Yeah, their espresso is also roasted to death.

I think there’s massive untapped demand for things like mini city cars and kei trucks.

Not just that, but even the more middle ground small cars. I’d love to have an EV truck sized the way they were in the 80’s/90’s (which was more or less comparable to a midsize sedan, just taller). The push to bigger and bigger wheelbases to take advantage of loopholes in the efficiency standards really doesn’t need to be reflected in EVs, but it’s what all the major automakers are doing.

Nah, these accusations of racism from a company owned by an Apartheid era South African emerald mine heir are too racist.

Thanks for clarifying. There are a lot of misconceptions about how this technology works, and I think it’s worth making sure that everyone in these thorny conversations has the right information.

I completely agree with your larger point about culture; to the best of my knowledge we haven’t seen any real ability to innovate, because the current models are built to replicate the form and structure of what they’ve seen before. They’re getting extremely good at combining those elements, but they can’t really create anything new without a person involved. There’s a risk of significant stagnation if we leave art to the machines, especially since we’re already seeing issues with new models including the output of existing models in their training data. I don’t know how likely that is; I think it’s much more likely that we see these tools used to replace humans for more mundane, “boring” tasks, not really creative work.

And you’re absolutely right that these are not artificial minds; the language models remind me of a quote from David Langford in his short story Answering Machine: “It’s so very hard to realize something that talks is not intelligent.” But we are getting to the point where the question of “how will we know” isn’t purely theoretical anymore.

Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive.

This is factually untrue. For example, Stable Diffusion models are in the range of 2GB to 8GB, trained on a set of 5.85 billion images. If it was storing the images, that would allow approximately 1 byte for each image, and there are only 256 possibilities for a single byte. Images are downloaded as part of training the model, but they’re eventually “destroyed”; the model doesn’t contain them at all, and it doesn’t need to refer back to them to generate new images.

It’s absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images, but the product of training is a model that doesn’t contain any of the original images.

None of that is to say that there is absolutely no valid copyright claim, but it seems like either option is pretty bad, long term. AI generated content is going to put a lot of people out of work and result in a lot of money for a few rich people, based off of the work of others who aren’t getting a cut. That’s bad.

But the converse, where we say that copyright is maintained even if a work is only stored as weights in a neural network is also pretty bad; you’re going to have a very hard time defining that in such a way that it doesn’t cover the way humans store information and integrate it to create new art. That’s also bad. I’m pretty sure that nobody who creates art wants to have to pay Disney a cut because one time you looked at some images they own.

The best you’re likely to do in that situation is say it’s ok if a human does it, but not a computer. But that still hits a lot of stumbling blocks around definitions, especially where computers are used to create art constantly. And if we ever hit the point where digital consciousness is possible, that adds a whole host of civil rights issues.

I have a suspicion that all of the layers of “Elon management” at Tesla and SpaceX have given him the idea that he’s a brilliant innovator; he gives them all his outlandish ideas and they get filtered into (normally) reasonable plans, and they guide him down the path they want him to go down while he thinks the good idea is his. And those companies are both doing well, so clearly his style works, at least in his mind.

But then he bought twitter, which didn’t have anyone devoted to protecting the company from him, and it’s all going to shit.

Ahh, so less “hard to believe” and more “unpleasant to believe”, that’s fair.

The only other solution is that the richest person in the world (officially) is this stupid. This is almost harder to believe than a conspiracy to destroy twitter.

Why is that hard to believe? The mega-rich are not notably more intelligent than anyone else, they just started decades ago with inherited wealth and got lucky early.

There’s a very specific type of “free speech” that he’s fighting for.

Your second question answers your first. The more he leaves Tesla alone, the better for them. It’s probably pretty hard to determine how much having his name associated with Tesla is hurting the company vs how much it would help/hurt to get rid of him, but if he’s attached but absent, it’s very much a “devil you know” situation.

Beyond that, it’ll try to summarize a book, but it often can’t do so successfully, although it will act like it has. Give it a try on something that is even a little bit obscure and it can’t really give you good information. I tried with Blindsight, which is not something that’s in the popular culture, but also a Hugo nominee, so not completely obscure. It knew who the characters were, and had a general sense of the tone, but it completely fabricated every major plot point that I asked about. Did the same with A Head Full of Ghosts, which is more well known but still not something everyone has read, and it did the same thing.

One thing I found that’s really fun is to ask it a question and then follow up with something like “Are you sure about that?” It’ll almost always correct itself and make up something else. It’ll go one step further and incorporate details you ask about. Give it a prompt like “Are you sure this character died of natural causes? I thought they were killed by Bob” and it will very frequently say you’re right and make up a story along those lines that’s plausible within the text. It doesn’t work on really popular stuff; you can’t convince it that Optimus Prime saves Luke Skywalker in RotJ, but anything even a little less well known and it’ll tell you details that it’s making up whole cloth with complete confidence.

Oh, unquestionably. The parts of SpaceX that they insulate from him are going well, but there’s no excuse for not having a pad deluge system (or something else that you’ve tested to accomplish the same goal) and it’s gotten them a lot of bad press. The rocket exploding was at least arguably expected, but the fact that they weren’t able to stop the torrent of bad press is notable.

He has a lot of narcissistic traits. I’m sure he was expecting a deluge of “of course we love you, you’re a genius and real life Tony Stark, please make our bird app better!” That kind of genuine adoration is one of the few things he can’t just buy outright, and he used to get it, but that well has been drying up as other car companies catch up to Tesla on EVs and their own products stagnate or get worse. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s last big public event was a rocket blowing up, which they could try to spin, but it also destroyed their launch pad because they ignored lessons that NASA learned in the 60’s. I’m sure in his mind all the bad press as people have started to realize what a shithead he is was just haters who were jealous of him, so surely if he just gives his fans an opportunity to express their opinions he’ll get lots of positive responses, right?

Probably less dramatic. You’re not going to get a spray of water; if water’s coming in, it’s coming in at over mach 3, and implosion would happen in milliseconds. Cracking like that would also be pretty unlikely. It’s more likely that they thought that it was just “an abundance of caution.”

As I recall, he literally said regulations were holding back innovation for submersibles.

“Red herring” as a term originates from the early 1800s. Although you’re absolutely right on the larger point; the ocean is noisy and sound carries, there’s no telling what it was.

No worries, had a feeling it was something like that. It also doesn’t help that there’s a line break between “pressure” and “chamber” (at least on my screen), so it’s an easy mistake to make.

Yes, that’s correct. The pressure chamber is the hull that separates the 1 atm of pressure inside from the 375 atm of water outside. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.

It’s not a few seconds, it’s a very small fraction of a second. The Thresher imploded in 1/20th of a second at 730 meters. We don’t know for sure how far down Titan was when it imploded, but based on the time they lost signal, I’m guessing around 3500 meters, so we’re talking about 4-5 times as much force. Plus the hull was made of extremely brittle carbon fiber, so it wouldn’t buckle at all, it would just collapse all at once. It’s hard to overstate how much force we’re talking about; at that depth, it’s about equivalent to building the Empire State building out of lead and sitting it on top of the ship with no other supports.

It’s not just that they didn’t have time to drown; it would have imploded so quickly that they would have been dead before their brains even had time to process that something was happening.

No, it’s catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber, the thing that keeps the squishy humans inside separate from the tons-per-square-inch of water outside.