As much as ramageddon hurts, Emacs' appetite for memory is a solved problem and you can enjoy that Emacs Macht Alle Computer SchÃn.

This helium crisis is nothing new. It's now 20 years since I wrote a column titled The looming helium crisis and little has changed.

In this context, AI is just a compiler that turns human-readable source code into machine-readable code. I mean, gcc does that too. Bison writes C code for you. IDEs help you edit. Spell checkers do your "look in the dictionary" job for you. We've had code-generating tools for a long time now, AI is just another one. Today's programmers are no longer involved in writing assembler, tomorrow's programmers will no longer be involved in writing C. How many of you can do low-level programming *now* ? How many people *today* write low quality programs with the existing tools?

What's different now is that AI disconnects you from the resulting logic in a way that previous tools didn't. Then again, C disconnects you from what the assembler does, just not as much. Python even more so. ESPHome "programs" are just YAML files. This trait enables more people to "write code", which is good, but increases the amount of bad code as much as it increases the good. We as a coding community need to figure out how to map our ideals and ethics to this new tool. What is "open source" if the compiler is an LLM instead of gcc? What is the source code? How do you reproduce or validate LLM-generated programs? Who will be providing the "core intelligence" that LLMs train on? There aren't many people who can write or maintain compilers any more, will we have the same problem with AI in the future? How do we recognize the effort, creativity, and authorship that goes in to "programming" with an LLM?

IMHO taking a general "for" or "against" position wrt AI/LLMs is not useful. We should take positions for or against *how* it's is used, and how we can "use it for good, not evil." Past generations thought computers were unobtainable magic. Today's generation has the Internet in its pocket. Future generations will wonder how we luddites survived without AI. It's up to us to figure out how to get there.

Besides, who doesn't want a compiler that reads the documentation and helps you write code? ;-)

Would providing aid or comfort to Iran count as treason? There isn't a declared war, but there has certainly been acts of war there.

When an occupied area of Ukraine - Bucha - was reconquered, they found plenty of raped, tortured, and killed civilians. Russian soldiers referred to these operations involving hunting down people in lists, filtration, torture, and execution as zachistka ("cleansing").

A fair peace would be withdrawal from all occupied territories, war crime tribunals from the leadership down to the individuals committing acts like these, and Russia paying compensation to the families of all victims of their acts as well as for the rebuilding of Ukraine. Confiscating all oligarch wealth might be a good start there.

I'm sure they've got that. This is a later layer of defense - training users to be aware that there are bad actors out there. I'm a consultant, and the organization where I'm at (doing completely other things) has an external vendor providing this. After you identify a mail, you get some micro training as well on factors that could indicate it is targeted - e.g. domain names looking almost like the real thing, creating a sense of urgency, checking where the links go before clicking them, etc. I believe this helps create and maintain a necessary awareness, even though there are a lot of other defenses too.

The bigger problem will be manhole covers on suburban streets. These will get sucked out of the road not only wrecking your Tesla but likely also endangering the traffic behind you. You can bet that this feature will be geofenced and only available on approved racetracks --which, for 99% of buyers, simply makes it useless and expensive payload.

The launch was a circus that PT Barnum would have been proud of.

A handful of specially built show-pony-cars that are ultra-light, only "flew" once (because they probably didn't have a big enough battery onboard to recharge those gas cylinders) and were the ultimate in Musk-level deceptions.

I'm going to do a full technical breakdown of all the reasons why what we saw was 100 percent marketing and why we will *never* see a Roadster 2 with the claimed specifications ever hit the market -- the laws of physics may be inconvenient but ignoring them is not an option.

What we saw in that demo was Musk, once again, coming up with a clever way to get hundreds of millions (perhaps more) of interest-free funding from people who slept through science classes in highschool. What's even more amazing is that this is the *second* time he's promised unrealistic deliveries, taken hundreds of millions in "reservations" and failed to deliver.

PT Barnum was so right.

And Musk also said "Manned colonies on Mars by 2024" and "Hyperloop" and "Fast transit tunnels beneath cities" and "Solar roof tiles" and a whole lot of other stuff to which the laws of physics and his engineers said "nope".

It's not the launch or even the jump that will be the problem... it's landing a 2+ ton car that is descending from several hundred feet above its apex and this has significant vertical speed. Even the gas-thrusters may have their work cut out for them :-)

No word about the real-world range of the Roadster 2.

I find it interesting that Musk can create a show-pony car that does cool tricks that nobody would ever allow on a road-legal car but he fails to address the elephant in the room: "How far will it go on a charge?"

Why did he ignore this crucial aspect of any EV?

Easy, because he originally claimed 1000Km and it is much easier to get a lightweight show-car to do jumping tricks than it is to deliver a real-world essential such as decent range.

The Roadster we saw in the display is just a stunt-car, road-legal production vehicles will be just another fast EV.

If people want to risk quarter of a million dollars reserving one then only one phrase springs to mind:

"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me".

Yggdrasil - that's a name I haven't heard in Linus contect for a long time. However, it was only relevant in the early 90s. Git was developed in early 2005, as a response to the controversy and problems using Bitkeeper: A proprietary distributed version control system that had provided free licenses for developers of free software, but with several caveats that many found unacceptable. In early 2005 the free license was revoked (due various unhappy devs reverse engineering it, IIRC - in particular Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame), and Linus responded by creating git.

For another blast from the past, here's an article about in the Linux Journal.

Also, in some cases there are two sides to the story. Take self driving cars: In the future, self driving cars could be safer than human drivers per kilometer driven, but still kill people due to failures in the software/hardware.

Potential gains should obviously not be a carte blanche for companies to do whatever they will with AI, but it should mean that society should have informed discussions about pros and cons for AI use in various settings. And while having people with actual knowledge being at the front of discussion, the hoi polloi should also be a part of it.

Only if that NFT, itself, is delivered by carrier pigeon.

Having trouble finding employees at the same time as laying off other employees is not necessarily contradictory, unless said workers have the same skills and experience.

One theoretical example - due to automating and streamlining internal processes, you could have too mqny support staff while at the same time having a demand for experienced developers. Or a transport company 100+ years ago transitioning to lorries wouldn't need as many horse support staff as they have, while trying to recruit mechanics.