Counterargument: Who would have predicted a few years ago that one private company would dominate global launch, launching more by every metric than the rest of the world combined, and -- all by itself -- triple the number of satellites in orbit in 7 years.

Sure, 200Xing the satellite count is a lot harder than tripling the satellite count, about 66 times harder. But if Starship is successful (by no means a given, also far from impossible), SpaceX will reduce per-kg launch costs by 100X, maybe more.

I'm skeptical... but I would also not just write it off as a "pack of lies". The things SpaceX is actively working on should make the launch part of it feasible. Will it be cost-effective? That's a harder question, and heat dissipation is the core thing that may make it infeasible.

Also, the final paragraph of the summary seems to be confused:

So, why are the hyperscalers hyping orbital data centers? Answer: because it's lucrative. "The Elon Musk part of it is honestly genius because he's got xAI building the data centers, SpaceX sending them to space, and Tesla building solar panels," Genkina says. "It's almost like he's paying himself."

Yes, SpaceX will be incredibly lucrative if it owns the whole vertical stack, building, launching and powering -- but only if it works. If it doesn't work, and if orbital compute isn't cheaper than planet-bound compute, then SpaceX will have no buyers.

The other possibility is that it's just a pump and dump, but that's not how Musk has ever worked in the past. Yes, he makes crazy promises, and delivers only half of them, and delivers years after the promised date, but those half-realized, years-late results are still often world-changing.

Doesn't really matter because it has to be done, unless we want to pay the much, much higher costs of just living with the hotter planet. We're all going to pay, one way or the other. It's just a question of whether we want it to be expensive or really, really expensive.

Right, and it will have extremely good days because of seasonal variation. If we size our systems to provide most of the winter load, there will be a lot of excess power in the summer, and while batteries will continue to get cheaper, I don't think they'll get cheap enough to timeshift from summer to winter. Long-distance power transmission also doesn't do much to address that problem, unless it's really long distance.

However, much progress has been made. I am alive right now because of a breakthrough cancer therapy that was FDA approved in 2011. (Well after Nixon!)

This fall I am going to get a therapy that mass-replicates your own immune cells in a lab for re-injection. It's so expensive (and has uncertain benefit) that it's not generally available in the UK or Canada yet. Automation will be a key to making it cost-effective.

It's such a complex area, I think information retrieval and computational science / simulation, or AI if you prefer, will help.

Maybe, but if there's a useful place to put excess production it can definitely be more cost-effective to do that... and carbon recapture is definitely something worth doing, and could probably be done intermittently. We just need a way to pay people to do it, pay them enough that it's worthwhile. Note that it doesn't have to be worthwhile now, we can new tech that makes it more efficient, but the pay on offer has to be high enough that people think there might be some path to profitability.

We definitely need to start pursuing it, at least researching it. We'll never solve the climate change problem with emissions reduction alone, recapture and sequestration will be essential.

There are some strategies which are pretty cheap, such as planting forests. But the numbers don't add up on that; we'll need more. I think carbon recapture systems may pair fairly naturally with renewable energy generation, though. Renewable variability means that in many cases it makes sense to overprovision. For example, in order to get sufficient power generation from a solar plant on cloudy days, you may install 2X-3X as many panels as you'd need for a sunny day... but that means that on sunny days you have lots of excess production that might be hard to use (I experience that with my rooftop solar; last month I generated just over 1 MWh that I couldn't use and the grid wouldn't pay me for). Using that excess to power carbon recapture would be a good idea.

For that to work, though, we need to arrange some financial reason for people to build and operate carbon recapture systems. That's a big missing piece which only government can solve. The obvious solution (to the entire climate change problem, actually!) is refundable carbon taxes plus carbon tariffs.

If your concern is that a product you use might be discontinued, there are some simple rules that you can apply to decide whether a given Google product is safe from being discontinued:

(1) Is it used by 100M+ people? If it is, it's safe. If the number is 10M+ it's probably good, but there's a risk. If it's less than 10M, it probably won't last. Unless...
(2) Is it a paid service? Paid services rarely get shut down, and if they do Google bends over backwards to make t right.

