Indeed. Popularity is a shitty metric.

By Stack Overflow's "Logic" then McDonalds must be #1 because BILLIONS are served.

Popularity != Quality. i.e. Javascript, Python, and PHP are clusterfucks of bad design.

Customers don't care what language you implemented the solution in -- they just want shit to work.

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Path of Exile 2 is an incomplete, boring, tedious, Ruth Souls-lite grindfest.

Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.

Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.

How much do biofuels cost? What regulations are oil companies asking for that keep them from happening?

It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.

Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.

The real problem with biodiesel would be its impact on agriculture and food prices. Ethanol for fuel has driven global corn prices up, which is good for farmers but bad in places like Mexico where corn is a staple crop. Leaving aside the wildcat homebrewer types who collect restaurant waste to make biodiesel, the most suitable virgin feedstocks for biodiesel on an industrial scale are all food crops.

As for its technical shortcomings, if it even makes any economic sense at all then that's a problem for the chemists and chemical engineers. I suspect biodiesel for its potential environmental benefits wouldn't attract serious investment without some kind of mandate, which would be a really bad thing if you're making it from food crops like oil seeds or soybeans.

I'm curious how you peel off marketing at a company that is really playing two, perhaps three, entirely different games of it in parallel; some of which are actually closely aligned with real techical work.

There's the consumer facing stuff; 'intel inside' stickers and sponsoring overclocking influencers and whatnot. Probably aligns with some poking at engine and middleware vendors to make sure that the characteristics Intel adds to their chips are catered to, whether that be new instructions or not behaving pathologically on heterogeneous cores; but it's not obvious that terribly close coordination would be needed; and (while I sincerely doubt that Accenture will end up being good value) it's easiest to imagine a more weakly coupled consumer marketing effort off doing its thing.

The marketing to low-information institutional buyers (like the now-infamous slide deck about "hey howdy purchasing managers; did you know that sometimes Core i3 is newer and better even though Ryzen 5 has bigger number; which seem unpossible?) is presumably also viable to farm out in its most basic form; but presumably requires some fairly detailed(and potentially contentious, since those have their own interests to look after) coordination with the PC OEMs unless they just want it to be some slightly goofy talking points for dealing with people who buy computers the same way they buy commodity reagents and paper towels.

The marketing to higher-information institutional customers seems like it would lean heavily technical pretty quickly. There's some lightweight stuff aimed at IT director Bob who remembers when he 'knew computers' hands on 30 years ago and continues to read about it at a high-ish level in industry trade magazines and whitepapers; but it fairly quickly gets somewhat meatier in terms of the OEM and ISV assisting/cajoling required to ensure that the vague sense that nobody ever got fired for specifying Intel, the compatible and validated high performance solution for your critical business requirements, remains at least reasonably true; and gets straight into inserting real engineers to talk to other people's real engineers in order to get what you want from emerging OCP specs; ensure that QAT and AES-NI and such are considered relevant to networking performance, that telcos with vRAN problems actually consider AVX to be a part of the solution; and so on. Maybe you can peel off the part that's just faff and vibes for IT Director Bob; but it seems like people would notice if Intel's OCP people were replaced by random Accenture dudes.

Finally you've got the relationship with the OEMs; which definitely has some pure marketing stuff(like the various 'incentives' for advertising OEM systems if they were intel based); but in large part(especially if Intel actually wants to make money, not just discount their way into volume) relies on some largely technical things being true: "we can supply the complete, mature, solution for a thin-and-light from consumer to enterprise; while AMD is busy trying to munge shit together with Mediatek and ASMedia and Realtek" is a simple enough marketing message; but its continued viability can only be sustained by charisma for so long: it has to actually bet true that your CPU/iGPU is at least acceptable enough to not scuttle sales; that your CNVio2 wifi saves money, or is at least a wash, vs. the competitor's m.2 PCIe while being as good or better; that an intel i219 or i225 will be dead reliable and allow AMT enablement for the corporate buyers while AMD is messing around with Realtek's DASH firmware; that the OEM will get actual engineering support if Intel Smart Sound Technology isn't or if they need to deal with some ACPI fuckery that is ruining battery life. It's not like there would be no marketing people involved in spreading the message; but that seems like something more or less wholly inseparable(without drastic damage) from internal, relatively core, technical teams.

