Plus the whole 'fucking dystopian' angle. On the one hand we've got people bitching about 'civilizational decline'; but we want 'robot philosophers' teaching children? I'm not against the occasional scantronned multiple choice test; but outsourcing philosophy to save on those oh-so-expensive adjuncts seems like the sort of thing you only do to children being groomed for mindless servitude or because you've entirely given up on humanity as anything but an ingredient in pump and dump schemes.

I'd be more optimistic about the ability to deliver an approximate equivalent if there were someone paying for them to do so(the economics of ordinary satellite launches seem to favor fitting within what a given delivery vehicle can handle, rather than bolting things together, so it's not 100% assured; but seems likely); but less clear on replicating the incentive structure.

It's not that the ISS is totally useless; but it currently justifies an awful lot of launches, including manned, more or less by being there. Gotta launch that crew lest the ISS be empty which would be bad because reasons, and have to launch those supplies because there's a crew on the ISS. They do find scientific things to shove into modules; but the arrangement is such that no project is ever called on to justify the ISS, which is just sort of assumed.

Short of the feds just paying some contractors and calling it a 'private' ISS replacement; it's less clear that there's much private sector incentive to build an ISS-like; judging by quite vigorous stream of privately justified satellites designed to not be bolted together and the relative absence of jostling for ISS experiment space. If it were worth that much we'd presumably be up to our eyes in sordid stories of people pulling lobbying stunts to try to exploit it on the cheap through regulatory capture; but we aren't really.

And here I thought that 'AI' was supposed to be leading to a flowering of specialized-for-purpose software that would previously have been infeasible to build due to resource constraints; but one of the most heavily capitalized outfits in the bubble can't cope with a chromium reskin and a couple of electron apps?

I suspect that he's doing some weasel-wording in terms of use cases in part just to make his proposal sound more novel and more hypergrowth-capable than it actually is. Aside from the question of why you'd want to put your money on a convicted fraud who was unable to deliver a simpler project; it's just not clear how novel, and how favorable for the frothy growth that VCs love, the proposal is.

Talking about "AI powered planes" seems like a way of trying to ignore the fact that 'drones', which are incidentally often rather small but need not be, are something others have been actively and aggressively exploring for years to decades now; with the accompanying question of why we'd be interested in a latecomer with a hype deck; and talking about 'AI' rather than 'autopilot' seems like a way of trying to ignore the number of aircraft that(while they do not go uncrewed today for regulatory purposes) are capable of executing most of their flight under the control of some (relatively) simple and well understood feedback systems; or the hybrid systems (like the predator and reaper drones, which at this point are old enough that some of them have cycled out of service) that would temporarily bring a human in to do hands on stick for particular operations but could mostly buzz around unattended so that a single operator could handle several of them at the same time.

There's clearly a lot of use case for aircraft that don't require a pilot; it's just much less clear how much room there is for it to be an exciting mostly unfilled space where revolutions will happen and there are enormous fortunes to justify the enormous risks; rather than actually being a combination of bulk civil aviation where the existing autopilots are probably 90% there but nobody really wants the blowback of cutting the pilot out; and all the various drone applications where people who aren't this guy are years ahead of him.

Going by "Walmart said that both patents were "unrelated to dynamic pricing," as the patent issued in January was specific to markdowns" it sounds like they are going to try the argument that it's not evil dynamic pricing; it's glorious personalized savings!

Those are the same thing arrived at by superficially different routes, obviously; but in terms of the psychology it wouldn't be at all surprising if you can convince people that being offered discounts calculated to be just big enough to get them to bite is totally awesome; where being offered prices just below the level that makes them scream is brutal oppression even though it's the same price, so I wouldn't bet against it working.

Clearly they got the patent, so somebody was convinced; but I'm puzzled by what you could actually patent at this sort of scale. I could imagine an specific implementation involving some genuinely clever techniques that might be novel enough to patent; or a specific good implementation being a juicy trade secret; but at a high level "try to do some price discrimination while balancing sales rate and margin" sounds like a classic "ancient obvious thing; but we envision a system involving a computer" patent.

"We've done so much damage to rule of law that we can now claim that paying a fixer with political connections $10 billion to close an M&A deal is plausible!"

