Manned missions have always been a budgeting headache because they take a lot of money, a lot of time, and a consistent Congress, the last one rarer than the Holy Grail. US unmanned probes are more often on budget and have been quite successful overall.

("Manned" sounds misogynistic, but "humanned" and "peopled" sound awkward.)

...why focus on just AI? Liars have been around since the dawn of speech, and long before that if we include creatures who mock sounds and looks to trick prey.

But it will generate generations of buzzwords for salespeople to dupe clueless managers with. It's a sales efficiency algorithm. It's like greatly improving on a traveling salesperson algorithm, but by using deeper bullshit instead of better routes.

Hypercard influenced VB, one of the most most productive dev tools ever. We somehow de-evolved into bloated buggy learning-curve-heavy web stacks. Ooga Booga.

Most of the complaints about VB-like tools are fixable, but too few bothered to apply some R&D, instead throwing the baby out with the web water, giving us fucked up frameworks on top of the brain-damaged DOM and CSS. You humans are doing it wrong.

Git off my productive lawn, you wormy little buzzword fuckers!

Thatâ(TM)s why the OS has protections to limit each appâ(TM)s access to data from other apps. Allow side-loading, but require multiple warnings to install any app that doesnâ(TM)t participate in sandboxing. Make it scary enough that nobody installs non-sandboxed apps unless they are backup apps, and even then, only after carefully vetting the source.

Whenever amateurs and tinkerers use "low code" or Rapid App tools* to create apps, almost 90% turn into maintenance headaches in my experience. They "mostly work" up front, but either the original author leaves, or the app grows into too big a mess for the original author to fix.

The user group calls in the formal IT team to fix it, and then get angry when the formal IT team says, "they didn't use standard practices, made poor documentation, and we are not familiar with their tool". I expect AI "solutions" to be similar.

Formal IT groups are becoming orphanages. Now a rash of AI latchkey orphans are on their way...

Always remember, making the baby is the easy and fun part.

* Such tools don't inherently have to be bad, but in the hand of amateurs they usually are.

this won't end well, pun half-intended

not very resilient after all

They are "resealant" misspelled.

Probably because they are big enough to survive while a merger or acquisition is negotiated. It's the quiet way to die.

white-space: pre-wrap;

How about this, then: It fills a niche, but it is full of bad decisions (and fragmentation), and survives mainly by its existing momentum. It's crap in the same sense that Unix is crap: the founder effect has made its flaws impossible to dislodge or rethink.

A popular solution to a problem is not necessarily a good solution to that problem.

Sure, if you want it to become an unusable cesspool. If you just hate YouTube and want to kill it, this is the way. Same with any other site that hosts user-provided content -- if it's popular and unmoderated it will become a hellscape in short order.

The buy-now-pay-later services being used are zero interest as long as payments are made on time, so it could just be a case of people who are living paycheck to paycheck (which indicates bad financial management more than poverty) using this to smooth out their expenses so they don't have to wait for their paycheck to be able to buy groceries. It could be a significant improvement for those who used to occasionally use payday loans (which are not zero interest). These people would be better off adjusting their spending habits to maintain a buffer of their own cash instead, but if they aren't going to do that BNPL is a better option than waiting for payday before buying food or using a payday loan service.

But obviously the only reason these by-now-pay-later services are in business is because some of their customers fail to make the zero-interest payments and end up having to pay interest, and this number is high enough to make them profitable. It would be very interesting to find out what that percentage is. People who are paying interest on regular purchases like groceries are throwing money away, which is clearly bad.

So, zero new products.

"software that doesn't allow you to shoot yourself in the foot if you're determined"

I can think of some: Retail video game console operating systems.