reliability and coordination.

According to the American tech elite we are now on the cusp of general AI, a future where all human labor will be obsolete within a decade and 99% of humanity will be 'useless eaters'. One would expect that a breathtakingly intelligent group of people armed with even the precursors of such awesomely advanced AI could design spacecraft that perform reliably with a lot fewer "learning opportunities" (also known as explosions and crashes). The criticism is that this "Move fast and break things!!" attitude of the Silcone Valley is not applicable to the space industry and that maybe the way things were done in the US 50 years ago, which is the same way space systems design is still done elsewhere where people don't have inexhaustible supplies of money to throw at a problem, might be better.

Rather, "not allowed". Sure, my Dell XPS 420, that a friend gave me, is old, but it runs Windows 10 like a champ - though I did replace the HDD with a SSD; I imagine it would run Windows 11 just as well if not for the (arbitrary) hardware "requirements" Microsoft imposed for Windows 11. Same for my other systems. Instead of buying something new(er), I'll be switching to using my Linux Mint 22 system full-time instead - which is also old, but works great (i7-3770, ASRock Z77 Extreme3, 32 GB RAM, Samsung SSD).

No, but they do understand the law, which considers an attempt to monopolize a crime even if unsuccessful.

They also understand that in the context of U.S. antitrust law, Apple's ~58% market share, at roughly twice the size of their next largest competitor (Samsung), is absolutely large enough to make Apple a successful monopolist, and they also understand that Apple is a twice-convicted monopolist — once involving Epic, and once involving the iBooks store — which makes their ongoing behavior worthy of extra scrutiny.

No, no. They're saying that the people who aren't using AI are getting less work because there are fewer jobs, and the people who are using AI are barely keeping up with inflation compared with the pre-AI world.

Good thing SSDs can't be replaced. /s

I had thought about this and was why I initially used Authy as they had a Windows app I could use as my backup/alternate - "had" being the operative word. I've since switched to 2FAS where I can export the data to JSON and manually copy the TOTP seeds into KeePassXC, which runs on Windows, Linux, ... I can also keep encrypted copies (via 2FAS directly or something like AxCrypt) of the 2FAS data where ever I want as well in the Google online backup. Another route would be to stand up a virtual phone/tablet device in something like Android Studio and install a copy of your authenticator app on that -- 2FAS could load the existing data from the online backup.

Actually, it's a pretty common strategy for breaking into the accounts of celebrities. It usually involves convincing someone who works for one of the phone companies that you've gotten a new phone, i.e. they already have enough personal info from you to impersonate you to the phone company. And then after that, all your accounts fall like a house of cards.

I'm assuming this is based on edge cases, e.g. medical images where cancer was just barely starting to appear, situations where lupus is mistaken for rheumatoid arthritis, etc., in which case the human rate of correct diagnosis could indeed be very low, precisely because they were chosen from cases where humans had made mistakes before.

If that is the case, then the question becomes whether the model is over-trained on these edge cases and would generate false positives, would miss obvious diagnoses, etc.

You're assuming companies don't understand that. What you're missing is that the companies that do this tend to be the companies that have their customers over a barrel. You have a choice in where to buy random stuff online. You don't have much choice in airlines. Only a few companies go to both of the airports that you need to fly between. They can screw you as much as they want, and unless you're prepared to lawyer up, you're gonna accept whatever they give you and like it, or you're not gonna fly, because they're all approximately equally horrible.

Ultimately, the reason for bad customer service is that the customer has no power. Short of a class action, you're not going to change their behavior, and they usually write their contracts to make class actions hard. And governments are thoroughly in the pockets of these big corporations, so they're not going to do anything about the problems, either. And there's no competition, because a few big companies have cornered the market, in part because of high cost of entering the market, which in turn, is often because of high regulatory burden. But those regulations are essential for preventing other problems, e.g. safety issues, so removing the regulations won't help, either.

The right fix is to separate the customer-facing organization from the safety-critical organization. Have a few companies that own fleets of airplanes, and a hundred companies that rent planes from those companies and fly them and sell tickets. With that organizational model, all of these problems go away, because the customer-facing orgs have a low barrier to entry, so you'll tend to end up with companies competing to provide the best service at the best price, with some focusing on higher-tier service, and come focusing on lower prices, but everybody knowing that if they screw up, you'll go with one of a hundred other companies. And you'll get a higher diversity of routes, and you'll have aggregators combining routes from multiple airlines, etc.

Unfortunately, we won't see this, because regulators aren't interested in breaking up oligopolies these days.

That depends whether you want your union to be an early 20th century relic or not. Unions can adapt to that kind of a world to. There is no reason thousands of remote workers can't band together, pay into a common union fund and then, for example, use this fund to retain lawyers individual members being kicked around by abusive employers. Then there is the power of unions to lobby national assemblies and governments. Finally, unions can cooperate accross borders as Tesla found out whe they tried to screw Swedish Unions. If corporations can be multinational conglomerates then I don't see why Unions in multiple countries can't cooperate across borders to help workers negotiate with those multinational conglomerates, especially when the latter get abusive.

Ummm .... actually no. The travel habits of the mega rich may be insignificant but that is also the wrong thing to look at. The mega rich have by far the most environmental impact because it's the mega rich that either rent, or outright buy politicians and then use these mindless puppets to set policies and manipulate markets. It's was the mega rich corporate oligarchs that killed off the attempts to popularise electric cars back in the 1990s. The only reason we have sales of BEVs taking off in a big way now is because the world's biggest communist country mandated and end to ICE sales and a transition to BEVs and for our mega rich oligarchs here in the west the choice is now between sink or swim. Similarly the world's biggest communist nation has been a massive driver of renewables and other low carbon footprint energy sources. We would have none of this if these decisions had been up to the western elite of mega rich oligarchs. In fact this mega rich oligarch elite has been and still is stifling climate friendly technologies they are actively stifling innovation and technological progress here in the west on a level that far exceeded what I thought it was before I started regularly traveling to Asia.

I recommend this NOVA episode Arctic Sinkholes (full episode) from Feb 2022, described in the articles below.

- Methane craters documentary highlights rapid Arctic warming
- Nova episode explores Arctic methane explosions