If it's free and has a small (for Google) userbase? It's all but guaranteed to get shut down. Google is a business. They make a lot of products that are free to use, but only because they can bundle ads with them or otherwise profit from them, but free-to-use products require a large user base to generate much revenue.

Typical. Modded down for making a simple, incontrovertible statement of fact.

It's not anywhere near one step away. Designing the peptides and getting one or more candidates is the easy part. The next steps are the hard ones, the ones that make pharmaceutical chemists and drug researchers cry:

• Phase I trials to see if it even works as claimed. Expect a 95+% failure rate here. Note that this is where you're going to see the best results for your drug candidate, things never improve from here. The best you can hope for is that they don't get any worse. So if you don't get strong results here you're probably wasting your money.
• Phase II trials to determine the best dosage and pharmacokinetics. Again expect a 95+% failure rate here, and results showing less effectiveness than shown in Phase I.
• Phase III trials to determine behavior in a large sample representative of the target population. Expect a failure rate upwards of 99% here, and a major drop-off in effectiveness. This is where toxicity and serious negative side effects show up, and those can kill your trial dead even if your candidate is working.

Getting through this process will take multiple tries and years of work, assuming you succeed at all. There's a reason they say that the clinic (clinical trials) is where drug candidates go to die.

Yep.

Even without the ownership issue it would almost certainly have failed because TSG (to distinguish them from SCO) discovered to their shock and amazement that Linux had not, in fact, kifed code from Unix. They clearly went into it assuming that a bunch of volunteer hackers couldn't possibly have built a fully-functional kernel, expecting they could easily prove lots of copyright infringement. Failing to find infringement they hoped they could bluster IBM into settling, but IBM was determined to fight it out and had much better lawyers (heh, we used to call them the Nazgul).

Many of us were disappointed when the ownership issue was revealed. We really wanted Linux to get its day in court. As it turned out that didn't matter; no one else was ever dumb enough to try. Today, of course, the biggest tech companies in the world -- which means the biggest companies in the world! -- almost all use Linux extensively. Even Microsoft would probably stand up to defend Linux these days.

The Democrats also voted overwhelmingly in favor of the PATRIOT ACT.

I take it you're in favor of reparations, then.

If not, you have an inconsistency in your worldview. You apparently believe that guilt is carried by groups across generations, even when none of the current group was alive -- and many didn't even have ancestors involved -- when the bad things were done. Thus, the modern Democrats are stained by the racism and pro-slavery views of the 19th and early 20th-century Democrats. Likewise, white Americans are therefore permanently stained by slavery.

Indeed. And, yes, Claude massively over-comments. I have more Claude coding rules about commenting than any other single topic. Though I do wonder if my rules make as much sense in the AI era as when code was all maintained by humans. Most of my rules are about minimizing comments because comments are fragile and tend to get out of date... but Claude actually does do a pretty good job of maintaining the comments. I still try to minimize them, though.

Heh. That's definitely true for me as well, now, not so much in the past. When I was at Google I had a higher caliber of colleagues. My colleagues at the new company are bright, but they're young and inexperienced. But, yeah, if I didn't have Claude to kick ideas around with me in my current position, my code would be much worse than it is.

Nope. Wars used to regularly cause widespread famines, as well as being far more directly bloody. Murdering all the children was for millennia an accepted practice. You should read the book.

Yes, it is

When the norms and the expectations move from considering something cruelty to be funny or enjoyable to merely accepted and then to shameful or hidden -- and even illegal -- those steps are progress.

Related: "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." While the individual hypocrite may not be better than the person who engages in open vice, and might be worse, the fact that people feel the need to keep their vices secret is a positive indication about society as a whole. Assuming, of course, that the "vice" is actually bad.

That's another area where our society has been improved... we're more tolerant, having realized that many things we considered bad are merely different. We still have progress to make on that front, too, but don't let perfect be the enemy of progress.