I get where you're coming from, but I think we also have to accept that we have only an extremely basic understanding of how the brain works, and still don't really understand what consciousness is at all. Our present situation reminds me of the early experiments with 'evolution' where people thought you could evolve bacteria by putting some chemicals in a glass jar. If they had had access to an electron microscope to see how complex even a single cell is, they would have realised how absurd it was to believe that you could just mix some organic compounds, wait a few days and get mulit-cellular life.

The 'neural nets' we have are a weird proxy for how we understood the human brain to work in the 1980s. We know that the way neurons work is way more complicated (chemical signalling, much more interconnections, each neuron being like a city in complexity etc) than our simplistic models (simple non-linearing gating and single dimensional interconnects etc). It's actually impressive that they are as useful as they have turned out to be.

Of course we may be close to stumbling upon the secrets to AGI, but if we did it would be just blind luck. I think it's much more likely we will continue to develop a suite of algorithms that can do things that humans can do more and more efficiently, though this will be a long slog of incremental improvement.

At some point we might be able to build a robot that can essentially emulate a basic human, and I guess at that point the philosophical question is whether that machine is conscious or not if it pretends to believe it is.

I think this idea of a super intelligence is really dumb though. For all we know (and there is some evidence with autism etc), there is a inherent tradeoff between pure intellectual capability and stability in other areas of the brain. Or there might not be. But we have no idea, so just guessing that once we can create an AI it will be able to improve itself in a pretty naive position to take (though understandable if your goal is to become a mega billionaire).

Ives is an artist, not a business person, nor an engineer. I think you've got to realise that, while I'm sure it was pretty exciting working at Apple on world changing work, the actual designs he was cranking out were pretty braindead. In most IT products, nobody really wants the actual device to be the focus, it's meant to facilitate the content, and that's why something like modernist principles is where all technology design has headed. I like modernism, but it hasn't been innovative for 80 odd years now.

Back when he started in industrial design in the 80s/90s/00s, it was quite a unique time (remember IDEO), because technology was long behind where our imaginations were. For example, everyone knew that a flat screen monitor would be the best format for a computer, but we couldn't make them. So you had to use design language to make that big bulky CRT screen look interesting. That is a good use for design. But once we had flat screens and compact CPUs etc, the need for all that evaporated.

I don't think he would have stayed at Apple if Steve hadn't been there. Steve probably just genuinely enjoyed having the 'cool artist friend' at work (in the jobs book there were stories about all their fun 'work' trips to Japan), when almost everyone else was a business person or engineer. But once Steve died, he was basically stuck deciding what radius to make the iPhone edge for the next three generations. That must be so braindead, and I can see why he tried to push things that nobody really wanted in an attempt to make the designs more interesting (I imagine the butterfly keyboard was about going towards a haptic keyboard and then being able to have a dual touch screen type device or something).

I haven't really followed his other design work, but that in itself suggest he isn't an amazingly notable artist. But whatever, he's done well for himself, but I definitely do not think he is or ever was much more than Jobs' artist friend who could help with the aesthetics on Jobs' big new idea.

Yeah I agree as well. I haven't had to do much MS code for a while, but wow, they just generally have the crappiest architecture design I've ever encountered. I mean it is the place where the lament 'architectural astronaut' was born.

When I was younger, I tried to understand what they were doing with their various driver models, franken-unix style file system, bizarre layer-apon-layer of UI 'object' models, and that nightmare that is the registry. It's just all horrible, and I genuinely think many of the original underlying architectural concepts have been lost to time and incompetence.

When I do MS work, I do find myself just copying and pasting big chunks of code because life is too short to try to understand if there is any sort of coherent design going on (and these days I assume there isn't). If AI code paste can help untangle that, then good for them.

But when I'm dealing with a well designed library, such as Cocoa even, I can't really see the big benefit of such an AI thing. A well designed library has a simple conceptual model that gets out of your way and lets you focus on the project's business logic.

I think the whole college industrial complex is doing a pretty good job of destroying itself anyway. My friend recruits electronics engineering grads. He has had to develop his own basic skills test, because the grades and degrees these people are getting has little correlation with their actual practical abilities. I mean, one question is 'draw the circuit for a bridge rectifier'. Many grads cannot do this. He has had a number say they need a computer so they can check on google. How are they getting EE degrees without understanding basic electronics? There were some useless people in my EE class 20 years ago, but all of them would have been able to explain what a bridge rectifier was.

