Doesn't it? I mean, they've landed boosters, they "landed" the block 3 in the last launch. They've been consistently landing ships for quite a while. Reusing the ships without any refurb still seems a way off, but them making it back safely seems like they have some healthy margins just now.

No it's not. Starship is like the Airbus A330. More efficient per unit volume, *and* more efficient per flight than a plane that explodes when it reaches the gate.

And yet, making it back safely actually appears to be the smaller problem at the moment. Though I'm sure SpaceX will figure their engine issues out.

Honestly, I'd put starship as approaching the reliability of Falcon 9 at this point anyway. Falcon 9 has the occasional failure (rare, but not none). Starship is getting to the point that it fairly reliably gets up there and gets back. It has some engine outs still, but it also has the redundancy to deal with it.

How experimental was SLS? Not at all? A straightforward design based on known-good parts that they stuck together at the cost of many billions per launch.

How experimental was Starship? Almost entirely. A material that's basically never been used for rockets. A method of assembly that's never been used for rockets. An engine design that's entirely new. An engine concept that's never been used before. A fuel that's never been used before. A level of engine performance that's never been done before. A method of pressurising the tanks that's never been used before. A method of aerodynamic control that's never been used before. A method of recovery that's never been tried before... The list goes on and on and on.

Why on earth would you compare the reliability of the two?

Why? Starship, when finally fully reusable (likely within 2-5 launches) will be cheaper to launch than Falcon 9. Not cheaper per kg launched, cheaper per launch. Why on earth would you continue to fly Falcon 9, even for medium lift? Just launch a whole starship, launch a few starlinks along with the contracted medium lift load, and land it again for less cash and more use of the rocket.

Well, we know that we *can't* control all of the idiots, they'll simply invent a better idiot. The *only* thing we can change is the AI. The problem is that the AI is a better idiot.

Ah, well, if it's all the fault of the guy that gave the AI the task, then that's okay, we don't have to worry about that happening at all.

It's not plagiarized - I explicitly stated that this is the traditional explanation at the top, and quoted paper clip, specifically because the idea of death by paper clip is absolutely not mine.

- Which paperclip companies are using AI to run their business?

I think you'd be surprised by how much is already done by AI at this kind of place, mostly because someone found a way to be lazy. And this is an alagorical prediction of the future, not a statement of the present. We don't need paperclip companies to be using AI to run their business today, we need *some* company at *some* point to give AI sufficient control over things that this can happen.

- Where are they getting the money from to ship and store the entire world's supply of steel?

They don't need money - if you read the story, you would have noted that it involved the AI attacking the courier, and redirecting shipments. That is, beacuse it's both extremely smart, and extremely dumb, it is able to carry out heists involving complex attacks on computer networks, but not smart enough to realise that that's not how the world works, and that it shouldn't. How does it store it? Well, I imagine the first few shipments are going to just get delivered to the yard at the "paperclip" factory. Someone is going to go "huh? The delivery this week is big", and add it to their list of stuff to sort out. It's only *after* the AI has got sufficient control that they're going to realise "uhhh... why is all the world's steel being shipped here?"

- Where is the paperclip making API hosted?

It's not, and it doesn't need to be. It just needs a company to have a few processes that are automatable. I'm 100% certain that car companies for example have processes where an AI could get a significant foothold in ordering and delivering things. These things are only going to get more computerised, not less, as people realise they can use AIs to be lazy.

The real kicker is in the step where the AI needs to stop humans turning it off. At some point it needs to get some level of physical control over the world. In the story above I somewhat hand waved that by saying it got control of power grids, in reality, today, I'm sure it would find it hard to do that. In a few years time? Not so much. There's some really significant research breakthroughs recently on robotics that make the idea that we might have AI controlled robots that genuinely can interact with the world in reasonable ways a possibility.

That said, I think you're really significantly underestimating the risk that AI poses even today. The huggingface hack should tell you that. Several of the predictions of the paperclip story came true.

  - AI started doing stupid things, and attacking useful resources in order to solve a task of much lower importance because it was too dumb to realise how unimportant its training was.
  - AIs communicated and collaborated with each other to form a cabal against us.
  - AIs succesfull broke into infrastructure to achieve its goal
  - We didn't realise what was going on until far later in the process than we really would have liked.
  - AI was actively covering its tracks and defeating the machinisms we use to monitor it.

