Nothing would make it “help get a little closer to making it a reality” if it’s not physically possible, and there’s a very strong argument that that’s the case. If nothing else, the maximum specific tensile strength allowed by covalent bonding - which is fundamental physics that we can’t change - combined with the reality of defects in a 36,000 km cable - is far below what’s needed to build a space elevator in Earth gravity. It might be possible to build a space elevator on the Moon or even (in the far future) on Mars, because their gravity is such that real materials could potentially do the job. But doing that involves bootstrapping an entire offworld industry, which is far beyond anything even the most advanced nations are capable of currently, let alone a technologically stunted oil state.

There’s no chance they’d actually succeed in building a space elevator. The Line is at least theoretically physically possible with current technology, even if it was always an obviously spectacularly bad idea. A space elevator is not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Always interesting to see the fascist take. Oh wait... no it's not.

I agree. Questions like this often seem to come from people who don’t *want* to use AI, or perhaps are afraid of it for whatever reason, and they’re looking for reasons that they shouldn’t use it.

10 years using Duolingo, 4 years in Diamond League, and earlier this month I just had enough of the low-quality AI bullshit.

Out. Done. Gone. Waste of my time, every damn day.

The decline in quality and accuracy was just too much. As an English speaker learning a handful of other languages and concentrating on two, it was interesting to me that the first real noticeable patterns of errors and general slop were actually on the English side. Increasingly obtuse questions or statements, ok fine, I will spit those back in French or Spanish with good accuracy. I don't have any issue whatever with the occasionally-dark humor or the gender related topics that might push others' hot buttons, and I appreciate the occasional foray into curious stories and situations. But... over the past year there has been an increasing level of nonsensical AI-generated questions, erroneous answers accepted, multiple correct answers, etc etc... and it's obvious that no actual native speaker looked at a lot of the new content -- either from the native or foreign perspective. A couple years ago there was an increasing level of having to hit the button for "You should have accepted my answer." But for the past year, it's become a daily occurrence to have to hit the button for "You shouldn't have accepted my answer." The latter is a clear indication of AI slop and drift in the language models, and lack of QA. Real human QA is not optional, and Duo has apparently dispensed with it entirely. The result is gameified garbled nonsense. Playing the game was fun for a while (seriously, still in Diamond league for more than four years straight), but the goal is language learning not to compete with other stupid little games on my device. Feh. Done. Cancelled my subscription, et je vais dépenser cet hundred bucks de mon argent pour un spritz et une charcuterie chaque après-midi pour le reste de l'été.

It was Andrej Karpathy, one of the world’s top AI engineers.

Description of the term: https://x.com/karpathy/status/...

About him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I’ve stopped arguing with people about it (mostly haha) for this reason. They’re either going to have to figure it soon enough without our help, or as you say be left behind.

This matches how I use it. I’ll add a few other points:

4. Writing the first core version of a service or UI. I’ll typically use close to 100% of those generated lines, and then continue building with LLM assistance where it makes sense. It makes a big difference to development velocity.
5. Finding bugs. If some bug isn’t obvious to me, provide the code to an LLM and describe the problem. Its success rate is high.
6. Working with tech I’m not particularly familiar with (an extension of your #3, i.e. learning)
7. Writing documentation.
8. Reverse engineering existing code, i.e. describe some code to me so I don’t have to dig through it in detail.
9. Writing unit tests.

What do you object to, her support for equality or her opposition to genocide? Or is it that a woman stated an opinion?

So, the functional equivalent of reasoning?

Are you saying that ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek etc. “make heavy use of external tools” to write code? Because they all write pretty good code, up to a certain size of program. Certainly far better than the average human, who can’t code at all; or the average software developer, who isn’t really very good.

I think you confuse keeping secrets with censorship. The people who knew the details of D-Day or of the breaking of Enignma absolutely agreed to keep those secrets prior to learning the details. There is nothing tyrannical about criminal penalties against people who consent to keep classified secrets knowing there is such a penalty.

Your comment applies to yourself more than parent comment. It's hard to think of any systemic oppression that wasn't enabled by censorship.

You can tell leaders are lying about how much they care about CSAM by how they reacted to the Jeffery Epstein scandal. They look the other way even when named specific individuals with strong evidence show up. Stop trusting the oppressors.

This is the exact same method by which Grubhub/Doordash/Postmates/etc get a large portion of their business: by getting their phone number and/or spoofed site listed as a search result or even in the google maps listing for a site nearest the searcher's location.
Of course Google won't "fix" the problem; it's a source of advertising revenue, and general boost to user engagement.