Machine learning is not why companies are dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into building data centers so they can earn tens of billions of dollars; it’s specifically large language models. Machine learning existed before the LLM boom and had real benefits, but has barely seen a fraction of the investment into it that LLMs have, because it didn’t have a bunch of tech bros speculating that artificial superintelligence would make them trillionaires.
Just a reminder that Musk’s original timeline to Mars was to launch in 2024 and land this year. Meanwhile, the Starship rocket(s) meant to accomplish this, as well as the lunar landings have only just had 6 successful launches out of 11 attempts.
Furthermore, none of those launches even attempted low earth orbit (LEO) which is roughly 120+ miles up. The delta-v to go to the moon is much lower, but the fuel for that has to get into LEO first, along with fuel for descent, ascent, and the trip back to Earth. The Apollo missions accomplished this by using a truly colossal rocket, the Saturn V. Incidentally, the Soviet’s approach was the N1, which blew up on all four attempts to launch it. While Starship is planned to be as big or bigger than the Saturn V, which much greater payload capacity, the actual lunar module (LEM) was a much smaller craft and was left at the moon to avoid return fuel, while the Starship lander is the rocket itself (or the top stage) and meant to be returnable.
In order to achieve this, it will need much more fuel and therefore can’t fly a single rocket to accomplish this. SpaceX plans to accomplish this via refueling in space, a novel technology that has yet to be demonstrated and therefore adds more uncertainty into their time budget to work out the kinks. All of this brings into question the timelines for Artemis as extremely optimistic.
Of course, the original goal (for Musk) was to go to Mars, which is like the jump from LEO to lunar landing, as the distance jumps from 120+ miles to 250,000 miles and then to 140,000,000 miles. Additionally, you can reach the moon in 3 days, while a trip to Mars takes 9 months. The difficulty curve is exponential and they’re nowhere close to this goal. Naturally, Musk is “50/50 confident” that they can launch a mission in 2026 in remarks made this year.
All of this to say - while SpaceX has some incredibly smart engineers who are passionate about what they do, Elon Musk is a liar and a fraud who has an abysmal track record of ridiculously optimistic timeline predictions and should never be trusted.
It’s so upsetting to me that everyone (including the title) have focused on Steve Jobs while completely ignoring a much more worthy person: Dr Norman Borlaug. At least the linked page has him first.
I totally get the frustration from watching people talk past each other, neither side taking anything positive away from the exchange, arguing for the sake of arguing or a misplaced desire to “own” the other one. It’s exhausting and there’s lots of times I want to do exactly what you did, so I truly do understand.
No hard feelings, and I really do appreciate the apology. We all get heated sometimes… it’s easy to do on the internet, especially when text makes it easy to misinterpret tone.
It’s nice to end things on a positive note and on the same page - as I said, I’m a consensus builder. For what it’s worth, you were absolutely right that taking your emotion out of your argument and just being sincere works, at least when someone is approaching things in good faith, which I believe we both were.
So all of this tone policing because I wanted to say RTFM, decided that the initialism didn’t work with RTFA and spelled it out instead, and failed to drop the superfluous “fucking”, thereby making it sound overly harsh. I thought since “fucking” was modifying “article” that the profanity wasn’t directed at the commenter, but still expressed some exasperation on my part.
You’re right, I should have dropped the “fucking”. I was upset because I had just read the article about a topic that concerns me greatly, scanned the comments to see if there was any sense of solidarity that “hey, this is a problem we need to address” and got frustrated when the first comment I read was something that shot from the hip and completely ignored the entirety of the actual article. If not for that, I probably would’ve edited the “fucking” out. That was a failure on my part.
You’re right, that did come across overly aggressive and I apologize to the original commenter. It’s hard to convey tone with text and obviously I failed to communicate this as I never intended my comment to sound so aggressive that it warranted everything that I got in response.
Go back and read everything I’ve written, but omit the word “fucking” and I think you’ll see that one concession to my frustration stands in contrast to the rest of my messages where I was blunt but otherwise respectful. I provided quotes and deflected credit to the original author when it seemed like the credit was being given to me. I never engaged in personal attacks and my only actual criticism was literally that opening line. I hope that demonstrates my true intentions, which were apparently buried by the overly aggressive opening.
I’ve since been told I have shitty behavior and that I’m a “douche”. I never called anyone names, and literally my only call out was “did you even read the fucking article?” You’ve been an order of magnitude more aggressive than I was in the first place and I’ve gotten downvoted and chastised and called names while you’ve gotten supportive comments. I’ve apologized for my behavior without any expectation of reciprocation.
I hate conflict. I hate arguing. It makes me want to just not participate at all online. I don’t need this and as an autistic man it gives me a great deal of stress. I don’t expect you or anyone else to understand or care which is why ordinarily I just lurk online because people seem so eager to jump down my throat. Feels weird and shitty to be accused of doing the same when I failed to police my tone appropriately.
Normally when I do speak up, I’m a consensus maker, trying to bring people together. In fact, this particular topic inspired me to speak up because I’m deathly scared of the direction that current events seem to be headed and I wanted to set my comfort aside in the hopes of seeing that there were other people who wanted to combat this.
It’s disheartening that as fascists worldwide are gaining traction, the most relevant article I’ve seen in a while about it and what to do about it has had discussion completely derailed by criticism about the clickbait headline and subsequent tone policing. If this is where all our energy is going, no wonder fascists are seeing so little pushback.
Also, when I said “it’s from the article”, I was literally trying to give credit to the original author, since it seemed like you were attributing that to me. Feels weird to be downvoted for that.
The funny thing about your comment was that was the same sentiment I was expressing towards the other person. So point taken I guess?
To be clear, I didn’t write that, it’s from article.
Is the headline clickbait? Sure. I’m not defending that. Guess the author could have incorporated this into the headline:
Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically.
Feels like these are a bunch of nitpicks that distract from the main point of the article - that we need to act urgently and drastically to hope to stop this before fascists consolidate power.
Did you even read the fucking article?
Based on the historical record, there are exactly three ways this goes. Option one: Stop them before they take power. Option two: War. Option three: Wait for them to die of old age.
As far as doomerism goes, he outlines several possible avenues to stop things that require us getting off our “comfy couch”.
Unless Al Jazeera edited the title, it does not use the acronym IOF. I assume that was the responsibility of whoever posted it to Hacker News.
And they’re turning around to give the money to their customers in the form of investments or loans, so that they can buy more products from them. That’s simply not sustainable.