The stock market's value was not dominated by house flippers back then.

Today, the market is largely tulips.

The launch was a circus that PT Barnum would have been proud of.

A handful of specially built show-pony-cars that are ultra-light, only "flew" once (because they probably didn't have a big enough battery onboard to recharge those gas cylinders) and were the ultimate in Musk-level deceptions.

I'm going to do a full technical breakdown of all the reasons why what we saw was 100 percent marketing and why we will *never* see a Roadster 2 with the claimed specifications ever hit the market -- the laws of physics may be inconvenient but ignoring them is not an option.

What we saw in that demo was Musk, once again, coming up with a clever way to get hundreds of millions (perhaps more) of interest-free funding from people who slept through science classes in highschool. What's even more amazing is that this is the *second* time he's promised unrealistic deliveries, taken hundreds of millions in "reservations" and failed to deliver.

PT Barnum was so right.

And Musk also said "Manned colonies on Mars by 2024" and "Hyperloop" and "Fast transit tunnels beneath cities" and "Solar roof tiles" and a whole lot of other stuff to which the laws of physics and his engineers said "nope".

It's not the launch or even the jump that will be the problem... it's landing a 2+ ton car that is descending from several hundred feet above its apex and this has significant vertical speed. Even the gas-thrusters may have their work cut out for them :-)

No word about the real-world range of the Roadster 2.

I find it interesting that Musk can create a show-pony car that does cool tricks that nobody would ever allow on a road-legal car but he fails to address the elephant in the room: "How far will it go on a charge?"

Why did he ignore this crucial aspect of any EV?

Easy, because he originally claimed 1000Km and it is much easier to get a lightweight show-car to do jumping tricks than it is to deliver a real-world essential such as decent range.

The Roadster we saw in the display is just a stunt-car, road-legal production vehicles will be just another fast EV.

If people want to risk quarter of a million dollars reserving one then only one phrase springs to mind:

"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me".

This is certainly the most capable vehicle ever conceived for shark jumping.

Because LLMs are the new tulips.

We knew this, decades ago -- which is why all advertising was banned. But as short-sighted next-quarter-profits commercial interests took over, of course all of that went away, and now we have advertisers (parasites) and marketers (parasites) and spammers (vicious parasites) and worse EVERYWHERE.

All web browsers should have universal ad blocking built-in and turned on by default. The parasites will of course complain, but we don't need them. (I don't want to hear "but my web site won't survive without advertising"-- I've been running sites since they were a thing and I've never allowed advertising, so I don't want to hear any whining about how it can't be done.) We need to permanently blacklist all advertiser domains on sight, and we probably need to block advertiser networks.

And the thing is: it didn't need to turn out like this. If advertisers had just behaved like responsible grown-ups then we could have grudgingly tolerated their worthless presence and just ignored them. But they couldn't do that; they had to turn their entire ecosystem into a massive assault on security and privacy.

Well, screw them.

Eight gigs and constantly swapping.

If only his cautionary words about the risks of AI software development had been heeded, he would have been a big name in the never-ending dumbeat about the "sotware crisis" for the last 50 years!

This just in, a report published by a group of people who would be materially harmed by losing business to the EU building its own technical capacity declared it would be costly and unfeasible to ever abandon them.

Up next after the commercial break, we report on how water is wet and grass grows.

This is fair, but that really just reinforces the point that the article makes. Solo dev is currently different, team output is limited by other factors than pure code output. I've worked on games with literally hundreds of concurrent programmers, and even when you're using something like Unreal Engine and your team is small ( 20 people), you've effectively got all the engine team at Epic generating code for you on a relatively regular basis.

It may indeed be possible for AI to actually make teams faster at some point (even in the nearish future), but right now, it's just more code, which isn't always the best solution.

Indeed, it could very well be a reinvention of Visual Source Safe.

The correct move here was not to (re)invent a source code control system so that it could handle such an enormous volume of changes.

The correct move was to realize that such an enormous volume of changes was a problem to be eliminated, not accommodated.

Agreed, and centralized coordination is a HUGE simplifying assumption to the task at hand.