You don't think China and other countries haven't done this too? The elites worldwide will have access to AI with the sum of human knowledge. While you guys lose your jobs to robots.
China also locks its citizens up in reeducation camps for disagreeing with the government. Do you want to copy that too? At some point we'll have to decide whether we want to live under the rule of law or be ridden over roughshot by the rich and/or powerful.
Cancer Death Rates Fall One-Third in US Since 1990s as Prevention Efforts Take Hold
On the flip side, contagious disease rates are increasing sharply as Trump administration charges forward with systematically dismantling vaccination efforts under the banner of dumbfuck.
I don't think Starmer was in power in 2022
Stop ruining his deeply held beliefs with
OK Mr Starmer. Laugh it off, pay $600k per Afghan (using others' money of course) and live your best life until karma catches up. Meanwhile Brits are suffering the most massive decline in living standards in decades, unable to afford food or heating in winter.
Well, I know it sucks but you can't just argue that people who helped UK forces fight terrorists should be left behind to be murdered by the Taliban as a cost saving measure. The only reason this is necessary is because the Tories made these people's names public back in 2022, that and Trump/Biden comprehensively messing up the Afghanistan withdrawal but it was mostly the former. This operation would cost a fraction of what it does today if the Tories hadn't published that list of names. I don't particularly like Starmer but in this particular case he really is doing nothing other than cleaning up a classic garden variety Tory mess here and Tory/Reform-UK muppets like you taking the piss out of him for it really is the pot calling the kettle black.
This isn't a price tag. This is the cost of running a covert operation to exfiltrate thousand of people in government aircrafts. But it does not mean this huge value was paid to someone in particular. Mostly it's accounting for the cost of their army to fly their own aircraft. Maybe they account for the salary of the soldiers who took part. But those soldiers would have been paid anyway. Maybe they account for the depreciation of the aircraft. But if the aircraft was not really damaged then it's not really a cost.
This operation would also not have cost anything close to this much if Trump and Biden hadn't messed up the Afghanistan withdrawal so spectacularly. That being said, respect to the British who, for all the incompetence surrounding this operation, are at least finally exfiltrating these people instead of having ICE hunt them down and returning them to the Taliban for execution like Trump is doing. I expect a large portion of the cost is bribing Taliban officials to not murder these people after the Tories released their names on the open internet.
> do not expect the slowdown to apply in other scenarios, such as for junior engineers or engineers working in codebases they aren't familiar with
If the juniors are working with the same code base, with the same AI that makes same incorrect suggestions which seniors reject and if AI is not slowing juniors down, doesn't that mean that juniors will accept the changes made by AI and pollute the code with wrong decisions?
I could very well imagine AI helping me to get a handle on/oversight over code bases that I'm not familiar with as well as really huge codebases where I'm familiar some parts but don't know every nook and cranny, or for insanity inducing tasks like finding memory leaks and heisenbugs but in terms of helping me code I'm not so sure. That sounds like a crutch that might be good for junior developers until they outgrow it. But why are we even talking about this? Aren't we all about to be replaced by ninja level prompt engineers straight out of primary school?
Getting high solar output during summer is nice, but they're getting 15-20 hours of daily sunlight in the higher latitudes. It'll be interesting to see the solar number in mid-Winter, when the days are 6 hours long and the sun is low on the horizon. I suspect coal use will ramp up to keep the lights on and the heat pumps running.
Northern Europe has a lot of wind turbines, and the winds are stronger in winter.
On top of that N-Europe (Blue) also has a lot of hydroelectric and in some regions geothermal power. I'm afraid MAGA drones will not be deriving any enjoyment from seeing the lights in N-Europe go out next winter because the sun ain't shining nor will they see coal use ramping up because nobody in N-Europe uses any significant amounts of coal.
So is a person wrong because they had multiple kids with multiple moms and supports them or had one kid and left it for dead with the mother?
My experience with guys who have multiple kids with multiple women is that they are selfish toxic assholes who whine and complain about having to pay child support for all their other kids because their pay is hardly enough to support their latest kid and baby-mama. Why, baby-mama number 5 is now married some other guy, why can't her new husband just pay for the two kids that you made with her before cheating on her and running off with baby-mama number 6?? Neither of the assholes you describe is an example worth following when trying to be a real man.
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)
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!".
I thought SpaceX WAS doing pretty well and wa sbeing rather cost-effective so far?
What am I missing?
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.
tech workers need to go union!
The demand for remote work undercuts any power unions had. A union's power is based on the ability to project power locally. Whether that is locking up a talent pool or deterring non-union replacement workers. With remote work they have zero ability to apply such pressure. The remote worker is beyond their knowledge or reach, sitting anonymously in their distant home.
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.
Elites who lecture you about climate change took 90 private jets (or super-yachts) to Jeff Bezos' wedding https://notthebee.com/article/...
Look. The mega-rich aren't without blame. Granted. But it's a counter-productive point. Why? Because the environmental impact of those individuals is minuscule compared to us normies en mass. There are 45,000 passenger flights per day handled by the FAA. Statistically, mathematically, factually... those 90 flights don't matter.
Ummm
If I can choose between using metric for everything and using a mishmash of metric and other arcane measurement systems I'm going to choose pure metric every time.
And yet, your country also uses a mushmash of metric and other arcane measurement systems. So you're trying to blame other people for what you yourself are doing.
What country would that be?
Seriously though, nearly every country in the world uses non-metric local units sometimes. In China they use li. In Japan they use inches to measure TVs. Probably in Germany, too.
Yes, but the point was that very, very few countries use a non metric system as their primary measurement system because they just don't see a point in making their lives unnecessarily complicated. If I can choose between using metric for everything and using a mishmash of metric and other arcane measurement systems I'm going to choose pure metric every time.
The typical page layout program is nothing more than an electronic light table for cutting and pasting documents.
