From outside, an IR imager should be able to see the heat from a leak. But who knows; one would imagine if it were that easy they'd have done it 7 years ago, when this crap Russian module's chronic leak issues began. My inner cynic thinks this is probably political; competent people aren't being permitted to deal with it.

They'll deal with it when some hatch or docking port blows out and sucks a couple people into space wearing NASA tee shirts. I'm rather certain about that much.

So my house has EV and gas vehicles, and by far taking the gas vehicle to a gas station is way more annoying than plugging it in at home. Not to mention the maintenance (oil change? nope air filter change? nope brakes? just like hybrids the brakes barely get used). No random surprises like "oh great, some fluid on the ground, smoke is coming out the exhaust.

The battery is the big one, and the tendency to be heavier means faster tire wear, but the plugging in for a lot of people is a *plus* not a minus. Meanwhile the gas car has a few hundred here, a couple thousand there, and by the time I might have to replace the battery, I am pretty sure I have racked up equivalent costs over a much more annoying series of repairs and maintenance.

Tip, as soon as you say "copilot says", no one will take you seriously.

Yes, an *engine* can last a while, but that's far from the full picture.

Headgasket will likely not last that long, and while *technically* the engine "lasts" through that repair, that was an expensive repair.

Timing belt won't last that long, and that's an expensive maintenance item.

The transmissions for ICE wear more than EV, and those tend to have a relatively shorter life than cited, and that also is pretty pricey.

Further ignores things like oil changes constantly incurring expenses. Brakes on EVs and hybrids last way longer. If you can charge at home, your fuel savings are huge (public charging, maybe not so much).

Yes, when the battery goes, it will be expensive, but in that same time you probably have otherwise accumulated a comparable cumulative maintenance and repair bill for petrol-exclusive issues.

As they said, 8x code output is a flawed metric. By volume they are getting in.

One could even reasonably argue that they tend to be good at catching critical little details that are difficult for humans, like the consequences of a shallow copy buried in a sea of code creating a security disaster. A "needle in a haystack" scenario, where AI does comparatively well with the relentless attention span.

But in other ways, they are verbose messes, and will toss a whole lot of pull requests. Each of those pull requests may be a lot more volume than needed. For example, I got a CodeGen pull request for "close a gap between two elements after updating the UI framework to new version". Yes, real issue, and.. well, the referenced gap *did* close, but with a lot of dubious side effects. The issue called for a single CSS rule to be tweaked. It instead was hundreds of lines of CSS, sometimes verbatim repeated 4 times (the originator said he had to ask the prompt multiple times because it failed the first few times, it seemed Claude thought maybe adding the same rules it already added might have helped). Others might have just run the code saw the gap closed and accepted it, despite the baggage of 99% of the lines changed having no particular intent behind it.

This is in a normal where a lot of developers think even simple things need to be complex. Hello world needs to run in Azure Pipelines using Kubernetes, Helm, and Ansible spawning at least 6 microservices. They think they need all of that and yet it's unmanageably convoluted, so the AI kind of lets them have all that superfluous complexity without actually managing it.

Thanks to work, I'm using it all the time.

It is true that even opus 4.8 cannot always bring a mundane code to life credibly. It can depending on what we are taking about, but the sorts of things it fails at are well short of the complexity of what it would mean to rewrite itself in any credible way.

They are finding a plateau with where the LLMs can go and could use the narrative of a "pause" to explain why capabilities are going to iterate in a more 'evolutionary' way instead of the revolutionary way folks are expecting.

There isn't to my knowledge a mechanism for the models to "self-improve", whatever one may think, at least the output doesn't have access to change the model in any way. The narrative of "oops the AI started evolving itself on accident" doesn't have a way to happen.

Considering that even the vaunted Opus 4.8 can't always develop mundane traditional software beginning, it's hard to imagine it could rework the model itself even if it had such access.

But, but, when WE do it then it's perfectly acceptable! It's only when the BAD guys do it that it isn't! . . . What do you mean most of the world considers us the 'bad guys'?

Isn't it great how our "free market" prevents farmers from buying tractors from Russia and China that do exactly what this one does but which have a proven track record and steady supply of replacement parts? Who would want that? /s

Agreed. But Marvel / MCU also shows that "Stargate Syndrome" is all too easy to catch. The heroes and villains just keep getting more powerful and dangerous, no wonder the movies are flopping.

No ownership implies no market exchange mechanism. That was a direct response to the OP's "markets existed before capitalism". They didn't, because exchange is tied up with ownership. Once ownership is agreed, you have capitalism. It literally is synonymous with ownership of the means of production. Lands, water wheels, slaves, you name it. If it can be sold, somebody owns it. And if it can be exchanged legally, somebody owns it.

Do you own a shovel or a chicken? Congratulations, those are means of production. You're a capitalist!

Maybe you should (re?)read Marx. Das Kapital is precisely about capitalism in history. Renaming terms because "modern" doesn't invalidate the old terms.

The palace owns the means of production. The rest you can read in the appropriate economics book referenced.

They don't want "strict" emissions controls because then they'll have to make products that meet those standards. What they want is a specific loophole that they can easily meet but is difficult or expensive for everyone else, such as a critical "safety feature" that John Deere owns the patent of.

Erm. that is capitalism, it's the ultimate expression of capitalism. Monopoly is the end game of capitalism. If you can literally prevent your customers from going elsewhere and being dependent on you for all future maintenance, upgrades, et al. you have the holy grail of capitalism.

Never confuse market liberalism with capitalism. A free market is not, by any means, a prerequisite for capitalism.

A strong legal system preventing abuse is the defence against that form of capitalism and what enables a free market to flourish.

Stargate died 15 years ago, let it rest in peace.

Stargate effectively had a single gimmick, the underdog vs incredibly powerful enemies and somehow winning. This resulted in a trope I called "Stargate Syndrome". The Underdog, in order to beat the uber-powerful enemy needs to become more powerful to defeat them, once this happens they need to create another, even more powerful enemy which the heroes need to become more powerful to defeat and then they need an even more powerful enemy to keep the series going, so on and so forth. SG1 started fighting fake gods with high tech and ended up with all the tech fighting almost literal gods.

Joe Mallozzi, one of the writers of SG1 did another series in the 2010s called Dark Matter, which started out incredibly well but suffered from Stargate Syndrome in S2, it was cancelled before the end of S3. A shame as it had a lot of potential if they didn't make the heroes effectively untouchable.

SG1 should have stayed finished at S8, Atlantis was pretty much the perfect length at 5 seasons. Leaving you wanting just a little bit more compared to SG1's a season too far (as much as I like Morerna Baccarin, it really was terribad). The reason it has a following is because it was good, the later iterations were not good (SG Universe and Origins), it will lose it's following if they keep making terrible sequels and spin offs. What we need is more original Sci-Fi, not comfort blanket spin offs.

Not every game is multiplayer, there's no need to even go online unless you're specifically playing multiplayer. There's been a recent trend of making single player games a multiplayer game of one, when you play a single player session you're still required to be online which means the single player part stops working when they turn off the servers.