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I don't think the style of multiple revisions to walk back the most problematic parts really helps the case. It very much leaves me with the impression that the original version is the one that the author really meant, with the revisions being just a weak attempt to deflect criticism.

Meanwhile, as one of those engineers, they ran fiber down the highway a mile from my house circa 2021, but they did not do any upgrades at all to the last mile infrastructure so I still only have a ~10Mbps DSL option for wired internet at that house, which is a big step up from literally no wired option before, but still vastly inferior to Starlink. (The terrain makes terrestrial wireless a nonstarter in the area). I've since moved back to civilization, but I still own the house. As far as I know, there are no plans at all to improve the last mile infrastructure.

Separately, from SpaceX's own prospectus, Starlink is only a tiny fraction of the overall conglomerate that went public recently. It "only" needs to support double digit billions of valuation to pull its weight inside of the company.

I would describe it as entirely normal. My experience working in a research organization where the majority of my colleagues hold Phds is that education level has a strong inverse correlation with ability/willingness to care about such mundane chores as spelling, grammar and arithmetic.

As someone who works daily with export-control-adjacent hardware and software, my experience is that people tend to aggressively self-censor to a far higher standard than export control regulations actually require. The perceived headache of drawing the ire of whoever it is the enforces this stuff (which as I type this comment I'm just realizing I don't know who specifically is responsible for that) is so scary that people don't want to take any risk at all of being targeted.

There are lots of these hyper-specific "reserved keywords" in the military. Another one from the US Army is "repeat", which is the command for an artillery battery to fire again with the same parameters as their previous barrage. Therefore on the radio we only ever used "say again" to ask someone to repeat their last transmission. Even if no one on the radio had ever or would ever be involved in artillery operations, I imagine it's easier to just train the entire force on a single uniform standard.

two oil changes, a tune-up, and a tire rotation

What is this, the 60s? Modern gas cars are so computer controlled that the concept of a "tune-up" effectively no longer exists, and they go 10,000 miles between oil changes so most people don't even average a single oil change every 6 months. EVs are even lower maintenance, but the difference isn't nearly as big as you're implying.

First of all, yes, I would object although I've debated whether I could get over it for myself. But it's a moot point because my partner would absolutely _never_ put up with it. And that's assuming that the human cleaner doesn't show up with a go-pro and an ill defined policy about where the video from the go-pro is going and what it will be used for

The company that just IPOed is already overwhelmingly "X AI" financially, regardless of the fact that it says "Space X" in the marketing. Whether SpaceX also buys Tesla is hardly even going to move the needle.

Waymo Premier 1 month ago

One major reason is probably that most of the liability portion is going to be covering medical bills in the US. I only did a quick skim of the Wikipedia summary but it looks like Finland, like (almost?) all of Europe wouldn't have that particular liability?

Another reason might be that insurance costs vary widely in the US. I recently had a reason to get an insurance quote in Utah, and it was literally one third the price that I currently pay in California.

All that said, you do seem to enjoy remarkably cheap insurance over there from my perspective. I hardly think those two factors are enough to cover such a large difference.

Waymo Premier 1 month ago

I shop around regularly. USAA isn't even remotely the cheapest option, and the handful of experiences I and family members have had suggest that they are just as shitty as any other insurance company when it comes to handling claims. I only stick with them because they are consistently within 20% of the cheapest option and I value having all of my banking and insurance handled in one place.

Waymo Premier 1 month ago

Comprehensive, collision and 500k liability through USAA, $120/month. Deductibles are as high as they will allow, which is $1k IIRC. I was recently forced to consider a move to Utah. Thankfully I didn't end up moving, but a quote for the exact same coverage in SLC was just $40/month.

Waymo Premier 1 month ago

I pay ~100/month per car for full coverage on two fairly new cars and $500k in liability from the auto policy plus a $1m umbrella policy. And that's in CA which is comically expensive. I find it very believable that you can get excellent liability only coverage on 3 cars for $100/month depending on the state and drivers.

Waymo Premier 1 month ago

As an American I would also like to know... My actual expenses for my low end luxury car are nowhere near that high, and I live in CA which has massively inflated car expenses in practically all fronts.

Registration: $600/year

Insurance: $1,500/year

Gas: ~$2,700/year (15,000 miles @ 30mpg @ $5.50/gal)

Loan: ~$3,500/year if I had borrowed the entire price of the car on a 60 month loan and then kept the car for 15 years as the GP stated

Maintenance: Certainly less than $1,000/year, much less in most years.

And in some states registration and insurance could literally be a third of what I pay. Gas could easily be half. I can't imagine anyone is paying $12,000/year for any non-luxury vehicle.

Waymo Premier 1 month ago

If two Waymo rides per day is covering your driving needs, there's no way you're spending $120/month on gas. Also, car insurance in CA is a huge ripoff, but I still don't pay anywhere near $180/month for very thorough coverage on my ~$40k car. Believable enough otherwise though.

Dopamine Fracking 1 month ago

I grew up with the fake stuff, and have lately done quite a bit of taste testing of the various grades of real stuff. Grade A golden is the only one with a distinct enough difference in flavor for me to care, and even then it's very much an acquired taste, not immediately and distinctly better. Given the stark price difference, my conclusion is that the maple syrup elitism is a silly hobby horse for people with too much money.

I think it can be hard for anyone who hasn't done safety-critical software before to understand just how much testing goes into it. Even for non-human spaceflight, the stakes are so high, we have all of the testing you would expect as far as unit tests, system integration tests, end to end testing, but then we also have full human in the loop software sims, full hardware in the loop sims both at multiple levels of integration, and on and on. For every line of code I've written for a spacecraft, I'm 100% confident that if that line is responsible for a bug in flight, there are at least 10 other people who would share the blame with me.

Honestly, why? I can't speak for BO, but at NASA, we're all learning what the technology can and can't do just like everyone else. You can bet your ass that no one is vibe-coding any part of the rocket without thorough review of every line of code and thorough testing at multiple levels though.

California has mandated it for new construction for over a decade now. Of course old stock doesn't really ever turn over in California so it's entirely possible that we will never reach a point where a majority of SFH in California have sprinklers, but it's certainly possible to change for new homes.

Claude Opus 4.8 2 months ago

If we're making that distinction, I think it would be more accurate to say that many people in the field appear to believe that these models are sapient, even though they are clearly not sentient.

Both anecdotally for myself and from what I'm reading in the news, it seems just as likely that AI usage has already largely peaked.

There was a lot of hype and exploration of capabilities, but models aren't evolving fast enough to keep that going, so I'm settling down into a familiarity with what an LLM can and can't do that means I am using them less overall that I was 6 months ago when I was throwing everything under the sun at it just to see what happened.

Without either new model breakthroughs or dramatically _lower_ costs, I will be very surprised if the ultimate market doesn't end up within an order of magnitude of where it is today.

Plenty of people have personal projects where the purpose is the end result. One small recent example of my own, I'm a long-time Garmin watch user. I struggled with learning all of the details of their custom language, runtime and SDK in the pre-LLM world. With agentic AI tools, it was dramatically easier to write a watch face that looked the way I wanted. From there, I very much did learn a lot and do a lot of re-writing and tweaking to make the code actually somewhat good, but the custom watch face was the point for me. I really couldn't care less about Garmin's esoteric tech stack. The only reason I bothered with everything after the vibe-coding step was to try to optimize power consumption where I could.