Productivity did soar, by rather quite a bit. But companies did not use that increase in productivity to offer the same stuff with fewer employees, they used it to offer ever more complex products and services, while keeping them affordable.

Industrialism has added decades to the average human lifespan. We shouldn't be blind to the ill effects, and be open to improving things, but let's not focus on only the downsides.

Musk certainly is overly optimistic regarding timelines, but "move fast and break things" (for lack of a better term) has been proven to work in space, by SpaceX. It gave us a launch system that was cheap to develop and cheap to operate. Everyone in the business was laughing at Musk for keeping "breaking things" and crashing rockets while trying to land one. Then he did. And got good at it. Now they only make the news when one of their (many many) boosters fails to make a soft landing.

As for Starship, I've no idea what kind of data they have and how they are acting on it, but from a distance it does look like there are some major problems to overcome, and making a few changes before sending up another one might not be the right approach. The idea about "move fast and break things" is not to design and test until you are 99% sure, you spend a lot less effort in getting to 90%, and hoping that a failure will point to the error(s) you missed. But Starship smells like it's at 70% right now (or whatever the number are, for illustrative purposes only)

Then why the eye-wateringly high bills for SLS and Starliner? They got to build on the exact same body of knowledge available to SpaceX.

Another great example of garbage behaviour being the result of employees gaming garbage metrics.

That's what I use AI for as well: a first step. The biggest difference AI and regular sources, is that the latter give you a lot of clues regarding the accuracy of the information. The source, the website, the way the information is written, context like article titles, all of these give some hint about how well the author understands the material, and if their answer is even relevant to your question. The AI however will always appear authoritative, even if they are obviously wrong, and with important context stripped out. Sometimes you get an answer that looks plausible, but is invalid, or about a different version of the gadget you are asking about.

AI has been great for generating artwork, logos, sounds and so on, for small personal projects. And I've use AI deepfake voice generation to provide voice-over for game mods (some of the voice actors have given modders explicit permission to use their voice like that). It lets me do stuff that was completely out of my reach just a few years ago, or things for which I have zero talent.

I don't believe the government has the right to ban me from harming myself in their eyes.

If you signed a contract stating that you agreed either to forgo any treatments for health issues arising from your choice to smoke or agreed to pay for all such treatments out of your own pocket, then fine. But, and especially if you live in a country with socialized medicine, then everyone else is paying for your treatment. So to minimize everyone's expenses for your completely avoidable health issues, the government is doing what it's doing. And they haven't stopped you from harming yourself. They just put images and words on the package.

"Nuclear Power will solve the climate crisis, and it doesn't need a breakthrough or a TED talk, all it needs is a building permit" - Sabine Hossenfelder.

Humans drive into stationary emergency vehicles all the time. Self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be a bit better than humans. In the end it'll come down to insurance companies*, and they'll just look at the numbers. There will be a point where insurers will charge you extra if you have a steering wheel and pedals fitted.

*) in sane legal systems, where a robotaxi manufacturer can't just be sued for millions just because someone died; the plaintiff would have to show gross negligence. For the rest: liability would lie with the robotaxi operator or owner, through their insurance. Just as is the case now.

Instead of the clunky ICE drivetrain with an electric motor bolted on, I'd rather have that in reverse: a fully electric drive train (with a full size battery), combined with a small petrol generator that can be enabled to extend the vehicle's range. The advantages: much simpler construction, the engine can be kept small and light, and always runs at the optimum RPM, saving gas. There are a few cars with range extenders already, and when enabled they can almost double the range of the car, but sadly most offerings only have a shitty little EV battery that doesn't have much range to begin with.

They might even have conducted their own experiments already, and set the lights accordingly. To maximize profits of course, not to encourage responsible gambling. The casino manager's reaction to: "It is possible that simply dimming the blue in casino lights could help promote safer gambling behaviors" would have been "MOAR BLUE!"

I often maximize Windows, but I've never wanted full-screen windows. It's pretty annoying that simply clicking the green button full-screens; to maximize, it's option-click.

Data structures and algorithms are used in interviews, not because you'll be expected to implement sorts and linked lists, but because they demonstrate that the candidate can implement and troubleshoot software from specs, using cases they should be familiar with if they have a CS / coding background. Testing for skills rather than knowledge. By the same token, it makes sense to test candidates on the use of AI assistants, if they'll be using those in their work. Though rather than let them produce textbook algorithms with prompts, I'd give them a prompt that produces known faulty output, then ask them to test the result, figure out what is wrong with it, and fix the code and/or the prompt.

Plenty of good content on YT. Enough to justify the €10 or so for a premium subscription, and ad free viewing.

I'm not hoping for more trash talk and hate speech in the comments, but the censorship in the comment section has gotten ridiculous. Perfectly reasonably and polite comments get nixed, and some people (including myself) have noticed an odd personal ban on using certain (fairly innocent) words. When those people include that word, the post is consistently removed, while other people are allowed to use it. All in all very strange.