When "AI-enthused defense contractors with names out of Tolkien" are literally a genre I suspect that he chose that particular citation because he knew it would lead to a few amusing crashouts.

Isn't much of the point here the cultural shove? Sure, there's the line-go-up stuff; but that doesn't explain the companies gutting quite profitable software development operations to shovel money at Nvidia for things that have no demonstrated ROI; if it were nothing personal, just business, the level of enthusiasm for taking on poorly characterized risk would not be as fervent as it is. It's absolutely about resentment of the human resources that has been running at least as long as the demonstration that it would actually take some shoving to get them all to come back to the office, likely significantly longer.

It's the significantly less common case, for some combination of a lot of high-visibility stupidity being lethal and lethal accidents being public in ways that the details of nonlethal accidents aren't; but destruction of gonads under sufficiently foolish circumstances qualifies a living recipient.

They already pretty much are. You have to do at least a little performative fretting about the risks, which spoils the enjoyment of pure cheering at the best crunching sounds; but there's no way we'd justify the level of recreational head trauma something like football produces if we didn't fundamentally regard the players as relevant only the the way racehorses are.

There are obviously cases where complete vertical integration makes no sense; literally all of them if you interpret 'complete' at full strictness; but when someone actually says "privatization" they basically always mean contracting out something large enough to be or have been an internal program. Sort of the way you don't say "outsourcing" unless it either was or plausibly could be an internal function. Ordering copy paper from staples or having a meeting catered generally doesn't count.

That doesn't mean to say that it's always a bad idea; but when someone says 'privatization' that's a "we'll have SAIC do it" proposal not a "employees and the DoE use laptops they got under a GSA schedule contract rather than from the First People's Computational Manufactury" proposal.

Oh, but these are *preventative* wars. He gets a peace prize for every country he invades!

Venezuela was using fentanyl as a WMD. Iran was about to nuke us. Cuba might attack us with drones if someone provides them. Greenland might start a snowball fight, and make us look bad if we lose.

Presumably we've got all our best people on this, since they're obviously not on the UFO videos.

One of the "unidentifiable" objects in an earlier release (last year, I think) was obviously as hell two birds flying low over the ground.

I don't have a conspiracy theory to explain it, but this is all utter bullshit.

Linux?

If they think it's worth it, on the balance, yeah. I'm not telling people where to put their money; or how to weigh the risk of Musk skimming the till on the actually-profitable rocketry in order to cover losses building mechahitler or trying to make orbital datacenters work.

I was mostly responding to the "I ask because I'd imagine the first thing the collective shareholders will ask for is that the crappy bits of Musk Inc. get divested as quickly as possible." part of the above poster's post. This is 100% an IPO where, to the degree legally possible and potentially beyond, and more so than even typical tech IPO voting structures, anyone who thinks that they are getting even a whisper of oversight, even at institutional investor scale, is kidding themselves.

It's up to you whether or not you think that a security representing whatever basket of endeavors Musk feels like conducting will be worth it; or if the risk that he'll bleed the winners to prop up his more dubious bets is too high; my note is purely that this IPO is genuinely rather novel in the degree to which it's designed to put the current CEO in effectively total control. Even compared to something like the mostly-unremovable Zuckerberg voting/nonvoting shares arrangement this has additional curbs on shareholder resolutions and litigation options.

Anyone who is hoping to avoid Musk's dumber ideas should probably just stay the hell away. Even by the standards of the classic "oh, there's actual-votes stock and peon stock; guess which kind we sold during the IPO" stuff; spacex is pushing things. The boy-king of mars holds 85% of the voting power; shareholders are required to waive the right to jury trial or class action and submit to arbitration only, only class B shareholders(mostly Musk) can remove the chairman of the board, CEO, or CTO; and similar enthusiastic use of Texas' provisions for 'controlled companies' that really don't want to take any pesky outside input.

Putting your money on that is pretty much entirely just making a bet on whether you think the dictator for life will make line go up or not; not even pretending to be analogous to an ownership stake.

If it weren't a technical issue; would it actually be a moral issue?

I suspect that there are lots of ways, including some surprises, of getting the problem wrong to some degree and introducing nasty developmental issues; so I could see an IRB having very plausible objections to the "eh, we'll keep pumping out flipper babies until we trial and error our way to what an embryo requires to develop a brain stem properly!" R but, if for sake of argument, you had a system that actually worked wouldn't that basically just be surrogacy without the seedy undercurrent of economic conscription?

Unfortunately, Musk and friends took that into account. They demanded, and received rule changes to get rammed into indexes as fast as possible. They'll certainly be happy to take direct purchases from any of the weirdos paying for blue checks on twitter; but the strategy is clearly intended to not require the bagholders to bite directly; instead hitting anyone with index exposure as rapidly and automatically as possible.

You start out doing it to others; but the empire always comes home in the end.

I assume that this would have been too banal, or he's about a generation too old to remember it immediately; but it really sounds like he could have 'solved' the same problem to the same degree with milkdrop or one of the other popular music visualization options from the glory days of winamp; but thought 'AI' would make a more interesting 'making of' story.

The idea that 'philosophical' means 'vaguely trippy visuals' seems weirdly common. In fairness to the people doing the visuals sometimes it's because what is being passed of as 'philosophical' is stupid; rather than because they are; but the latter case is also pretty likely. No idea what Lennon said in this case so can't comment on the likely cause.