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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • It isn’t about who knows who the Elon Musk is it’s about who cares who Elon Musk is.

    Why should I care who some random CEO is? If you can answer that question you will impress me because CEOs don’t have a lot to do with what the company does, they have a lot to do with how the company is perceived. Think about Tesla is that for whatever reason they decided to be a 100% perception company and a 0% results company. Presumably because their results are unimpressive.



  • For the same reason people need SUVs, for moving large amounts of stuff around. In my case I would just throw the bike in the back rather than having to faff around laying all the seats flat and then having to put down the tarpaulin so they don’t get dirty.

    I could get a van but then I’ve got a stupid van with all its limited visibility. A pickup truck would actually solve the problem if it weren’t for the fact that all the manufacturers are American and seem to think that they need to rival the size and weight of a tank.



  • It’s no worse than some of the stuff Nissan has come out with over the years. Remember the cube?

    The problem with the Tesla truck is that it is ugly without purpose, all the other oddly designed vehicles look the way they do because they have a particular unique feature (been small, having sliding minivan doors on a vehicle otherwise two small for them, having gull wing doors, removing a-pillars from the design, etc), but the cyber truck just looks like that to be contrarian.



  • I think we can do even better so it’s interesting that we decided our bodies were the pinnacle of biology and technology.

    It’s not that we think the human form is the optimum, it is simply that we don’t want to have to modify human accessible areas for robots, partially because this increases the cost of automation and also partly because we need the environments to still be human accessible. In environments where you will only have robots, then the robots have freedom to be whatever design we want, but a general purpose robot needs to exist in a human-built environment, an environment with things like stairs, lips on curbsides, and boxes with handles designed for human hands. There are videos out there with the spot robot trying to do something simple like open a door with its weird giraffe neck arm thing, it’s not graceful and it’s not quick, because it is interacting with an object that was not designed with it’s body shape. It is much easier to build a human-shaped robot than it is to redesign all doors to have an interface to allow a robot of any arbitrary shape to operate it.

    Also aesthetics do matter, if humans are going to be interacting with these robots they need to look like something that’s at least sort of friendly, if it looks like a multi limbed weird techno spider no one’s going to want to interact with them.






  • Warzone’s always the best environment to test new battlefield systems.

    Look at the difference in technology between the beginning of the first world war and the end. We started off with essentially standing in fields shooting each other over distances you could spit, and ended up with tanks. The second world war gave us nukes.

    Will probably have AGI battle droids by the end of this war.





  • Exactly, blockchain technology doesn’t do anything to prevent people from just straight up lying. I’ve heard people suggest that blockchain could be used to create a distributed Wikipedia, and somehow it would be immune to trolls because “blockchain”.

    Also blockchain is susceptible to something called a 51% attack, where if you can compromise more than half of all of the nodes then the illegitimate version becomes the trusted version over the legitimate version, without ever having to compromise the original version, (because 51% of the vote is 100% of the control). The only reason that doesn’t really happen with cryptocurrencies is that there are so many people who use cryptocurrencies that the numbers required to pull off at 51% attack would be unachievable even for a nation state.

    However I can’t believe that this database would be anywhere near that distributed so a committed actor could very well achieve a 51% attack.

    It’s not as if other nation states don’t maintain their own versions of this anyway (it would be stupid to trust the United States exclusively even if it weren’t for Trump), as do a lot of the cyber security companies. So it’s not really a problem anyway.


  • It’s not even just about shoving AI into everything. That would be bad enough but this feature is literally useless, and it isn’t as if Microsoft doesn’t have a plethora of other features people want them to work on.

    How about inventing Windows airdrop? Or spend some time unifying the UI so it doesn’t all look like it was developed by two separate teams working independently. Nah, let’s just build some spy software.

    Hell I’d even accept them spending some time making a non-shit version of Teams