Also go look at the scandals around places like Juliard where they have milked their reputation while putting increasingly less effort into actually teaching students. This is basically private equity stuff - take over a business with a reputation for quality then cut costs. Here in the UK, when I graduated, about 7% were getting first class honours - now it's at nearly 30%. The measurement is becoming worthless.

I think for many jobs with hard skills (such as software), independent proficiency assessments like LEET testing will be the way forward. Business groups will set up assessments and if someone can get a top result in those they will be in, regardless of whether they got the knowledge through university or by watching youtube videos. College will remain for those who go into career pathways where it's about knowing the right people - but it will become increasingly pointless for anyone who does not already come from a rich and connected family.

If you don't come from a rich family, and don't have hard skills then you will be screwed, and I expect this number will grow massively as automation (including AI) raises the bar for what hard skills you need to have. At some point there will be so many people struggling to find careers that it will become politically untenable to continue running our economy that way, and then we'll just have to hope someone has come up with a better idea by then.

I imagine the delayed payment thing is funded by the merchants (vendors) because it presumably encourages people to buy more and/or allows smaller shops to compete with bigger retailers who might offer their own credit programs. Merchant card fees are quite high (around 2-4%) especially for smaller vendors, so if they can force out other payment providers with this 'deal' then that could be a net win for them. I also imagine they get a certain number of customers switch over to credit at high interest rates because of the low friction.

The real scam in all of this is how merchant payment processors have inserted themselves into the process in a way that is transparent to the user, and then they absolutely fleece business with no ability to negotiation. A business I owned used to take credit card payments over the phone. We were low volume but high value items, and one day Visa or whatever rang us and said they had to up our fee for no reason. We asked why and they said most of our customers were platinum card holders so it cost them more to give them all the rewards, and basically, we were going to have to pay for that. It was easy for us to just bump a bit more onto our prices, but I realised how dumb it was that all the guys flashing around their fancy credit cards and bragging about the 'free' stuff they were getting were actually just paying for it (and then some) at all the high end shops they spent at.

The model isn't to make profit, well, at least not in a sustainable way. The goal is to IPO - which is exactly what Klarna was trying to do before it got hit by the deteriorating economic outlook.

If consumer spending hadn't hit headwinds, then their plan would have been to keep 'growing' sales (loan issuance) while keeping delinquencies at an okay level. Engineer a couple of quarters of profit, and then do an IPO with the promise of some sort of exponential increase in revenue due to leveraging their large user base and partnerships with merchants blah blah blah.

The VCs and early founders cash out and then what happens to the company after that is not really their concern.

These buy now pay later companies have been around for ages. They periodically collapse when it turns out that the 'asset' of loads of unsecured loans from people who have no money (i.e. it's not even worth pursing them though the courts), is basically worthless in any kind of economic downturn. As far as I can tell, the main leverage they have to make people keep paying the loans is the offer of more loans. As soon as this process breaks down (you decide you really don't want to keep giving them more loans) then it all comes to an end quite quickly.

The big difference is that even if you own a car, you still have to pay to use it. You have to pay taxes, insurance, fuel, parking, maintenance. Even if your car sits in the garage all the time, you're still paying a lot to own one.

With software and media this is not really the case, though a lot of software does have ongoing costs these days so some kind of recurring charge is valid.

I also think most people are just annoyed about the exploitative nature of software as a service, not the actual concept. For example, Apple has the dumbest tiers ever for their iCloud storage. You can either get not enough or way more than you need. Other firms (ahem accounting software) make it hard to change over, and keep jacking up the price each year. Adobe makes it hard to stop the subscription.

If we could have faith that the service would be fair, then I think many people's problems with SAAS would disappear.

For example, if Apple just charged me a fair amount for every GB I used, I would absolutely go nuts on iCloud, but their dumb MBA designed system pisses me off so much that I put the effort in to using alternatives.

