Zigurd

You're smart and well read and these are the counter examples you come up with? I've got another one with similar real world applicability: ask the pastry chef who wants to hang with the gluten intolerant.

There's a long list. The one that comes to mind chronologically early is securities fraud in accumulating shares of Twitter. Though it's probably past being prosecutable, visa fraud in immigration status. There are dozens of crimes in DOGE.

Ask Vivek Ramaswami how well it works for Asians to aspire to be kindred spirits of white supremacists.

This whole argument rests on per capita GDP being the right measure of success. The US isn't in the top five of any quality of life index, pick your methodology. It ranks at the bottom of the top 10 of the OECD quality of life index, and that's it's only appearance in the top 10.

Have you been to Appalachia? Any part of the rural south? Qualitatively poverty in the US is shameful even compared to rural China. You are living in a spreadsheet world, not the real world. Is there any value to that GDP number without raising the standards of living of Americans?

It is exceedingly generous to suggest there are lessons to be learned from Grokpedia, and they're all pretty superficial.

One of the last things Wikipedia needs is kibitzing on how to improve Wikipedia. There's no shortage of ideas, mostly naïve ideas in light of how difficult it is to shift Wikipedia's culture without breaking it.

How about a positive review of the slopodyssey?

AGI is supposedly the literal be all and end all. It's a bit embarrassing for the singularity to have an S curve.

But they do have S curves. If you're on the shoulder of the S curve while your spending commitments are accelerating, that won't end well.

Space data centers is an idea that originated at Google, and you'll find some back of the envelope math that says it's possible. Which is fine if you're speculating about wild ideas at Google. They even built those Internet balloons before figuring out that wasn't going to work.

The difference is Elon actually sells these ideas to investors. There's a difference between being Edward Teller and being Elizabeth Holmes which he may not be seeing.

Latgalian (<- correct spelling) is a dialect spoken by maybe tens of thousands of people in the province of Latgale. I assumed that since this was a distro from Latvia, that I was looking at Latvian when I booted it up. I did not take the hint that "Austrumi" was referring to the east of Latvia, which is the province of Latgale.

I might have had a better chance understanding spoken Latgalian. Written Latvian is all phonetic, having been designed by 15th c. German clergy to teach us barbarians a proper religion without burdening us with difficult spelling rules. Written Latgalian is a retrofit.

It sure seems that it doesn't take much. Kevin O'Leary gets people to lend him money to build data centers from being on a TV show. A disturbingly large number of people think Trump is a business genius because of his TV show. Elon Musk looks very legit by comparison.

I readily admit to being literal minded more than I should be, but some people here...

Icing was mentioned early in the ATC audio, then a request to increase altitude, then a comment that they encountered precipitation, implying the icing could get worse.

IANAP but the mention of precipitation points to conditions that could overwhelm anti-icing systems, which the Learjet was equipped with.

I once ran an inadvertent experiment by installing Austrumi Linux, but not realizing that the default language is Latgallian. I'm fluent in Latvian, but I wondered if something had gone wrong with my brain. I could understand most of the words I was looking at, but more than half of the sentences I read were baffling.

You really are a time traveler from the 1990s. In your comment below you say "Batteries are far too expensive, we're still a couple of decades out for that." Even excluding battery chemistry that are designed for bulk use like sodium ion, solar plus batteries is far cheaper than nuclear power. Today.

You think it's axiomatic that the insurability of nuclear power has to be socialized. Insurability is a strong and reliable financial signal. We're seeing this every day in the tech industry now with data center build out that needs credit default swaps. If you can't buy insurance at any price, it's probably not going to end well.

The 1990s called. They want their energy economics back.

Even back then, those economic comparisons were idealized for nuclear. Build it run it count up to the dollars and there you go. Except you need to secure it, you need to handle waste, and roughly the same cost over runs are bedeviling decommissioning as they were construction.

On top of all that, why is nuclear still uninsurable in the private market?

By the time they build one the kids will be asking what's a hyperscaler?

People are giving Trump too little credit for the one thing he's good at, and the one thing he's outsmarted the tech smarties at: he made them bend the knee, and once they did that with the ballroom donations, a proper bully will make them lick his shoes.

All orbital data networks are competing against terrestrial wireless, which is much cheaper and faster to expand, and it doesn't deorbit itself in five years because it's run out of maneuvering fuel. Selling space technology into a shrinking TAM takes bravado, or in the case of Amazon, it takes having a business that can carry you if the bet doesn't pay off.

The TAM eventually boils down to whatever floats or flies over the oceans, military customers, and places where the wireless network operator is too feckless to provide coverage to your cottage at the end of 2 miles of driveway.

Sergey has gone a bit culty. But yeah. There are no moats that can keep out everyone who has built and operated data centers before the AI bubble. For these players, overspending, up to a point, is a defensive move.

The cult definitely has some Jonestown overtones: the singularity is coming so things so mundane as a bond rating are of no concern. One way or the other.

Crew Dragon has a launch escape system. Starship can't, at least not without some fundamental changes.

Marginally greater skepticism is probably a good thing in terms of avoiding a big shock when some big AI player, like Oracle for example, gets into serious financial trouble.

They also put down a deposit for a roadster.

Putting a crew on starship means either developing a crew escape mechanism, or demonstrating it is safe without one, and convincing regulators that's true because Elon would never exaggerate safety claims.

Overriding safety systems is itself a safety capability. But this wasn't a failure of the safety systems. It wasn't even a failure of the train drivers who had been over using safety system overrides. It was a management failure for not noticing that over use of overrides.

If I read the description correctly, those hardware level systems were manually overridden, which should only be done in extremis. My guess is that this is going to turn into a normalization of deviance case, since such a cavalier attitude toward safety was unlikely to be one person's first time doing something so dangerous. There was no dilemma here and no time pressure.

Your suggestion about limiting speed after a shut down is a good one. On top of that, the rail operators should have spotted a trend of repeated safety system overrides and investigated why that was happening.

I'm totally not on the spectrum so I've only watched about 80% of the Plainly Difficult channel on YouTube, but if you want a painless and entertaining, if you're into that kind of thing, way of learning about train signaling and safety, and how safety systems have evolved, I highly recommend it.

Leadtime for nuclear power, unless you wanna buy a sketchy Russian submarine reactor that's been rusting in an arctic bay, is decades longer than even the supply constrained gas turbines.

I don't know why you think solar needs two forms of back up. Batteries are very reliable.

It's worthy of a book length history: some records were shredded, and some undoubtedly lost forever, but German citizens occupied Stasi offices and preserved records. At least some of the shredded records were digitized and reconstructed. There are over 100 million pages of archived Stasi documents in German archives today.

Compared with gas turbines? The main reason power is supply constrained is that gas turbines are a precision high-tech product that fails catastrophically if you don't build it right and maintain it.

Bloom fuel cells are a plausible alternative, but they are in the process of building out their manufacturing capacity, and operating experience at data center scale hasn't been tested. Bloom's process also involves extremely high temperatures, which could result in uptime and maintenance issues.

I have a fairly narrow use case: I'm developing apps in Dart/Flutter. Gemini works well for that.