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Comment Re:The American Dream (Score 1) 15

The way to do it is to drum up hype for some fantastic product or service, but disclose enough uncertainties to make it a long shot. With enough hype, enough buzzwords and slick videos, and a few big ticket celebs to endorse your launch, investors will still come. They figure it as a high risk/high reward deal, they have several on the go and hope that one or two of them will pay off to make up for all the others that fail. When your business inevitably fails, you'll have extracted enough money for yourself from it (there's several ways), and your investors will chalk it up as just another loss on something they didn;t do sufficient due diligence on.

Outright lying about your product though... that's bad enough and opens you up to prosecution. But lying about the numbers? That is a big no-no... They will come after you for that, with a vengeance.

Comment Re: Time to resurrect the old meme... (Score 1) 249

The dollar being the reserve currency of choice is one thing, what really matters is that oil is traded around the world in dollars. That effectively expands the dollar economy by trillions, and is what allows more dollars to be printed without affecting inflation. Once countries stop selling or paying for oil in dollars, that's when the currency will crash and burn for real.

Comment Re:Erm... (Score 1) 163

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)

Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 248

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.

Comment Re:Their tech doesn't work (Score 4, Insightful) 110

Humans drive into stationary emergency vehicles all the time. Self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be a bit better than humans. In the end it'll come down to insurance companies*, and they'll just look at the numbers. There will be a point where insurers will charge you extra if you have a steering wheel and pedals fitted.

*) in sane legal systems, where a robotaxi manufacturer can't just be sued for millions just because someone died; the plaintiff would have to show gross negligence. For the rest: liability would lie with the robotaxi operator or owner, through their insurance. Just as is the case now.

Comment Re:Told you (Score 3, Interesting) 363

Instead of the clunky ICE drivetrain with an electric motor bolted on, I'd rather have that in reverse: a fully electric drive train (with a full size battery), combined with a small petrol generator that can be enabled to extend the vehicle's range. The advantages: much simpler construction, the engine can be kept small and light, and always runs at the optimum RPM, saving gas. There are a few cars with range extenders already, and when enabled they can almost double the range of the car, but sadly most offerings only have a shitty little EV battery that doesn't have much range to begin with.

Comment Re:They already know (Score 1) 28

They might even have conducted their own experiments already, and set the lights accordingly. To maximize profits of course, not to encourage responsible gambling. The casino manager's reaction to: "It is possible that simply dimming the blue in casino lights could help promote safer gambling behaviors" would have been "MOAR BLUE!"

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