Would you believe, so they can be used as an energy storage system?

It's actually a pretty good idea, but only if you can keep the command-and-control system secure.

Alas, it's historically been easy for people to slip into a mindset of "no hacker would ever know or care about OUR little system, because [reasons]", and use that as a justification for ignoring security concerns altogether.

Of course that's never really been the case, but now that any bozo with $200 in their pocket can just pay an AI to find every possible security hole and report back, it's REALLY not the case.

Outright hostility, you say? I can't imagine how that came about.

It's quite possible; OTOH having drones flying over our nuclear plants isn't something we should feel blase about. Maybe a drone swarm can't do much actual damage to a nuclear plant, but the fact that people are flying drones (deliberately or accidentally) in a restricted area is bad news all by itself; it suggests either complete ignorance of the law, or bad intentions.

Why not boost the ISS instead of de-orbiting it? Is it because it's just too old to keep safe for human habitation, regardless of what orbit it's in?

This month: Everybody meet Paddy! He's going to use AI to rewrite all of our legacy software for practically free!
Next month: Our AI initiative has failed, entirely due to Paddy's incompetence. Please escort him from the building immediately and make sure he never works here again.

Nah, that would be gauche. Instead, we implement the cap relativity-style, where your tax rate increases proportional to the amount of money you've made already. As you keep making money, you asymptotically approach the financial "speed of light" but can never quite get there because in order to actually reach it you'd need to earn an infinite amount of money.

vim is the reason I had to give on up using a Dvorak keyboard and switch back to Qwerty. It turns out I'm quite capable of typing text in Dvorak, but relearning the muscle-memory for all the different vim operations was a bridge too far :(

Perhaps, but in this case the real pressure comes from having to justify multiple trillions of dollars of debt, using a technology whose actual scope of applicability is much smaller than you've been leading investors to believe. You can practically see the flop-sweat at this point.

Well, dude did go ahead and do that. Whether it's a useful approach is certainly debatable, but since there's a working prototype, anyone can test it and find out.

They can certainly write code, but the code they write will be "their code", and I will at best be reviewing it for them. It won't be "my code" because I didn't write it.

It's not as important as you might think. If the concern is humanity being able to survive the loss of Earth's biosphere, then the enabling technology to accomplish that is recreating an independently sustainable human-compatible biosphere elsewhere -- which is not something that Starship, on its own, will be able to do within the next 20 years, even if it could place human beings on Mars. So if the Giant Space Asteroid comes for us, we'll be just as doomed with Starship as without it -- the Mars colonists would starve to death a few months after the Earth resupply ships stopped arriving.

Assuming all goes well, I agree. OTOH, returning old equipment back into service after it had been written off is a little risky, don't you think?

It's perfectly possible to build a machine that will incapacitate a human at close range; all of the world's militaries have been doing it for years.

It's also possible to deliberately dial down the machine's combat effectiveness to the point where a fight against a human might not be a foregone conclusion.

OTOH, having done the latter, what have we learned? That we can design and build a robot that we nerfed just enough that it usually loses in hand-to-hand combat?

As they say, what's remarkable isn't that the dog plays a good game of poker; it's that the dog is able to play poker at all.