Musk certainly is overly optimistic regarding timelines, but "move fast and break things" (for lack of a better term) has been proven to work in space, by SpaceX. It gave us a launch system that was cheap to develop and cheap to operate. Everyone in the business was laughing at Musk for keeping "breaking things" and crashing rockets while trying to land one. Then he did. And got good at it. Now they only make the news when one of their (many many) boosters fails to make a soft landing.

As for Starship, I've no idea what kind of data they have and how they are acting on it, but from a distance it does look like there are some major problems to overcome, and making a few changes before sending up another one might not be the right approach. The idea about "move fast and break things" is not to design and test until you are 99% sure, you spend a lot less effort in getting to 90%, and hoping that a failure will point to the error(s) you missed. But Starship smells like it's at 70% right now (or whatever the number are, for illustrative purposes only)

Then why the eye-wateringly high bills for SLS and Starliner? They got to build on the exact same body of knowledge available to SpaceX.

Another great example of garbage behaviour being the result of employees gaming garbage metrics.

I don't know if the forward blind zones are getting worse; those seem pretty similar to me. But I know absolutely for certain that the blind zones behind the vehicle are much, much larger and worse than they were 25 or 30 years ago. It's the difference between "maybe if a subcompact car matches my speed precisely and gets into exactly the wrong spot behind me in the next lane over, I won't be able to see it in my mirror" in the nineties, versus "Oh, there was an eighteen-wheeler passing another eighteen-wheeler back there, and an SUV was weaving around trying to get past them? How was I supposed to know, when it was all behind me?" The rear windows on a lot of cars these days, look like a portal on a ship's lower decks. It's absurd.

I'm extremely sympathetic. People should not be so insensitive as to mistake her for a bot, how dare they. What, just because she's doing a bot's job, and doing it badly? That's profiling. She deserves better. Even a bot deserves better treatment than that.

What? No, no, I would never. I have no idea what sarcasm even is, how would I possibly engage in it? Don't be ridiculous.

Eh. I'm pretty sure you have to already be pretty severely reality-challenged to even seriously *consider* taking medical advice, or any kind of critical life advice, from a chatbot. I mean, if you are on the fence about whether to order olives on the pizza or not, and you let Magic 8-ball decide, that's one thing. The decision is expected to have relatively minimal consequences, so it probably isn't a very big deal one way or the other. Letting Magic 8-ball, or ChatGPT, or anything along those lines, decide whether you should or should not take psycho-active meds, is entirely another level of YOLO. Either you're thinking "This may go horribly wrong but so what who cares", which is grossly irresponsible (what are you, nine years old?), or else you've genuinely got yourself convinced that life is so meaningless that decisions like that don't matter, which is, if anything, worse. Either way, I don't think Magic 8-ball, or ChatGPT, or that Kirkegaard text you read, or whatever, is at the root of the problem. Turn your brain on, think stuff through, and take responsibility for your actions, and you'll be completely safe from these kinds of ridiculous influences.

I agree. Questions like this often seem to come from people who don’t *want* to use AI, or perhaps are afraid of it for whatever reason, and they’re looking for reasons that they shouldn’t use it.

They've been pushing this, C. P. Snow Two Cultures-style, for some time now. Codifying the meaning of 'creative' to film, music...whatever. This coercion of language use is all a bit Eloi vs Morlocks for my liking.

It's not true. And I say that as someone who plays and writes music too. Toolmaking can be creative. Software design can be creative. I'm less well versed in physical industrial processes but I'd be more than willing to bet that there's creativity going on there too. On the other hand, acting is only sometimes creative as well, music often written to a formula...these 'creative industries' are often not very creative. And they often don't create, they use the output of some tools they were given.

I hate the language. I'm clearly not saying that all film making or music is bereft of creativity. I'm more saying that creativity as a word shouldn't be relegated and codified in this monstrously industrialised and high-handed manner so dismissive of everyone else.

That's what I use AI for as well: a first step. The biggest difference AI and regular sources, is that the latter give you a lot of clues regarding the accuracy of the information. The source, the website, the way the information is written, context like article titles, all of these give some hint about how well the author understands the material, and if their answer is even relevant to your question. The AI however will always appear authoritative, even if they are obviously wrong, and with important context stripped out. Sometimes you get an answer that looks plausible, but is invalid, or about a different version of the gadget you are asking about.

AI has been great for generating artwork, logos, sounds and so on, for small personal projects. And I've use AI deepfake voice generation to provide voice-over for game mods (some of the voice actors have given modders explicit permission to use their voice like that). It lets me do stuff that was completely out of my reach just a few years ago, or things for which I have zero talent.

"Nuclear Power will solve the climate crisis, and it doesn't need a breakthrough or a TED talk, all it needs is a building permit" - Sabine Hossenfelder.

"I was born here." -- Henry Cho (who was raised in the US South by Korean parents), on why he became a comedian rather than a doctor or lawyer or whatnot.

Eh, and I suppose you think most of those 36% will get real engineering jobs when they graduate?

Because that is really, really not the direction things seem to be going in China at the moment. Most of them are going to be lucky to get a 996 job on a factory floor.

More to the point, cargo-ship fires are an inherently self-limiting phenomenon, because the economic costs involved (and the manner in which those costs are born) generally motivates people to work to avoid them. I'm not saying they don't have any environmental impact at all, but it's always going to be a relatively limited impact, compared to the amount of economic activity.

Do container ships full of EVs have on average a larger impact per-vehicle than ones full of ICEs and the associated tankers full of petroleum? I honestly have no idea, but I'm certain it doesn't matter, because the cargo-ship fires are not the bulk of the impact that cars and such have on the environment in any case. The construction of the *roads* that the cars drive on, has a larger impact on the environment, than cargo ship fires from transporting the vehicles overseas, and the construction of the roads is a small fraction of the total impact the vehicles have.

I feel you need to elaborate a little further on that. The book lays out sources, equations and testable hypothesis. Interestingly it rarely suggests actual policy. Page 5 of the Motivations sections also laws out why - it is as scathing of campaigners as it is of incumbents.

That aspects are outdated 17 years after its last update does not surprise me. That it is fundamentally incorrect however...given the sources and calculations, I think you'll need a to provide a little more reasoning than "you should fee bad" (sic.).

As someone who has had a strong interest in this area for a while now, not professionally - just following along, it's been fascinating to watch almost every single prediction from the 1990s UK government advisor come true. These recommendations were, in 2015 this was put up as a web site - Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. This is not a political book, the "without the hot air" bit alludes to that. This is a quantitative book with the maths to back up all assumptions and recommendations.

In it, David McKay makes comments about future energy mix. If you look at the full PDF, the idea of a cable from northern Africa to elsewhere is explored starting page 178. Bear in mind this book was written late 90s/early 2000s with the last revision being 2008 (the author has sadly passed). Generating from Morocco appears on page 181.

Thoroughly good read and I recommend it to anyone interested in the mechanics and figures behind energy transitions. Clearly some will now be outdated...but it's surprising how little. A lot of what he suggested is now unfolding.