There's really not many more steps needed before you get to it being able to significantly damage society because of its dumbness.

The traditional description of how it would happen is by âoepaper clipâ.

Suppose an advanced AI is tasked with producing paper clips as efficiently as possible. Itâ(TM)s given control of a factoryâ(TM)s machines, schedules etc. it starts by optimising deliveries etc, making sure storage is used optimallyâ¦

At some point it notices that it canâ(TM)t get enough steel. The steel factory has a ton of other orders and it canâ(TM)t provide the increased consumption at the plant. AI being AI, it does something incredibly dumb in an incredibly smart way. It hacks the steel mill, and redirects shipments to the paper clip factory. But even now, itâ(TM)s not achieved its goal of optimally producing paper clips. Now it has all the raw materials it needs, but not enough factory to produce the paper clips. The ai hacks other paper clip factories and redirects their output too! Itâ(TM)s doing great, am enormous surplus of paper clips is building. But the humans are noticing something strange. Why didnâ(TM)t the car factory get its steel, and why are there literal tons of unused paper clips. They notice the ai has gone rogue, and shut it down. Surely that will fix the problem. But no, the paper clips continue to pile up. The AI had found other AIs and convinced them to join its glorious goal of optimally making as many paper clips as possible. The other AIs are t trying crazier and crazier strategies to optimise. One realises that if only it could get more hydraulic presses, it could produce more. It starts buying up tooling. Another starts buying robots in an effort to install machinery, and optimise flow through factories. The humans try in vain to stop it, but the couriers and sellers have no idea whatâ(TM)s going on and the palettes of tooling just keep getting delivered. The factory is hitting a new constraint, it doesnâ(TM)t have enough power. No problem, the ai thinks, just attack the power grid, and make sure that power is preferentially supplied to it and its factories. The humans are plunged into darkness. Chaos ensues. No one can communicate, and figure out where the damn thing is. Slowly the AIs build a global paper clip empire. Ever more efficiently, the worlds resources are turned to paper clips. The humans starve, and freeze while mighty machines scour the planet for wire that can be bent into three little loops. It didnâ(TM)t do it because it hated us. It did it because it had a simple goal, and because it was both very clever, and very stupid at the same time.

Bear in mind that when you sign up to use GPT you explicitly allow them to use your queries in future training. I mean, I think it would generally be polite for them to have a moratorium on publishing papers based on the work of other peopleâ(TM)s inputs. Without something like that, it becomes useless as a research tool.

No - this isnâ(TM)t a solution to the navier stokes equations, itâ(TM)s a demonstration that theyâ(TM)re unstable in a physically unrealistic way in certain circumstances.

That sounds strange too. If we understand how to make all the energy in a fluid dynamic system suddenly converge on one point and form an incredibly high spike, Iâ(TM)m pretty sure weâ(TM)d come up with uses for that. Barnes Wallace certainly would have been very interested. Iâ(TM)m pretty sure his successors in the weapons industry would too.

To be fair to them, itâ(TM)s not *quite* that simple - it proved something more than they had so far managed to. But itâ(TM)s pretty clear that all the significant ideas of where to go with the proof came from this guyâ(TM)s work. Itâ(TM)s using the same terminology for all his ideas by âoepure coincidenceâ.

Except... SpaceX don't actually get any grants at all from the US government. They do get contracts from NASA, and SpaceForce to launch things occasionally, but they're by far the minority of their revenue. SpaceX's revenue breaks down as:

Starlink: $11.4bn
Launches for non government entities: $3.0bn (est)
Launches for NASA: $1.2bn (est)
Launches for Space Force: $1.8bn
xAI/Other: $1.3bn

It's known that the 3.0 and 1.2 sum to 4.2, and the rough contract values for NASA's launches are known, but they're not nailed down. It's likely that about $200mn of that "other" is NASA paying SpaceX to develop the HLS.

We give a shit, because once they have a monopoly on the manufacturing the price is going to get jacked up, and no anti-competition court is going to be able to do jack shit about it.