Wait ... it gets hotter the more "red" politics we have. And cooler when we have more "blue" politics. Hmmmmm .....

AI slop now making your games even better! Joy!

This is not the NASA of old, say, the Apollo days. Things have changed. There were good changes (just watch "Hiidden Figures"), and not so good ones. The shuttle losses had all sorts of impacts.

Overall, NASA is still kept afloat by many inspired and invested people who go above and beyond to make the mission happen. But NASA is also a lot more sclerotic and bureaucratic than it used to be. There are a lot of one-hatters. A lot of people who ride their hobby horse but nothing else. Not enough real (!) accountability, paired with an unreasonable amount of paperwork. Risk management sometimes going haywire (in either direction, too much or too little). DOGE did not help, a lot of good people left, and some (if not even too many) of the wrong people stayed.

With all that on the menu, its no surprise that NASA is somewhat of a shadow of its former self. One of the early reasons for people to join SpaceX was recapturing that old NASA engineering spirit. I get it - not that SpaceX seems like a healthy place to work at.

Throw into the mix that "space" has become even more political (always has been), NASA management is trying to play a weird game of pleasing everybody and offending nobody while having not nearly enough money to do this, adding all the things politicians want it to do (without funding it properly), and often an apparent disregard inside NASA HQ as to what is going on in the real world (including NASA itself and other agencies) - and you get strange outcomes.

I am not surprised that NASA goes ahead with this launch. I am pretty sure that they feel "we must beat China" at all cost, and whether that is really wise or not will not be considered, in the end. I suppose others are correct. It will likely be going well (defining success as the absence of failure?), we will declare victory - and the fact that this was primarily riding on fumes and a prayer will bite (and potentially kill) some other crew later. Not my kind of risk mitigation ....

I wish them luck. The astronauts know what they are getting themselves into, at least. It will be plenty cool. If risky ...

If Chatbots are better than ads (or people???) in swaying voter opinions, then this tells you more about the people than the bots.

I for one find Chatbots massively annoying. When "Cluesss" has a child with "Overly Friendly" you get a chatbot. Makes you long for a real person on the phone - and those are usually bad until you can escalate your phone call several levels. But in a way that tells me that companies are correct - it's a waste of money to have a human on the phone when clearly the chatbot does a "better job" - and to me that reflects poorly on the callers, not the company.

Seems to me this idea falls short. Should not consciousness be tied to the ability to experience pain, not be able to entirely remove that pain? More abstract, should consciousness not have to suffer the consequences of its actions?

I'd be much happier (or less unhappy) with a general AI that is not allowed to act and "think" in a consequence-free world, that has to suffer for its deeds. Ideal? Probably not. But a start ....

And, unlike last time, there really *is* no money to save this industry. Just sayin', the Social Security Trust Fund will be in the red no later than 2030. A lot more people will care about that than AI when that arrives at our doorsteps ... not that we have not known for decades.

So yes, the bubble will pop, the useful part of "AI" will survive, the U.S. will be in recession, we all loose a shiny and "free" toy.

Moving on ...

That gives "it is in the cloud" a new meaning. Oh, wait: it went up in smoke! Hmmmm ....

Two quotes:

"How hard can it be?" & "What could *possibly* go wrong?"

'Nuff said.

I typically challenge "AI" when it gives incorrect answers. And the outcome is quite predictable: "Of course, you are right, I made a mistake .. blah blah blah." It is comical, and it reminds me at every turn not to trust the answers.

So rather than sycophant I would say push-over .... just one data point, though a consistent one.

The problem is: what should you learn? How do you learn it? How do you know what is "right", "true", etc.

I consider myself lucky. I was schooled before the WWW became a thing, I remember the "invention" of the PC. I am used to books and reading. To me, that is a massive advantage.

As a result, "AI" becomes a useful tool. I use it to save time, or to occasionally get new ideas. But I am very aware that it is a problematic, faulty tool. Younger generations have it much harder here ...

The bigger problem may well be that we have no clue what to teach, and how to teach it. That has always been true, but AI, the WWW, social media and other stuff just makes this a lot harder now.

I let me students use AI all they want. But I also tell them to be critical. And I create problems where AI has a good chance of fail quite spectacularly. It pays to work in niches ;-)

In the end you can wallpaper over cracks, but it is still wallpaper.

Disclosure: not a professional coder here (although I code a lot for scientific data analysis).

Hear me out: I totally get that "vibe coding" can (and should) be a scary proposition for professional coders. Not talking job security, I am talking code quality and code reliability. You know better that I ever will why this is generally a bad idea.

But: for most people on this planet, computers are an appliance. And the entry threshold to writing useful code is pretty high. Now, I would assume that even with perfect vibe coding, it will be pretty hard to get code that does what you intend it to do (and that is assuming vibe coding writes good code). As I always say: computers do what you tell them to do, not what you *think* you told them to do. Big difference. Still, could it not be, shall we say, liberating if more people could create useful code if they were able to provide clear instructions? Just sayin' ...

Yeah, and Outlook does not synchronize with Teams properly, and Teams meetings may or may not work properly depending on the phase of the Moon, and teams is _really_ bad on the iPad, and you never know where files are in Teams (in Chat, Sharepoint?, and I have to click so many times to get what I want, and even more to download it) and on and on and on.

I marvel at Microsoft to turn what already has been a raging dumpster fire into a much bigger combined CF/dumpster fire. That takes skill and a lot of resources! Chapeau! At this point I am especially critical of Teams which, with luck, works maybe 90% if the time. I often wonder whether it is actually controlled by gremlins/China/Russia, and not Microsoft.

Nuff' said. I am just amazed people pay for this & companies flock to it ....

Ha ha ha!

Does this mean AI only needs a single brain cell??

"The basic issue is that Disney was never particularly interested in running FiveThirtyEight as a business, even though I think it could have been a good business."

It does not take Superhero powers to figure out that small business like 538 do not typically thrive under the umbrella of big businesses like that. They are peanuts to them, and if typically does not even matter if they are good. I am sorry for the people who put their hearts into it, but maybe people will learn from this .... Nah, who am I kidding?