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Truth in tech matters to this audience, at least to the engineers. Musk had repeatedly overpromised and undelivered ("full self-driving"), made preposterous claims (2019: Tesla Semi convoy FSD is "something we can do today"), and engaged in fraudulent behavior (SolarCity or the "funding secured" tweet).

You can love him because rockets, EVs, and enormous satellite constellations are pretty cool, but you'd be a fool to trust him.

A good book on this is The Coddling of the American Mind. It argues several factors (including social media, safteyism, and the decline in unstructured play time) are responsible for the significant rise in young adult mental health issues that started around 2012. Good read.

Add to that:

- no sex ed

It really feels like there are a lot of parents who think they can keep their kids safe by keeping them dumb about how their bodies work.

I remember when you could query Google for x and it would simply say it didn't have any results for x. It was such a great feeling to get a frank, honest reply instead of being bullshitted with results that didn't have x in then.

Yes, let's fix the problem by compelling people to have kids they don't want instead of creating a world worth bringing kids into. /s

Birth rate always drop in times of riding political instability and decreasing quality of life.

Exactly. Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a big enough rock.

> The manufacturer was able to offer further expertise including analysis of lower-level software logs which led to identification of the likely flight plan that had caused the software exception.

This part stood out to me. I've found it super helpful to include a reference to which piece of days in working with in log messages and exceptions. It helps isolated problems so much faster.

The menu descriptions in the study were quite thorough/complete. No trickery involved.

If you want to sell this idea you at least need to have a name for it.

^^^ This. A declining population is good for humanity in terms of reducing climate change (among other environmental impacts), addressing resource scarcity, preventing war/disease/famine, and encouraging states to invest more in their people (which benefits democracy/freedom).

I think the reasons depopulation is generally depicted as a bad thing are: (1) if it happens too quickly then your society doesn't have enough young people working to support the old, (2) capitalism--the most effective economic engine we know of--works best with a growing population, and (3) states derive geopolitical advantage from having large populations.

They're not trying to kill Linux per se, it'll just be collateral damage. Only specially blessed builds of browser and OS will be allowed access to sites that use the new api. It defeats the point of the API if the user can control the behavior of the client.

Presumably the end game is for Google and a few other corporations to control what web browsers you can use to access most of the web. Mozilla may or may not play asking (they did on EME). Linux won't work except maybe for Ubuntu and Red Hat build if/once they get around to adding support for it. That could be a long time since you need a long chain of verifications to pass thru the browser, OS, kernel, boot environment, and TPM to work AND you'll need to convince Google that the chain is strong enough to not be hacked. Ad blockers will be shut out at some point.

And no, you can't just go back to playing flight simulator off of floppies. Your bank, your airplane and concert tickets, heck even your child's pediatrician will require it. Not that doctors are hungrily reading up new web specifications, but they'll be using a medical services platform that relies on some cloudflare defaults that all the security guys like because it cuts down on bots and DDoS.

You'll be left using walled garden operating systems that spy and advertise as incessantly as cable TV.

Maybe a big stink will cause Google to backtrack a little, or make promises they won't and can't ultimately keep. The only real solution is to use the government to prevent users from losing control.

Eberhard and Tarpenning had the idea to make an EV sports car (rather than the traditional "green" branding that EV's tried to go for), so I think they deserve credit for the "sexy" approach. Musk deserves credit for recognizing the opportunity, commandeering it, and keeping the idea going.

The concept of reusable rockets isn't new, but Musk and Shotwell helped make them reality. What really made it work and where Musk doesn't get enough credit is in the iterative "fail fast" approach to rocket design... something untenable under risk-adverse bureaucracies like NASA and Boeing.

His contributions to Paypal are dubious (IIRC) at best.

I think his true genius was building a fan base with the technocratic class that appealed to their techno-libertarian dreams of a future utopia. This allowed him to raise huge amounts of money despite constantly failing to meet his promises. Trump for us nerds, basically.

That rings a bell... I think the civilian craft was a helicopter, but my google-fu ain't finding the incident.

That's not enough: you should also read the critics and opponents of what you think is true. That is, if you're truly trying to figure out reality and not just seeking psychological security.

Remember, the test of a true intellectual is that they can convincingly defend a position they find abhorrent.

This would require a device to compare the on-board time with an external reference clock of some sort, right?

While acknowledging its sins, America should ultimately be judged by its triumphs.

It's not cool they are seemingly terminating a service I've already paid for. I say seemingly because their FAQ pressures you to opt-in to their new mail service as soon as possible and is vague on whether or not GandiMail will remain usable after November. That's BS to me; I'll transfer out even if it means paying more elsewhere.

Source? Seems like an Elon Musk- or Fusion research proposal-type timeframe

For the most part yes, but for market arbitrage, the milliseconds saved by communicating thru the planet might be worth figuring out how to oscillate an extremely large weight very rapidly.

If an art student was able to gain those abilities, would you then argue they couldn't legally create art?

You're discounting the deterrent effect. Defrauding investors has a huge negative impact on society, to say nothing of bogus blood test results, deceiving regulators, and ruthlessly threatening legal actions against whistleblowers and journalists.

It was a fantastic gamble IMO. Low chance of success, but enormous payoff if it had succeeded. Imagine a commercially viable alternative to iPhone and Android with multiple manufacturers and a completely open platform. Ultimately, I think they came to market too late and Android moved into the niche (low end market) they were targeting.

The government has been pushing for more power since... forever? Since the civil war at least. National security letters. Secret FISA court. Extraordinary rendention. Data taps on all major social media platforms, all telecos, and who knows what else. Warrantless searches within 50 miles of borders, shorelines, and international airports. Enhanced interrogations. Very few people in politics seem interested in curbing it.

Yet what repression do you see in the Jan 6th cases? Wouldn't you expect to get arrested for breaking into any (super important) federal building and disrupting any (super important) government meeting? Is the government taking excessive action beyond fines and a few year's imprisonment?

Moreover, from a geopolitical and law/order standpoint, wouldn't you see it as imperative for the government to take legal action in the wake of insurrections? Hasn't this been a weakness of costal cities (like with CHAV)? While I'm all for restraining government power, there are situations where it must be used or you effectively have anarchy.

"complexity merchants" - I love this term. It aptly describes beneficiaries of earlier IT fads. Remember UML? Remember WS-*? One could come up with a long list of technologies that were a bonanza for billing consultant hours but no so great for getting to solutions.

Except for the part where Amazon (software) agents break into your home and steal your books.

Yep, it's a perennial. Naieve entrepreneurs and investors love the romance of these vessles, but they will never carry enough payload fast enough to compete with the vast array of existing options. All they're good for is suckering grant money and writing clickbait.

Also Billy Mitchell of Fyre Festival... wire fraud instead of bilking his concert attendees.

Fair, but my point was that it /should/ be. That the justice system is content to chew thru thousand of man hours (police, lawyers, prosecution, court officials, etc) instead of just laughing is indicative of the administrative bloat that prevades our institutions.

If I were a WY legislator, I'd propose an implied 5ft public access easement on all such crossings.