I really don't think money is the motivating factor for him. If it was, it would be way easier to understand the guy. If he cared about money he wouldn't have completely tanked Tesla sales with his stupid behaviour. No, the trouble is that he wants power and to smash up a system he doesn't like - he is ideologically driven by a weird ideology. Wanting to change the system is not necessarily a bad thing (there are many problems with our current system) but the guy is ignorant. When he learnt that there is not a giant vault full of the dollar bills everyone had saved up over the last 50 years to pay out social security, and than pranced around telling everyone that he had made the incredible discovery that social security payment come from current tax receipts, it was like 'how can this guy not understand basic economics?'.

That level of ignorance is incredibly dangerous when combined with hubris and access to power. He probably genuinely thinks he's saving everyone because Theil gave him a copy of Ayn Rand for dummies a couple years ago.

The whole lot of them seem incredibly ignorant, but I also blame the establishment for this. The establishment is not ignorant of the structural issues we face, but basically refused to do anything about it for the last 20 years. So the people who have been screwed over by neoliberalism are now supporting anyone who will actually try to change the system. As someone who got hammered by not getting on the housing bandwagon earlier in my career, I could scarily seem myself falling into that camp if I didn't have decades of critical thinking skills developed through an engineering career. But I vote for establishment players with gritted teeth, because I know things can get a lot worse than simply having no real financial future.

Yep. And for his next trick, watch Tesla roll out a fleet of robo taxis in June (as promised) that seems to perform better than Waymo and don't need lidar so are much cheaper.

We will then hear how these will be rolled out en-mass 'next year'.

The vehicles will just be teleoperated, but if anyone pulls them up on this they will point out that Waymo also has remote safety drivers. Nobody will be able to tell how much the vehicles are being driven by AI vs the teleoperator, so this is where the 'magic' will happen.

I have absolutely no doubt that this will work and $TSLA bulls will eat it up.

Thanks to starlink he might even live demo a car being remote summoned from the other side of the USA (tele operation now works anywhere!) as originally promised a decade ago.

Elon is not the only one who has destroyed the tech world with BS (ahem, anything AI...), but he is becoming one of the worst. It's just good to know there are still businesses out there who are busy doing the hard and boring work of actually solving real problems (thanks Waymo).

I agree. I saw their cars in SF recently, and while I didn't ride in one, it was incredible to see how well they integrated with other traffic. I was also surprised at the variety of conditions they could drive under - people trying to do weird u-turn manoeuvres, pretty poor road conditions/markings etc. Basically driverless cars are here, and I think the media has expended so much effort on the Tesla driverless hypefest over the last 10 years that they are totally missing the massive revolution that is now happening.

The cars are going to be everywhere within a few years. It's going to absolutely decimate driving jobs. If their tech can do what it's doing on busy city streets, truck drivers on the highway are essentially unemployed at this point - subject only to Waymo getting around to addressing that market.

The entire automotive industry is going to be disrupted - young people don't care about cars anymore, and will happily give up having to learn to drive to use taxis. The die-hard ageing boomers who wouldn't have given up their steering wheel without a fight will realise that these things will allow them to live independently as they rapidly age, so will embrace them as well. The whole concept of cars as a status symbol was already dying and these things will kill it.

Kudo to the the team at Waymo. Rather than pumping the hypefest and all cashing out as millionaires, they have keep grinding away for over a decade now to actually make something that works.

While my memory is fuzzy, I'd probably agree that homework at school level is pretty pointless. The reality is you are not learning very much at school. But when you get into a decent university program (e.g engineering), there is simply not enough time to learn everything in lectures. You can get a brief overview, but if you really want to understand something you need to explore the space in your own time. At least for myself, I found this was the case. There were certainly people who saw homework as just a box to tick, and frankly, those people became terrible engineers.

For example, I can listen to hours of signal processing lectures, and quickly get the general gist, but if I had to apply a concept to a project, I'll have to work my way through a text book and grind equation out on my own. The detail is just a whole different thing from having an overall understanding, and I don't see how you could learn that in a lecture or lab context.

