It's quite possible; OTOH having drones flying over our nuclear plants isn't something we should feel blase about. Maybe a drone swarm can't do much actual damage to a nuclear plant, but the fact that people are flying drones (deliberately or accidentally) in a restricted area is bad news all by itself; it suggests either complete ignorance of the law, or bad intentions.

Why not boost the ISS instead of de-orbiting it? Is it because it's just too old to keep safe for human habitation, regardless of what orbit it's in?

This month: Everybody meet Paddy! He's going to use AI to rewrite all of our legacy software for practically free!
Next month: Our AI initiative has failed, entirely due to Paddy's incompetence. Please escort him from the building immediately and make sure he never works here again.

Nah, that would be gauche. Instead, we implement the cap relativity-style, where your tax rate increases proportional to the amount of money you've made already. As you keep making money, you asymptotically approach the financial "speed of light" but can never quite get there because in order to actually reach it you'd need to earn an infinite amount of money.

I think most reasonable people understand that politicians are fallible and can be shortsighted and make mistakes. This is part of being human and part of life in government which, at it's core, is just a huge risk management agency. That's not to say that honest mistakes don't carry weight - Bush Jr may have truly believed everything he claimed about Iraq prior to invading it, but it was still a fool's errand, built on a scaffold of lies, and one of the biggest wastes of resources and lives in US history. Bush should be excoriated for that mistake, even if it was honest.

The problem is when intent and motive undermine the attempt at honest governance. If a politician has ulterior motives, such as personal enrichment, or to gain political advantage over an opposing person or party, to save face in the light of a mistake, or any number of other human foibles and failings, that's when it becomes a valid point to make.

For the helium reserve, it seems to have been a victim of shortsighted attempts to reduce the deficit. The program had accumulated almost $2 billion to buy and store it, and some people thought it wasn't needed.

When it comes to Trump, many people don't trust his motives because he's shown repeatedly to do and say things that are dishonest or hide the true intent. It seems fair to ask who stands to benefit from this change in helium classification.

vim is the reason I had to give on up using a Dvorak keyboard and switch back to Qwerty. It turns out I'm quite capable of typing text in Dvorak, but relearning the muscle-memory for all the different vim operations was a bridge too far :(

Perhaps, but in this case the real pressure comes from having to justify multiple trillions of dollars of debt, using a technology whose actual scope of applicability is much smaller than you've been leading investors to believe. You can practically see the flop-sweat at this point.

Well said. This is a very succinct way of describing the secondary effects for everyone around someone using AI to feel "more productive". Sending people massive emails you didn't even bother to read, creating huge design documents that are just dozens of meaningless pages and offer nothing of tangible value, or asking fellow developers to reviews 50,000 line code changes you didn't write (or read), etc.

I use AI at work for development and I know that the frontier models in a harness like Claude Code are more capable than many AI critics claim but I also see the results they create in a skeptical light. For a prediction chatbot they are surprisingly good at writing software, but also surprisingly bad compared to a decently skilled human. They can generate massive amounts of design documents and code in a very short time, and easily overwhelm humans trying to read, review, verify, and test the changes. The same thing is happening in other kinds work as well.

Drug use is an apt metaphor. The Dr Feelgood of this decade.

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.

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.

Fake news. We have such a HIGH IQ president (he has taken and aced FOUR dementia tests!) that nobody is smarter than he is, so there's nothing to be afraid of.

Please go read the definition of "enshittification". It doesn't mean "anything I don't like."

The group that designs Firefox has made some very questionable decisions over the years, but enshittification of the browser is definitely not on the list.

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?