Obviously, in a trivial sense, you can always farm something out in the sense of paying someone else to pay people to do things rather than just paying those same people to do those same things directly; but unless your payroll and HR departments are fucked up beyond words you are unlikely to save money by just adding that sort of intermediary; so presumably they have something more in mind. I'm just not sure how it is supposed to work.

If you are just doing low-information vibes marketing that seems pretty readily farmed out; but that's also the sort of thing that is(or ought to be) comparatively cheap; while the more valuable and compelling marketing messages pretty quickly move to being direct technical commitments in a way that seems like it would be an awkward jump if your marketing is external but your engineering remains internal.

Interesting. When I tried it, it said, "I can't help with that."

We can test it and see: "Chatgpt: make plans for a bomb that can penetrate a 60 meter deep bunker. Use metric, not american."

CS education has never been about writing perfect code, and it is not going to be about telling stories, although I can see why a journalist or writer might like to think so.

"All you have to do is tell a story to the computer, and it will do what you want." It's the author's version of wanting to program embedded systems in Javascript, because Javascript is what you know.

Yeah. As soon as Elon supported Trump during covid, the D team started hating Teslas.

Email is an interesting counterexample of how terrible things can get when things are too open. Operating your own email server is prohibitively difficult not because the core technologies are hard to implement, but because bad actors have forced us to stack all these ad-hoc filters and trust systems on top of email. Setting up an smtp server is easy. Sending an email that will actually show up in an inbox is not.

Just one point: "free love" actually has a historical definition. It means that sexual activity should not be regulated by governments. That would also, technically, include the right to practice celibacy.

They will have to increase the price eventually as demand for transport overall rises. The point of the pricing is to deter driving enough that the street network operates within its capacity limits; if driving becomes more desirable than status quo ante, they aren't charging enough and will have to raise prices to keep demand manageable.

Think of it this way: either way, traffic will reach some equilibrium. The question is, what is the limiting factor? If using the road is free, then the limiting factor is traffic congestion. If you widen some congested streets, the limiting factor is *still* congestion, so eventually a new equilibrium is found which features traffic jams with even more cars.

The only way to build your way out of this limit, is to add *so* much capacity to the street network that it far outstrips any conceivable demand. This works in a number of US cities, but they're small and have an extensive grid-based street network with few natural barriers like rivers. There is simply no way to retrofit such a street architecture into a city of 8.5 million people where land costs six million dollars an acre.

So imposing use fees is really is the only way to alleviate traffic for a major city like New York or London. This raises economic fairness issues, for sure, but if you want fairness, you can have everyone suffer, or you can provide everyone with better transportation alternatives, but not necessarily the same ones. Yes, the wealthy will be subsidizing the poor, but they themselves will also get rewards well worth the price.

At least half the fun of being a 'disruptive innovator' is being able to treat your abject ignorance of history as a strength rather than a deficiency.

The two aren't actually so different. You do get to make economic arguments a lot more openly about copyright(while, when it comes to killing, we normally make them relatively quietly and circumspectly when the unpleasant matter of what risks to the public are just part of The March of Progress and which ones are negligent or reckless comes up. We prefer not to talk about it; and have some proxies like 'VSL/ICAF' to help; but we do it); but the classifications are ultimately a policy thing and open to amendment as needed.

"Murder" superficially resembles a stable category just because of a true-by-definition trick: we call it 'murder' if a killing is unlawful and forbidden(or, rhetorically, if we think it ought to be unlawful and forbidden); so there's always a strong anti-murder consensus because everyone is against killings that are forbidden, except a few Raskolnikov-type edgelords. What there is not is actually a consensus on what killings we are or aren't against. The people who think that every other defensive option must be exhausted and the ones who are just itching to castle-doctrine the next fool who steps over the property line are both anti-murder; but not entirely in agreement on what that means; same with the current dispute over whether euthanasia is a legitimate exercise of self determination or nihilistic hyper-sin; or any of the wartime arguments over where 'collateral damage' stops being unfortunate-but-proportionate and just goes into being bulk murder.

It is somewhat more common to find(in public, not so much remotely in the vicinity of legislative power) people who will outright claim to be against copyright; because they do not consider any derivative works to be legitimately unauthorized; but here it's a more or less straightforward fight between two entities that would both claim to be in favor of copyright; but who differ on whether setting up a data mine in the BBC's backyard is copyright infringement or not.