A celebrity graduation speaker that actually has something thoughtful to say that is realistic, relevant, and inspirational to the graduates? That’s crazy, everyone knows celebrity graduation speakers are supposed to be self absorbed and prattling on about the stuff that excites them without connecting to the graduates, except maybe to be dismissive of the graduates and look down on them.

The Wozniak era of Apple was pretty much all upside. Whatever less than nice things to say at Apple almost certainly came about more than a decade after he had left them.

Of course, this argument is a pretty piss poor one when the example held up is Musk…

His first jolt was selling a website to a relatively clueless Compaq that did nothing with it except throw money at Elon. No idea if Elon’s site was any good or not, but it didn’t matter because the reality is that it folded without an enduring impact as part of the dot-com collapse. He used his winnings to try to make X.com the first time, and was a comparative failure next to Paypal, which, somehow, agreed to merge and put him in charge and he almost tanked it. Then ebay bought it out and Musk got maddening amount of money for doing nothing but screw it up.

Tesla is probably the first example of him not actively screwing it up, though his drama around “I wanna call myself a founder” was dumb. That said, any investor could have done it, so his ‘value’ was his lottery-like wins leading to that point.

There are others that are arguable, though recently had it happen where someone kept giving out names of impressive and seemingly valuable ‘billionaires’, and we kept checking and every last one were ‘only’ millionaires. So it seems like ‘billionaire’ remains a stupidly over the top concept that isn’t particularly redeemable, with the defensibly decent folks staying under a billion through not being super greedy and/or philanthropy.

Neuralink I suppose is an example where his appetite for crazy risk might pay off or be terrible.

FSD implies no one else is trying for self driving, and that’s no shortage there for that ambition.

Humanoid robots at scale, they haven’t displayed a capability to suggest they have any better shot than others, and there’s plenty of less loud companies trying. None are particularly close, so Elon stands relatively alone in proclaiming success without the proof.

I don’t know that his crazy appetite for risk is on display with SpaceX. I would argue most of their real successes were relatively lower risk, and generally when the companies indulge musk at his craziest are like the other comment says, comparative failures.

The plague of work chats now:

Here’s what ChatGPT/copilot had to say:

People can ask for themselves, you answering that way adds no value. Just say you don’t know.

In group chats, keep your mouth shut and let people that actually know answer. Don’t drown out the actual expert answers.

And holy hell the ones that will die on the hill that they are right because chatgpt agreed with them even when they are totally wrong…

Though the chance someone other than you dies from you taking a shit is pretty far fetched, and I’m not liking having to try to conceive of how that happens.

But a lot of activities are this way. Getting on a ladder in public could kill someone, just breathing around other people could kill someone, etc etc.

But what about monster HDMI cables?

Well, driving to work is basically that. Non zero chance someone dies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Light

Also, a bunch of shit is about ready to burst out because they somehow decided to use wallpaper to hold a bunch of stuff to the wall instead of putting it in a closet. But it looked fine in the moment, so decided it was good enough.

So being drunk affects how you use light/dark mode?

Based on my experience with LLM and developers I personally know, my only assumption is they don’t have the skills in the first place…

In corporate world there are a lot of “developers” that actually act kind of like codegen. They just throw plausible sounding bullshit into an editor and hope for the best. Two examples:

Once asked to help a team speed something that ran slow, even by their low standards. Turned out they had made their own copy file routine instead of using the standard library one, and sucked the file into memory, expanding array 512 bytes at a time, and then wrote it out, 512 bytes at a time. I made the thing nearly instant by just making it a call to the standard library function to copy a file.

While helping with a separate problem, I noticed their solution for transferring some file with an indeterminate version number in the middle of the file name. It was a huge mess, but the most illustrative line was the line in their Java application declaring a string “ls /path/with/file|grep prefix.*.extension”…

Lots of human slop out there that AI can actually compete with.

I just don’t get it, even the purportedly best models screw things up so much that I can’t just leave them to the job without reviewing and fixing the mess they made… And I’m also drowning in pull requests that turn out to be broken as it proudly has “co authored by Claude” in it… Like it manages to pass their test case but it’s so messed up that it’s either explicitly causing problems, or had a bunch of unrelated changes randomly.

I feel like I’m being gaslit as I keep reading that there are developers that feel they successfully offloaded the task of coding.

Closest I got was a chore that had a perfect criteria “address all warnings from the build”. Then let it go and iterate. Then after 50 rounds each round saying “ok should be done now, everything is taken care of, just need to do a final check”. It burned though most of my monthly quota doing this task before succeeding. Then I look at the proposed change… And it just added directives to the top of every file telling the tools to disable all the warnings… This was the best opus 4.6 could do…

Now sure, I can have it tear through a short boiler plate and it notice a pattern I’m doing and tab through it. But I haven’t see this “vibe” approach working at all…

While CATL has done work and has made real world solutions, I wouldn’t take their marketing material over the broader scientific consensus.

I am totally willing to buy that the market ends up between NMC and Sodium with LFP left behind despite having some advantages over sodium. Of course as solid state becomes a thing, that will be more of a factor than Na v. LFP v. NMC.

I think I’ll need a citation, from what I can find, the LFP chemistry still is more dense than CATL sodium, which makes sense because, well, the physics are what they are, sodium is about three times more massive than lithium. The best argument I could see on this point is debating whether there’s a space in the market between sodium and NMC for LFP (if you are already compromising on density, then what’s another further compromise to get the other qualities you mention for sodium).

less performant

Well this is a matter of how you define “performant”.

It’s got lower energy density, which is generally considered a critical measure.

No no, he said “rated for atlantic crossing”, so it’s got to be good, right?

Technically over a decade, but feels like that’s an understatement.

In the 1940s some people called a machine to play NIM as “Artificial Intelligence”. People talked about opponent AI in checkers games before most of us were born.

Certainly by the 80s using “AI” to describe the manipulations of enemy characters was all-in.

there is no ballast, not even a dedicated bilge space, and with the shallow draft, I am uncertain how the boat in OOP isn’t too top-heavy to stay up-right. Forget the “Sovereign Living” bit at the end, I’mma need to see some solid design and build data before listening to another word from that guy.

Don’t worry, he said up front it is “rated for cross-atlantic” so it’s all good.

Frankly waiting for the news story where he gets killed “proving” his concept…

The first warning bell was “rated for cross-atlantic”… “rated” by whom?

Of course then there’s the latter part where he talks about the next one is going to be super amazingly polished autonomous vessel with everything up to and including a sauna from the solar… And of course the sovereign citizen take…

Cool doing a project like this, but it smells of overconfidence in what it currently is and how trivial it will be to get to something much much more…