It's like visual coding or RAD all over again. Whenever suits and PHBs are told there's a magic wand that'll allow them to do without paying people for the nitty-gritty bits, they get all excited and convince each other in their echo chamber that their dream of a company of all managers and no workers is just around the corner.

Then reality says "hi", the hype dies down, a few scam artists got rich and the world continues as it was, with a couple new cool tools in the toolbox of those who know how to use them correctly - which is generally the same people that were supposedly being replaced.

That's how I see AI. I've been writing software for the better part of 40 years. What I see from AI is sometimes astonishing and sometimes pathetic. I would never, ever, ever put AI generated code into production software without carefull checking and refactoring, and I would fire anyone who does.

Code completion is mostly in the "astonishing" part. If I write a couple lines of near-identical stuff, like assigning values from an input to a structured format for processing, the AI most of the time gets right the next line I want to write. Anything more complex than that is hit-and-miss.

Mostly, I use AI the way I would use an intern. "Can you look up how to use this function correctly? What are the parameters and their defaults?" or "Write me some code that's tedious to write (like lots of transformation operations) but not rocket science by far.
Essentially, it does faster and a little bit better what previously I'd have done with Google and Stackoverflow.

I have no fear it'll replace developers anytime soon. Half of the time the code is outright wrong, most of the time it has glaring security issues or isn't half as fault-tolerant as it should be, and for any case where I know how to do it without any research, I'd be faster writing the code myself then going through several iterations with an AI to get it done.

rat and roach, I see. what are the others?

yeah, don't do that.

I find most food too disgusting eat even a second time, let alone every day. At best, it would be wilted. Probably at least soggy, and, well . . .

cats & dogs have a different notion of how many times to eat the same food, though.

So clueless.

The fact is that the trade imbalance is the largest single factor that makes the US dollar the world currency -- and also helps to keep the federal debt cheap. All of those countries that have a trade surplus with us send us lots of goods and in exchange they get lots of dollars. What do they do with them? They buy US-denominated securities, including treasury bonds. So many people and organizations around the world holding large reserves of US-denominated securities is what makes the dollar the world's default currency.

To the extent that he succeeds at "correcting" the trade imbalance, he'll undermine the dollar's status. And trying to bully countries into sticking with the dollar by threatening action that will make the dollar worth less to them is just... clueless. And that's assuming his actions to explode the debt while escalating financing costs doesn't result in enormous devaluation of the dollar, which would make it worthless rather than just worth less.

On balance I think I'm mostly glad that Trump is a moron, because if he weren't he would be really dangerous. On the other hand, if he had either a brain or the humility to listen to people who do, he might understand that he's trying to destroy what he's trying to control, and that winning that sort of game is losing. Probably not, though. He's amoral enough to be okay with ruling over a relative wasteland, because he and his will be better off.

It *does* explain why he needs so much of your money for expenses . . .

>It's not clear this is a stepping stone to anything else.

perhaps to one-way trips for celebrities? I could get behind that!

(In space, noone has to hear Katy Perry sing)

hawk

>I didn't watch Independence Day that close. Did the aliens win or the people?

It starts as a win for the people, as the aliens destroy DC.

Unfortunately, they later turned out to be hostile.

Exploration may be worthwhile, but it is a totally separate thing and won't provide relief for climate issues. The only possible way it could help anyone on that front is that the select few that go are hard for the desperate starving people to follow. But you'd never be able to build a civilization at any scale there without also figuring out ways to make Earth way better. Any habitat you make that can survive on Mars you could make on Earth, any CO2 scrubbing you can do in a small environment you can also scrub that environment on Earth (problem is the scale is useless for atmospheric CO2).

Plants may be happy to have CO2, but the resultant weather may not be so good for the plants.

If we could "fix" the moon or Mars, then we could fix the Earth easily. Moon/Mars colonization is insanely harder than dealing with even the harshest likely Earth climate changes.

With a more energetic atmosphere, who *knows* what the weather patterns will be, what crops will be feasible, and how much plant life and animal life we can cultivate for food. There is some non-zero chance it somehow pans out with less drama than feared, but significant chance that humanity will suffer starvation and violence that dramatically harms our population. Seems like a bet we shouldn't be taking if we can help it.

It occurs to me that this is a good use of massive solar plants. It wouldn't cost much to idle your oxygen-separation equipment when the sun isn't shining, so you wouldn't need much in the way of battery storage. Grid scale solar without battery backup in a sunny area (like south Texas) can cost as little as $0.03/kWh, which would give you a separation cost of $4.5 to $24 per ton of LOX. Obviously, if you were producing LOX at a scale needed to fuel a fleet of Starships, you'd work to get that towards the bottom of the scale -- so the LOX loadout for a ship could cost on the order of 3500 * 4.5 = $15,750. To launch 150 tons to orbit. Of course you still need methane.

Could you make "green" methane (i.e. without using fossil fuels) with a big solar farm, and what would that cost? You'd do it with the Sabatier reaction to combine CO2 and H2 to get CH4. To make a ton of CH4 you need 2.75 tons of CO2 and 0.5 tons of H2 (stochiometry, dawg). To get a ton of CO2 with direct air capture takes about 2000 kWh of electricity, so 5500 kWh for the CO2. At $0.03/kWh that's $165 for the CO2. However, producing the half-ton of H2 with electrolysis would take 25,000 kWh, so $750. This puts the raw materials cost of green CH4 at around $915. The Sabatier reaction would add a little more, call it $930 in all.

So... Starship could be entirely solar-powered at a cost of around 3500 * 4.5 + 1000 * 930 = ~$946k, assuming $.03/kWh, ignoring equipment and storage overhead. It turns out that the cost is utterly dominated by the cost of methane production; LOX is all but free. But the cost of solar will likely continue to go down so... fuel costs could indeed get really, really low, even with a zero-carbon strategy. Perhaps as low as $2/kg to LEO.

On the system requirements angle, PC gamers generally don't care anymore, however, MS can certify a few standard tiers, say, 'xbox 2026', 'xbox 2026 premium', 'xbox 2026 ultra' and the software and hardware ecosystem follows those.

Microsoft can curate a store of games regardless of the nature of the hardware. The app stores choosing to let developers run wild has nothing to do with in-house hardware.

For the software modding and third party applications, they can have their software platform do this. Windows being open is a choice (and in fact one they wanted to roll back with 'S', but to no success. They could release/license out 'xBox OS' for this experience.

On the game discs, the consoles are largely killing this anyway, famously Switch 2 game cartridges are likely to be nothing more than a dongle and Sony selling variants with no optical media at all. Online entitlement is their direction, and the industry seems content to screw over second hand market (that's a bonus for them) and anyone with zero internet.

A GPU only costs as much as a console if you go for a GPU more potent than what goes into a game console. An xBox Series X equivalent GPU is like $250.

Most games that release for xBox release on Steam for PC as well. It's generally considered an easy port for bigger market reach. That's why pairing a game controller with a PC is so popular, and steam big picture mode.

I would not at all be surprised for the near future for 'xBox' to be Asus, Dell, Lenovo, etc devices under a licensing deal with perhaps restrictions around particular TPM endorsement keys and certified specification levels for performance and portability use cases.

From a business perspective, those haven't given them the results they would have wanted.

Paradoxically, their worst products make the most money.

Rapid Accelerated Disassembly?

Rapid Anomalous Disassembly?

Or did you mean R.U.D. (Rapid Unscheduled/Unplanned Disassembly)?