Le Pen is nowhere near close to winning in France. The French presidential election uses a run-off system. Because the majority of voters sit to the left/center, this is where all the major parties are busy fighting it out for voters. It means Le Pen can sit on the edge of the fight and collect up all the far right voters without any real challenge. Due to the number of far right supporters growing (which is an issue) this has allowed her to get into the second round in the last few election, as the left/center votes are divided among multiple parties. But in the second round she then gets absolutely destroyed, because even those who dislike the alternative party will still move their vote across to keep Le Pen out. When you dig into the statistics, this is apparent at a huge level. The only reason she does okay is the sheer number of voters who don't bother turning up to the second round because their left/center candidate lost. But if there was a real risk of the far right taking over France, you can bet that they would all turn up.

Similarly, in the UK, Farage has zero chance of ever being PM due to the first past the post system. I mean, it's essentially a mathematical impossibility. At best he may be able to get one or two seats, but even that is pretty tough. TBH, it would be great if Elon had dumped $100million on finding out that you can't buy a UK election, but he seems to have had a falling out with Farage.

I've thought about this as well. When I was a young engineer working for a big corporate, the older people tended to keep their politics to themselves (wise advise ultimately), but us younger folk were a bit more outspoken. However the general company policy was to not discuss politics and everyone in leadership was quite careful about this. Thinking back now, this makes a lot of sense - I think I would have been horrified at some of the views fellow engineers had. I think the issue with places like SpaceX now, is that anyone who agrees with Elon's politics probably feels validated to spout on about it. This emboldens others with the same views, while those who don't share those views stay quiet. Eventually you end up with a sort of cult situation, where you have to either be on board with whatever Elon's latest view is or you get shunned.

Ironically, unless Elon believes that being left leaning means you cannot be good at your job, this will destroy the meritocratic framework that he keeps spouting on about wanting to support.

It sounds like SpaceX was already a bit of a toxic place to work (as is rocket lab, from firsthand experience), so perhaps this won't have as big an impact though. I'm too old for this sort of BS now though. There are plenty of places to work where you don't have to deal with this sort of thing.

I don't think the data they would have gotten was that great either. They really need to test heat shield performance and the flap design changes made to starship. They need the results from this to inform the next step in starship design. What they really need, if they want to be able to iterate on the design quickly, is to have starships coming back to the launch tower so they can inspect them.

But they are not making progress towards this goal. They still need to have an orbital flight, and I doubt they will want to do this until they have had at least two V2 designs perform sub-orbital flights without issue. Starship is massive. Having it stuck in orbit, to re-enter at a time that they can't control, would be a serious safety issue.

I guess the problem is that they have a very full development program - if everything went well, they would be pushed to get a starship return to launch within the year. After that they still need to make the stack reusable, then rapidly reusable and then deal with things like orbital refuelling and figuring out how to land on mars/moon. There is a lot of work, and if at each point they are going to have setbacks due to items they have already tested, then it is going to slow the design massively.

To be honest, this is really one of the flaws with their 'agile' approach. Moving quickly works well when you have only a few probabilities stacking up (e.g. testing belly flop landing and things like that), but as your system becomes more and more complicated, you get hammered by even small failure probabilities in parts that you aren't trying to test. This seems to be the case with these two flights, and it will just get worse and worse as they try to add capability to starship. It could very well get to the point where they are better off sitting down and doing meticulous bench design and testing of parts, rather than spending $100million per launch to find out that there are unexpected tolerances in some valve body etc that didn't appear before.

I know a lot of artists, so I'm sympathetic to their plight (most of them don't make any money from their work), but ultimately, if an AI can make a song that people prefer more than a human artist's one, then I'm not understanding what the outrage is? Yes it sucks, but there are lots of areas where machines can now do a better job than the most skilled artisan and nobody is mourning for those workers. I mean, just consider how drum machines have destroyed the market for everybody except a handful of apex-level session drummers. Why don't we ban drum machines to keep aspiring drummers in work?

Further, if the AI generates a song that infringes the copyright of their current works, then they can enforce their copyright in the same way that they can and do against a human artist who does the same; if their songs are really better then this won't affect them and they will continue to rake in the big money.

Recording studios will only fall silent if these artists are not able to produces better songs than a data centre full of GPUs. If that turns out to be the case, then perhaps they should direct their ire towards the tastes of the general public, or their own failure to innovate, rather than ideological legal manoeuvring.