Illegal doesnâ(TM)t mean I donâ(TM)t have the right to record, tho. Government doesnâ(TM)t give rights.

Surely this more recent story is much closer to the truth . . . the service struggling to "keep its relevance" is the one attaching itself to the other like a parasite.

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.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

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".

This is fair, but that really just reinforces the point that the article makes. Solo dev is currently different, team output is limited by other factors than pure code output. I've worked on games with literally hundreds of concurrent programmers, and even when you're using something like Unreal Engine and your team is small ( 20 people), you've effectively got all the engine team at Epic generating code for you on a relatively regular basis.

It may indeed be possible for AI to actually make teams faster at some point (even in the nearish future), but right now, it's just more code, which isn't always the best solution.

One of the big problems with this is that it effectively changes the job description of programmers to managers.

You're not just responsible for your own code, you're responsible for telling someone/something else what to do, and then reviewing their work, and then integrating that work and making sure it's correct, because if it gets checked in and it's wrong, you're on the hook for it. But you didn't even write it, so it's harder to understand. Most programmers I know are better at understanding the code they wrote rather than the code they read.

Management is not a job for everyone. I've been a senior programmer and a lead programmer, and it is easier to be a senior programmer that writes complicated, essential systems than it is to be a lead programmer that REVIEWS those systems. If you don't want to do that kind of management work and you just enjoy writing code, you should stay a senior programmer, or move up to some other non-management job. But if you're forced to babysit an LLM, you get ALL THE WORST PARTS of being a lead programmer. You only get the code reviews and none of the intellectual stimulation and enjoyment of creating that thing on your own.

At least a couple comments have pointed out that solo devs use LLMs to great effect, and I'm sure this is true. But if you're not a solo dev, the task is so much different. You're trying to integrate with a bunch of other people and other systems and you're on the hook for something you didn't even write, so you'd best spend the time learning what the code says. It completely defeats the point. When I get an LLM to write my powershell scripts for me, it's because I have no interest at all in learning that scripting language. It takes 2 minutes, usually does a good job, and I can forget about it forever. The development model of asking an LLM to write code that you're responsible for that has to intermingle with the code of dozens of other people and agents sounds like a straight-up nightmare.

Solo development is a different job. The tasks you give to AI are based on what you need, and your own mental model of they code they need to spit out.

Large-scale development is different, because people are different. I've worked on 5 or 6 different game engines over the years, and Unreal is the current one that I'm on. Unreal has its quirks. The rest of our game engine has historical baggage that I need to account for. The interactions between systems are more organic, because not everything can be planned in advance. I worked on Assassin's Creed for 3 games (about 7-8 years?) and we carry over the mistakes of the previous games to the next one, because that engine shipped a game, so it's a known quantity. Sometimes if you're lucky, you get to fix some of those bugs, but then the next games get YOUR bugs, etc.

Solo devs ARE doing amazing work with AI, but solo devs *by definition* don't need to understand the code of 1 or 4 or 50 other people. You can't just check shit in on a big team.

Perfectly reasonable study, because small-scale development is not the same. I have to understand the code of 10+ programmers on a regular basis. Our game engine is involved. The only way for me to learn the code is to use it and step through it.

If you're writing apps yourself, AI is great. It's a teammate that follows your instructions and implements the things that you want. You've already got a mental model of what you need, and it gives that to you. Of course it works for you.

Big codebases are just different. Systems are interdepedent in weird ways for historical reasons, or vendor reasons or weird coworker reasons or whatever. It's not the same task.