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.

I didn't pay the original retail price. Apple discounts it's older phones to serve as entry level products. I think I paid about half what it was when first released, and it had a bit of an extra discount as well from the retailer.

Not at all. What most people don't realise is that the majority of robotics companies are not interested in trying to make a humanoid robot. Humans are great general purpose manipulators, but most robot applications are doing a specific task. Take many assembly line jobs - how useful would it be to have, say, three or four arms, the ability to position in space within +/-0.5mm and the ability to hold a 20kg load at arms length without movement for as long as you want? Well, we can make robots that can do all that. Or a range of other specifications. Making a robot that can't do any of those things because it 'mimics' a human is just dumb.

For example, we have screw feeder heads that you can fit to a robot arm, precisely because there is no point having the machine that makes screws just dump them into an open container so we then need a multi-million dollar CV and robotics system to pick up individual screws. You just feed the screws out of the machine that makes them onto tape and then put that tape into the screw fitting robot. The entire electronic assembly industry automated in this way and no humanoid robots were required - indeed barely even any machine vision.

There are tasks that would suit a humanoid robot for - e.g. domestic duties, some construction. But the problem with them is that these are very difficult things to solve, and many of the jobs have low economic value (pay poorly, no skills required). This means you need an absurd reduction in the cost of the robot before it would make economic sense, and that's before you've actually figured out how to make a robot that can do the task efficiently.

We will get there one day but right now there are huge numbers of much better economic opportunities for non-humanoid robots, so that is what businesses are building.

Perhaps the best example of this is the Spot dog. It is an incredible robotics achievement, but most of them get sold for research labs and the market is tiny compared to things like industrial manipulator arms.

I'm on a iPhone 13 that I bought new a year ago. I just found the cost of the latest models a bit crazy. It was genuinely confusing trying to remember what the differences between each model were, and I just didn't feel the value matrix was very strong, so I just got the cheapest one. It's really good and will last me a long time.

It's pretty obvious that Apple has been doing increasingly dubious business practices to try to maintain margin (the storage upgrade costs, the whole 8GB entry level thing, the stupid tiers of iCloud storage). They are entitled to do what they want, but during the Jobs era, one thing I think he got absolutely right was 'don't confuse the customer'. You just went and bought the 'iPhone' and knew you had the product that they had shown you on the stage. No guessing about whether you need the max or pro max or last year's pro max. I mean, the peak crazy for this was the iPad lineup, but they seem to have gotten that cleaned up a bit now (though, what is the difference between the iPad and iPad Air?).

I do like Apple products precisely because i deal with computers all day, and I like that they 'just work' for stuff I do at home. But I do get the sense they will use more and more opaque business practices to try to keep profits up. Sadly, the pretex to all of this, is that they are just not innovating anymore.

Absolutely agree. I doubt this is in any way cheaper for Apple. I'm pretty sure (from what I've read about their chip) that the issue is that the performance is not as good as a QualComm modem, hence why they are putting it in their budget model. I doubt the performance issues are enough that most people would notice, but in head to head performance tests it would come across badly.

I'd expect they will try to go for lower power or something so they can put the chip into their wearables etc first. Whether we ever see one in their top of the line products I think will depend on what progress they can make. It would not surprise me if a lot of the issues they are having are working around patents.

It's a bit like the Apple Map situation where their primary goal is to remove dependency on a single supplier.

Not sure I agree. The advent of free youtube highlight reels has brought me back into the sport, and I think this is a really good way to watch it. I watch all the gran prix and qualifying now by just watching the highlights in one sitting. I used to watch a lot of the full races, but honestly, (a) I just don't have time these days (b) it's really not that interesting most of the time.

F1 is more about how the season develops at a driver/car/team level. Then there can be particular moments in a race, or drama during accidents or pitstops. But most of the time during races it's just cars following at 2 second intervals to 'manage tyres and fuel', with a few lead cars being obscenely quicker than everyone else. But this has always been the case with F1 because it is a development series. Outside of a handful of seasons, the racing is mostly won in hidden tech development long before the cars are on the track. If we are lucky, the leading team might have inter-team battles, and every now and again, another team will challenge the lead team for best car for a little bit. It's really a soap opera sport.

If I could easily pay-per-view a few of the races (e.g. Monza, Spa) then I'd likely do that, but when I think back to my youthful days watching races seasons, it was largely because I had lots of free time and nothing better to do.

Yeah but the SpaceX concept is way beyond our technological capabilities right now. Sure they can make it happen on a prototype, which is definitely a huge achievement, but to do it regularly at a safety level required to match passenger aircraft is an insanely harder problem.

It is incredibly hard to make even a very simple system reliable to the level needed for passenger safety. The cascading of probabilities just destroys you. For things like aircraft, the issue of the environment they operate in, which cannot be fully controlled, in many cases puts a limit on how far you can drive down risk levels. The almost universal approach to reliability engineering is that you have to have redundant systems. This massively fixes the problem of cascading probabilities, but even then you have to spend huge effort to ensure that shared risks are dealt with properly.

With propulsive landing, the failure matrix is insane. You have forward flap actuator failures, relight failures, gimbal failures, control system failures (sensor, computers, actuators for all flaps and engines), general structural failures of a lightweight highly stressed airframe, fuel system issues (contamination, blockages, valve issues). Then you have the general problem of the huge amounts of energy within the propulsion system that can easily destroy the rocket. For example, I suspect they cannot practically contain a turbo pump or combustion chamber failure due to the massive energy levels involved. It's the same with jet engines - if a turbine disc fails, the shrapnel is going where ever it wants - it's not practical to shield against such an event, and these events do happen every few years, and unlucky passengers have been killed. But it's hard to see how they can design a rocket that can survive all possible high engine energy failure events. At that point then you have to make the engine so reliable that it will not fail in this way, which is an insane problem.

I think that with a lot of rigorous design, they can get it reliable enough for space craft (NASA only requires 1:270 loss of crew rate). But for passenger transport they are dreaming for now.

In 10 or so years when passenger rocket transport hasn't happened, I expect we will all get to hear Musk tell us about how, now that he 'knows more about reliability engineering than anyone else', he has 'discovered' that 'making things reliable is really hard'.