The bigger problem will be manhole covers on suburban streets. These will get sucked out of the road not only wrecking your Tesla but likely also endangering the traffic behind you. You can bet that this feature will be geofenced and only available on approved racetracks --which, for 99% of buyers, simply makes it useless and expensive payload.

Not quite. The knitting club for the love of knitting can still do their thing. Because they sit around with each other and knit*. The reverse engineering club would be similar. Get a bunch of people in front of a white board and it becomes pretty evident who knows what they are doing and who is presenting someone (something) else's work.

*And gossip about all the neighbors.

IIRC, there have been a few incidents involving BlueTooth controlled personal .... er, um .... appliances. Which a woman (in most cases) wears and her partner can control remotely. But they have been "taken over" by third parties, hacking into the connection.

At any rate, if one chooses to wear such a thing, beware of the PFY sitting in the corner booth, having entirely too much fun with his iPhone.

This would not have happened if the robot was programmed in Rust.

Doesn't apply to me either. I have Xfinity and nobody would want to share that.

The launch was a circus that PT Barnum would have been proud of.

A handful of specially built show-pony-cars that are ultra-light, only "flew" once (because they probably didn't have a big enough battery onboard to recharge those gas cylinders) and were the ultimate in Musk-level deceptions.

I'm going to do a full technical breakdown of all the reasons why what we saw was 100 percent marketing and why we will *never* see a Roadster 2 with the claimed specifications ever hit the market -- the laws of physics may be inconvenient but ignoring them is not an option.

What we saw in that demo was Musk, once again, coming up with a clever way to get hundreds of millions (perhaps more) of interest-free funding from people who slept through science classes in highschool. What's even more amazing is that this is the *second* time he's promised unrealistic deliveries, taken hundreds of millions in "reservations" and failed to deliver.

PT Barnum was so right.

And Musk also said "Manned colonies on Mars by 2024" and "Hyperloop" and "Fast transit tunnels beneath cities" and "Solar roof tiles" and a whole lot of other stuff to which the laws of physics and his engineers said "nope".

It's not the launch or even the jump that will be the problem... it's landing a 2+ ton car that is descending from several hundred feet above its apex and this has significant vertical speed. Even the gas-thrusters may have their work cut out for them :-)

No word about the real-world range of the Roadster 2.

I find it interesting that Musk can create a show-pony car that does cool tricks that nobody would ever allow on a road-legal car but he fails to address the elephant in the room: "How far will it go on a charge?"

Why did he ignore this crucial aspect of any EV?

Easy, because he originally claimed 1000Km and it is much easier to get a lightweight show-car to do jumping tricks than it is to deliver a real-world essential such as decent range.

The Roadster we saw in the display is just a stunt-car, road-legal production vehicles will be just another fast EV.

If people want to risk quarter of a million dollars reserving one then only one phrase springs to mind:

"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me".

... are where many people go to get Internet service. Between crappy broadband and spotty 5G service, it's all they have left.

And lest you think that this is a problem primarily of rural areas, I can drive by Bill Gates mansion on my way to work and flip him off.

... creates a situation wherein I must follow him around with a little plastic bag. It's not my dogs fault, it's mine. I wanted the mutt and it's the price I must pay.

Think about when Dick Cheney had his pacemaker wireless functions disabled. Sure would have been a problem if it had enough of a local model to demand being reconnected to the collective. If it has this capability, it doesn't need to "allege" anything.

Sort of a replay of what made "The Cloud" relevant*. Sure, the heavy duty apps are best run on the big models on hyperscale hardware. And the color-changing ligh tbulbs can just sit there, running a small model locally. But the big operators need the volume to make their investment pay. Hence, things like Microsoft 365. Bring stuff that we can run on the desktop back into our data center. And we'll run your light bulbs to keep our utilization figures up as well.

But I still think there's an element of fear attached to that self-replicating idea. Fear your light bulb. You don't know what it might be up to in the dark.

*And before then, it was the PC versus the company mainframe.

Yes. I can feel Microsoft's hands on my shoulders already. Shame they won't let me turn around.

Distributed computing. Like SETI@home. Your color-changing lightbulb might not be able to host the entire model. But there are a lot of lightbulbs in your neighborhood.

Because the LLMs are self assembling a mesh network. Not every node needs agency, only the peripheral nodes. Like someone's pacemaker. Do what we want or your granny gets The Big One!

They have realized that society is becoming ill at ease over AI. And they are creating a safety net for themselves.