They can certainly write code, but the code they write will be "their code", and I will at best be reviewing it for them. It won't be "my code" because I didn't write it.

It's not as important as you might think. If the concern is humanity being able to survive the loss of Earth's biosphere, then the enabling technology to accomplish that is recreating an independently sustainable human-compatible biosphere elsewhere -- which is not something that Starship, on its own, will be able to do within the next 20 years, even if it could place human beings on Mars. So if the Giant Space Asteroid comes for us, we'll be just as doomed with Starship as without it -- the Mars colonists would starve to death a few months after the Earth resupply ships stopped arriving.

Because the software / firmware could be different from the production environment? If you're an auditor, and you believe an entity may be up to something nefarious, would you TRUST the same entity to supply you a device that wasn't altered to cover their tracks?

Assuming all goes well, I agree. OTOH, returning old equipment back into service after it had been written off is a little risky, don't you think?

You say they broke their website, but that's just from your puny individual human perspective. When you consider it from their giant corporate perspective, any time they can put another advertisement in front of your eyeballs is a win for them. If they just up and presented the media you wanted, you'd watch it and then go away, robbing them of views they deserve somehow.

It's perfectly possible to build a machine that will incapacitate a human at close range; all of the world's militaries have been doing it for years.

It's also possible to deliberately dial down the machine's combat effectiveness to the point where a fight against a human might not be a foregone conclusion.

OTOH, having done the latter, what have we learned? That we can design and build a robot that we nerfed just enough that it usually loses in hand-to-hand combat?

As they say, what's remarkable isn't that the dog plays a good game of poker; it's that the dog is able to play poker at all.

As methods for by suicide-by-wealth go, it's classier than drugs, and more accessible than a carbon-fiber submarine. I predict we'll see some pretty spectacular Youtube videos of people making themselves (and their car) two-dimensional.

I wonder how the performance of 2 networked 512GB Mac Studios would compare to the performance of a (hypothetical) single Mac Studio with 1TB of RAM?

My intuition says that the network linking the two machines would be a bottleneck, but I don't know if that's a minor performance problem or a major one.

I didn't know either, but I do know what JPEG is, and I have a pretty good idea about what XL might mean, so I was able to suss out that it might be a new and improved lossy-compressed image format.

Of course, approaching the problem rationally like that doesn't provide me an opportunity to make childish insults, but that's just one of the downsides of being a grown-up that I'll have to live with.

Generously: Musk wasn't willing to go along with thee grape soda and beef jerky terminology, therefore Mr. Mossad knew he was a liability to the operation. He either wouldn't or couldn't be controlled or would readily spill the spaghetti due to his autism.

The real killer app for AI will be when someone creates an AI that grovels over all the millions of low-effort AI slop games out there and flags just the interesting/fun/novel ones for your attention. Otherwise you'll never find the gems amongst all the dross.

There hasn't been anything worthwhile on AM since Paul Harvey died, and not much even before that. I try to listen to it every time I drive my old truck (because it only has AM) and give up in frustration every time.

There's no reason why Python (compiled from Rust) would be any slower than Python (compiled from C). Both languages compile to native executable code, and both have good optimizers available.

Cameras are not the problem. Everyone has cameras these days. I do not care if the local transportation department or highway department monitors the roads or has the ability to pull up a recording to determine the cause of a crash or some other event in the public space.

The network / database / AI detection of license plates / car color make model and features such as decals / facial features/ TPMS monitors / Bluetooth and WI-FI signals is the problem, and indefinite cataloguing of all of the above compounds that problem. Those are the features which turn the whole enterprise into warrantless mass surveillance.

When NEST or whoever was going to do the same thing with doorbell cameras--to track "lost pets" is also problematic for many of the same reasons: the police can gain access to it arbitrarily.