Or live in an apartment building with a pitched roof.

Regardless of its faults, China is a serious country like the US and Europe used to be.

Serious countries don't let people with important skills and knowledge travel to hostile countries where they might be kidnapped or defect. It's so obviously a bad idea that it's bizarre that I even have to point it out.

These were people who worked in defence so anywhere behind the Iron Curtain was right out and I imagine Cuba would have been too. Even Austria was considered a risk, probably because so many spies would hang out there from both sides.

Or so they told me. I can't be entirely sure they weren't exagerrating.

You're right. Some of my friends were banned from travel to communist or communist-adjacent countries during the Cold War, by a supposedly 'freedom-loving' country.

And I don't think Western countries typically allow people under investigation for serious crimes to leave unless they're pedos with connections.

NASA followed the "we launch when the paperwork weights more than the rocket" model where everything had to be tested to death on the ground. Even so, many people expected the first Saturn V launch to fail, and they only launched a complete rocket because it was faster than testing the first stage with a mass simulator on top. And it was never fully debugged before the program was shut down.

SpaceX follow the software development model where you break things fast, and complaining that they didn't get to orbit the first time (something they haven't even tried to do before this flight) is like complaining that someone wrote some code from scratch and the first try didn't compile. They've also been able to test a lot of potential failure modes (e.g. deliberately removing heatshield tiles or flying more dangerous reentries) because they're flying often and willing to break things.

One result of this is that a single SLS engine probably costs more than an entire Starship/Super Heavy stack. Even the ones that were taken off Space Shuttles and refurbished.

My Walmart is worse than that. They didn't have any price tags at all. Just video screens with AI avatars of a guy in baggy pants sitting cross-legged on a rug.

When I walk by, he says "Look at my cotton swabs! I offer you the best cotton swabs in the land!"

I say: "Well, how much to they cost?"

He squints at me, looks me up and down for a long while, then says: "For you........ I give to you seven hundred and fifty swabs for two pieces of silver only. Believe me when I say you will search this entire kingdom and not find a better deal!"

Indeed. Space is no longer about how much money contractors can bilk out of the US government. It's about vast wealth being created in orbit. For SpaceX, those huge Starlink v3s are as important as the rocket: 10 years from now, using wires for client internet connectivity will be a quaint thing geeks go on about, but no one else actually uses. Musk is going to ruin the market for telecoms and cable operations, globally.

The real problem with AI is that it is not productive. We are spending all of this money, and what are we getting for it? An awkward coding assistant? Yeah no. The real purpose of AI is to monitor YOU, as it already does with Flock cameras.

You have no idea how true that statement is. We will be funding our own personal "social monitor" which will give us tickets/citations for violating the morality code. The future looks so gross. 1984 didn't even come close to how horrific this will be. And yet everyone is just sitting here while the noose is surrounding their necks. All of your devices are tattletales. Your car is legally enforced to take action for/against you.

This is not the future I want for others. I want to offer Freedom and Liberty to the future, not chains around their neck forcing them to act.

Bro, any single metric, in isolation, will always favor the mechanical. Think your foot is steady? A machine can do it steadier. Think you pay attention to the road? A machine can pay more attention. Think your reactions are fast? A machine is an order of magnitude faster.

Every single metric, in isolation, a machine compares more favorably.

So why do some humans get better gas mileage than machines in real world long distance driving? Why do some humans have far fewer "close calls"?

It is because humans have something called context. They can see that a hill is coming up and can gain a bit of speed cheaply downhill before going up the hill. They look forward 12 cars ahead and see that the tractor trailer is either slowing down or speeding up. They can see the kid's ball flying into the road, knowing that a kid will be following shortly.

In summary, while machines can ping every metric in isolation better than a human, it can not combine all of those metrics better than a human can. Machine driving is barely able to replace the worst of us. It has a long way to go before it can even compete with the best of us.

If the AI could have context, it wouldn't need to have faster reactions. A machine is generally faster at reacting than I am; however, I am FAR better at NOT getting into situations where a faster reaction time matters. In fact, I have decades and hundreds of thousands of miles to demonstrate this principle. You have a VERY long row to hoe if you will try to convince me to get into a FSD car.

Odd. How much beyond this are we:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwritings.stephenwolfra...

Because what I read there had NOTHING about "reasoning" and none of the models I have looked at appear to be capable of any sort of reasoning. "AI" as it currently stands is nowhere near the concept of 'reasoning'.