Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

Well, dude did go ahead and do that. Whether it's a useful approach is certainly debatable, but since there's a working prototype, anyone can test it and find out.

They can certainly write code, but the code they write will be "their code", and I will at best be reviewing it for them. It won't be "my code" because I didn't write it.

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

It's not as important as you might think. If the concern is humanity being able to survive the loss of Earth's biosphere, then the enabling technology to accomplish that is recreating an independently sustainable human-compatible biosphere elsewhere -- which is not something that Starship, on its own, will be able to do within the next 20 years, even if it could place human beings on Mars. So if the Giant Space Asteroid comes for us, we'll be just as doomed with Starship as without it -- the Mars colonists would starve to death a few months after the Earth resupply ships stopped arriving.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now?

No, each kid needs to get an X ("The Everything App") account.

Normally, you don't license media (whether it's digital or analog is irrelevant). That CD or tape or vinyl record is sold, such that you own that copy. Title is transferred just exactly the same as how title is transferred when you buy (not license) a loaf of bread, or a screwdriver, or a book. (WARNING: Though I say "normally," what's normal does change. I'm aware that a lot of people use proprietary streaming to consume media now, instead of playing locally-stored purchased copies, and those people likely did agree to a licensing contract rather than purchasing anything.)

But with software, they've been claiming that a piece of paper that they inserted into the box, retroactively causes the sale to not have really happened, even though the information that the sale was a fraud, is hidden inside the box until after the fraud has been perpetrated. The customer thinks they bought the box rather than licensed it.

There was some monumental decision reinforcing this a while back. I'm not sure this is the best example, but it's well-illustrated in this decision in favor of Blizzard against a cheatbot named Glide, where the judge supports the outrageous assertion that WoW purchasers actually did not purchase what they thought they purchased. And then instead of throwing Blizzard's executives into prison for a decade to deter future fraud, he found in their favor instead. Dirty judge. He actually fucking says this:

section 3 of the EULA provides that Blizzard explicitly retains title to “all copies” of the game client software

[emphasis mine]

For whatever reason, nobody's tried that outside of software (that I know of). I still haven't seen a EULA packed in a loaf of bread or a music CD case. But maybe some day....?

You wouldn't necessarily be wrong to expect this form of fraud to happen some day, so perhaps you're right that Congress should nip it in the bud ASAP. Sure, ok. But Congress is normally reactive so it also makes sense they're seeing it just as software problem. None of their constituents are complaining about media companies defrauding them, just software companies.

Assuming all goes well, I agree. OTOH, returning old equipment back into service after it had been written off is a little risky, don't you think?

It's perfectly possible to build a machine that will incapacitate a human at close range; all of the world's militaries have been doing it for years.

It's also possible to deliberately dial down the machine's combat effectiveness to the point where a fight against a human might not be a foregone conclusion.

OTOH, having done the latter, what have we learned? That we can design and build a robot that we nerfed just enough that it usually loses in hand-to-hand combat?

As they say, what's remarkable isn't that the dog plays a good game of poker; it's that the dog is able to play poker at all.

More people should spend more time trying to enjoy their own lives instead of obsessing over what other people are doing

I mistook your sig for a final paragraph in your post, and did a double-take!

Reading other people's code is a big part of how I learned to do things. I enjoyed Abacus' "Anatomy of the Commodore 64" for it's commented disassembly of the C64 ROMs. But it was easy for that to make sense, because it had been written in assembly language.

But once you're looking at to binaries compiled from higher-level languages, it gets more complicated to .. uh .. recreate the original intent.

Now they got computers to do that? Fuck yeah!

But this is a count-in too. He even wrote the first line of the song for you.

Shitstorm because of AI
The computer is making me cry
Hallucination's a bitch
But they say it'll make me rich
[first guitar solo]

As methods for by suicide-by-wealth go, it's classier than drugs, and more accessible than a carbon-fiber submarine. I predict we'll see some pretty spectacular Youtube videos of people making themselves (and their car) two-dimensional.