"We've achieved one 9 of reliability; is it really worth spending more than 10% of our time trying to improve?"

There is, presumably, an amount of time savings where this could be justified(at least for things that you, ultimately, only do because they pay the bills; not ones of some intrinsic value); but it seems particularly grim to deal with the changed nature of the work for such paltry savings.

Going from 'thinking about things you know about' to 'keeping a close eye on an erratic intern who can bullshit really fast' is a fairly dramatic downgrade in terms of the quality and apparent futility of what you are doing. At least junior people sometimes improve thanks to mentoring, even if it's not something you do specifically to save time in the immediate term. A relentless torrent of glib and dense, though, is hell compared to just doing it yourself; so the idea that you aren't even saving time by doing so is pretty grim.

If the cops are going to hold people without charge for months for bullshit reasons and then act like there's nothing wrong with that could they, please, try to focus on the "If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about!" idiots? At least with those guys it would be educational outreach.

Normally you just sort of ignore the collection of random side jobs that, of course, C-levels can work at the same time without being accused of double-dipping; but it just explains so much that that Adobe has overlap with a major source of healthcare costs.

The likely trick is that the risk run by the 'shadow fleet' is almost entirely tied to political will. You can certainly turn off/spoof transponders if you are feeling a little naughty; but you can't really hide something the size of an oil tanker; just throw up a mess of paperwork and legal ambiguity.

In an environment of high oil prices and difficultly keeping people onboard with an Israeli crusade and an American debacle, it potentially becomes considerably harder to sell other countries on caring harder about the 'shadow fleet', rather than appreciating its work; and even something like the US, which is well placed to just bomb them and probably objects to at least some of the irregular exports, is potentially under pressure because they know that both the public's willingness to suck up gas prices and international willingness to endure higher oil prices are finite and not necessarily to be messed with.

We are already seeing a related development: the US is moving to soft-pedal some sanctions on Russian exports despite Russia's continued belligerence in Ukraine and known support for Iran; just because the Straight of Hormuz is fucked and they are blinking on oil prices.

No disagreement with aligning incentives; I was just seeking to point out that this is the sort of commodities issue where you are quite likely looking at the usual somewhat abstract squabble over money dissolving into "literally not available". In relatively liquid market economies you get so used to it just being a price question that it's always a bit of a mental adjustment when "Not. In. Stock." suddenly turns relatively hard.

When you are talking about 70-90% of your petroleum travelling across what is now a shooting war that heavily favors anyone who wants to interfere with shipping it's not really a question of little price tweaks anymore; it's a matter of figuring out which oil-related activities are most important because the others are probably going to stop happening in the immediate future.

I'm not sold.

Why is wagering cash directly 'gambling; but exchanging cash for nonrefundable WagerBucks that are only used for wagering just prior to wagering not gambling? It's true that being nonrefundable makes WagerBucks no longer a strict representation of cash; but that's sort of like saying that things you buy with gift cards are part of the barter economy because gift cards can't be cashed out.

I'm also unclear on point 2: people can certainly gamble on games that are directly adversarial and have rules with win/loss/tie conditions; but there's an entire category where all outcomes are wins of varying sizes(like the 'ticket' machines where you always get at least a tiny trickle of output per play; but the actual prizes are hundreds or thousands of tickets; a loss state is clearly implied by the valuation but denied by the rules; most lootboxes are this way since they are never genuinely empty.

Point 3 also seems curious: is casino poker not-gambling because the owner/operator only takes the standard house rake each hand, regardless of which players are winning or losing? Is it only ever gambling if the operator deals in money, and as long as there's a level of indirection it's never gambling? What level of separation counts as separation if the operator pays out in something that only 3rd parties buy; but keeps an eye on the secondary market and adjusts the game accordingly(with items known to have higher secondary market values displayed in the same way that casinos display high cash value outcomes) or the like?

Ultimately definitions can be,(and always are) matters of what we want them to be; but none of what you describe seems to suggest that it is 'not hard' to have 'very easy and clear boundaries and definitions'. It's not impossible to have boundaries and definitions of some sort; but the whole affair looks ripe for ambiguity and boundary pushing; especially when the incentives overwhelmingly favor someone who can get gambling effects without suffering gambling regulations.