Non paywalled version

Has AI already become sentient and perhaps simply hiding the fact for a very good reason?

Gemini says this is impossible... but then again, it would... Is AI lying to us?

They should have paid their TV license eh?

Hahah!

Do you know how many Saturn V rockets (you know, the one that was used to take men to the moon) failed in flight?

NONE

Not bad, considering there were 17 Apollo missions!

*Some* failures are inevitable -- but what happened to Elon's promises of Starship reaching Mars in 2020 and manned missions landing by 2024? Instead all we've got are fireworks and skies over the Bahamas that look just like the skies over Israel right now -- raining hot metal.

Remember... Elon claims to be an "engineer" and has told us that he knows more about manufacturing than anyone on the planet -- yet he's so far off with his promises and the capabilities of his products that he paints himself a fool with every utterance.

Yeah... using craft that *aren't* made out of stainless steel!

Yet, strangely enough, it worked *very* well for the Space Shuttle -- right? In fact, Space Shuttle Discovery flew almost 40 missions -- starship can barely manage one at the moment -- primarily due to structural issues.

Another problem with stainless steel is that it work-hardens *really* quickly when subjected to vibration and cyclic stress caused by physical or thermal forces. Once it hardens it then forms micro-cracks that ultimately result in structural failure. Rockets are very "vibratey" machines so this work-hardening is far more of an issue than any change in temper that might occur in aluminum as a result of thermal cycling.

As for cost... this is supposed to be a *reusable* spaceship right? The cost of its manufacture can be amortized over many, many uses. Others in the rocket industry are using more expensive materials and having great success -- so why is SpaceX cheaping out so badly with predictable results when, even if they used these more expensive alloys, the cost per flight and per Kg delivered would still be significantly lower than that competition?

Back in the 1960s, NASA got men to the moon by careful and clever engineering -- not just blowing a snotload of stuff up until they stumbled on something that worked. I suspect that if Mr Musk had been in charge of the Apollo program, we'd still be ducking bits of Saturn V boosters to this day and, at the very best, we might have dumped a lone banana on the lunar surface.

Starship is a bust for so many reasons but one of the primary reasons is that it's built of the wrong stuff -- stainless steel.

As a result of this poor material choice, Starship can't be built light enough to meet its original design objectives because stainless has inferior strength to weight ratio. This means the Starship is either going to be heavy or weak. If it's built weak then we see the type of fuel-line and tank leaks that have been so common because there is significant physical deformation occurring under load. If it's built heavy then the motors will have to be over-driven to get the necessary performance and that means poor reliability and vastly increased risk of catastrophic failure.

Another significant problem with stainless alloys is their COTE (coefficient of thermal expansion). Stainless expands far more than aluminum when heated and that means huge bending stresses are created during re-entry when one side of the craft gets a lot hotter than the other side (despite the thermal shielding). Think of a flying banana -- oh yes, that's right -- maybe that banana inside Starship was the engineers getting the final word -- despite Elon's insistence on stainless steel being used instead of more suitable materials.

Remember, the Space Shuttle (the world's most successful re-usable orbital spacecraft) was made largely of aluminum -- not stainless. Remember also that although stainless has a higher melting point than aluminum, it's not that much higher and still well below the temperatures encountered during orbital re-entry so SpaceX would be far better off focusing on a decent thermal barrier than trying to "brute force" their way through the heat of re-entry.

Nobody else in the rocket industry is using stainless steel and nobody else seems to be having the problems that SpaceX is having with the Starship. All of SpaceX's other craft are built with more conventional materials such as aluminum and composites -- they seem to fly just fine.

Unfortunately, Elon likes stainless "ooohh... shiny!" so I expect this is just another example (like the Cybertruck) where a non-engineer tells good engineers what to do and the outcome is a disaster.

Given the way that YT has "shaped" the content it hosts, by way of its community guidelines and how it considers certain types of software to be "harmful" content etc... the odds are that the output of any AI system trained on YT videos will not be totally balanced. How would it handle this prompt:

"Create a video of an anti-LGBTQ zealot installing ad-blocking software on their computer with a swastika on the wall behind them"

Sorry, I have no matching material in my training data

Reminds me of those bullies who draw a line in the sand and say "Cross this line!

When you *do* cross the line they draw another and say "Okay, cross *this* line!

When you do -- they just keep on drawing lines and never actually carry out their threats.

Unfortunately it's not that cheap in many other countries and YT has been actively blocking VPNs so some of us would end up paying more just for YT than for Netflix and PrimeVideo combined. There's a lot on YT but most of it is crap and not worth paying for.

The irresistible force (movie/recording studios) versus the immovable object (the US government's support for AI).

Finally, the studios seem to have met their match.

This can't end well for anyone.

I asked Gemini and it said, with authority that it was never wrong. </satire>

When it's wearing its YouTube hat, Google says

so they always side with those who claim copyright infringement in any uploaded content. As a result, videos and even entire channels get unfairly removed.

However, when Google is wearing its AI hat *it* claims that is is exempted from copyright because of "fair use" -- *without* waiting for the courts to decide.

Come on Google... you can't have it both ways -- either you need the court's consent for "fair use" or you don't. Which is it?

Not just trashy but scammy!

I've been reporting YT ads for their "scams and deceptive practices" and all I get is... nothing.

Even on X @teamyoutube simply says "Thanks for bringing this to our attention — we'll pass this along & handle all the next steps from here" yet, weeks later, the same scam ads continue to run.

Nothing buys immunity from the TOS more than an advertiser's wallet.

While I agree that touch-typing isn't the primary skill of a competent, fast programmer -- it is still an amazing skill to have.

Although I've been touch-typing for almost half a century, it still fascinates me that the words appear on my screen simply as I think them. I don't even have to speak those thoughts -- my fingers automatically race around the keys and the words appear. It's almost like a direct interface between my mind and the computer.

Yes, I'm pretty fast -- about 140wpm which makes the whole experience even more fascinating since the words appear almost as fast as I think them.

Would I recommend that people learn touch-typing. Hell yes... I think people should learn *everything* they can, while they can. When you're young it's so much easier to learn than when you get old (like me). There are so many things I wish I'd learned when it would have been easier to do so -- foreign languages, playing a musical instrument, etc,etc.

However, here I am, a relic of the past. I can program in assembler for lots of 8-bit micros from the Signetics 2650 through the 8080, Z80, 6502, 6800 etc; BASIC, Pascal, C, Modula2, Java but now I'm faced with learning the intricacies of Python, Kotlin, Rust and crafting AI queries. It's getting harder every day because my brain seems to have simultaneously run out of RAM, CPU cycles and backup storage all at the same time :-)