porcoesphino

I would like to see Telsa and Musk burn but I wish this was reported more accurately. He could get a lot, but only if he delivers:

Under the plan, Musk could receive approximately 423.7 million Tesla shares in 12 separate tranches, each contingent on achieving milestones such as the delivery of 20 million electric vehicles, the deployment of 1 million robotaxis, and reaching $400 billion in EBITDA and an $8.5 trillion market cap

I got through about ten news articles before I got to a reasonably descriptive one:

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/the-hurdles-elon-musk-must-clear-to-unlock-1-trillion-in-tesla-pay-bcdcf088

It describes the 12 milestones needed to unlock the each payment:

For the first milestone the market cap of the company needs to hit 2 trillion (and hit one of five other goals) and its currently at about 1.5 trillion. So by my understanding, if people boycott he doesn’t get the packet. The 7th milestone requires the market cap to reach the market cap that Nvidia currently has (and I presume there is another 1 of 5 goal condition). The 12th milestone, required to get the amount in the article headline, requires the company to reach a valuation thats 150% of Nvidia’s current market cap (and I presume there is another 1 of 5 goal condition).

I agree the amount is preposterous, but I’d argue so are these goals, and so is the simplicity of the reporting.

Finally read the transcript, here are some quotes:

And I think that lends you very well to paying attention to what these guys were doing and saying and thinking, which made no sense to me at all. I mean, it had its own internal logic, but it wasn’t logical.

Because as I’ve always said, no sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than Silicon Valley. They’ve got such a chip on their shoulder. They’re so angry. They feel so badly done by. And they have no sense of how much the government funded all that research, did everything to make their lives possible and comfortable. Yet they’re violently anti-government.

you wrote a paragraph that is probably the best explanation of tech-libertarianism or fascism ever written: “It bespeaks a lack of human connection and a discomfort with the core of what many of us consider it means to be human. It’s an inability to reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with the preference for and a glorification of being the solo commander of one’s computer in lieu of any other economically viable behavior. Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these techno-libertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.”

I feel like with the Netscape IPO and all the money that began to be made in Silicon Valley is they really bought the Milton Friedman thing of stockholder theory of value. So anything that affects tech price, stock price is bad.

Once money started really pouring in, they were being lauded as like the smartest, coolest, most amazing, wonderful people that ever existed. And so who would have the strength of character to question that? Nobody, I would say, generally, people are scratching you behind the ears and telling you that the way you are, however limited it is, is perfect and perfect for this moment

In Cyberselfish, you divided tech libertarians into the Ravers and the Gilders. And the Ravers were kind of the tech libertarian types who go to Burning Man and have some countercultural characteristics. And the Gilders were more of the suit money obsessed types, the conservatives

How did the book affect your life?

…

I don’t know why writing that book was such a professional death sentence for me. I didn’t write it with the idea of I’m a whistleblower and I will now get death threats. I didn’t think that would happen. It affected my life terribly. It threw me $65,000 in debt. I could never get published anywhere, not a book, not an article, whether it was on technology or something else. It really was like the book had placed a curse on me. And I felt really bad about it. Like, was it a bad book?

…

I think if you’re a writer or any kind of creative person, you want to feel, and this is narcissism, at least for me, you want to feel you’ve created something of lasting value. And having this validation come 25 years later goes, I did create something of lasting value, however we wanted to define it. When I wrote it, I did not think it was too ahead of the curve. I was describing what I was seeing then and I didn’t understand why other people didn’t see it

Looking back at what you wrote, does anything about where we are or how we got here shock or surprise you?

I thought there would be more correctives, you know, that culture of computer freedom and privacy, the way the Bay Area has traditionally been what a friend of mine calls a blue church as opposed to red. I thought those corrective forces would be in play. I didn’t realize how pervasive the Wall Street mentality, which is shareholder theory of value and I can do whatever I want and it’s fine. I didn’t realize there weren’t going to be correctives to that. That is one of the things that surprises me.

Interesting. I’m not going to watch the video but was curious. Here’s her wikipedia page:

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

I didn’t find a good summary of her book “Cyberselfish : a critical romp through the terribly libertarian culture of high tech”

I think this is the transcript of the video:

https://www.thenerdreich.com/paulina-borsook-saw-tech-fascism-coming/

And it seems like the youtube video is just The Nerd Reich podcast if you want to listen to audio only

Intelligent systems need perception to understand, predict, and navigate their environment. These sensory capabilities reflect what’s useful for survival in a specific environment: bats use echolocation, migratory birds sense magnetic fields, Arctic reindeer shift their UV vision seasonally. But when your world is made of text, what do you see? Language models encounter many text-based tasks that benefit from visual or spatial reasoning: parsing ASCII art, interpreting tables, or handling text wrapping constraints. Yet their only “sensory” input is a sequence of integers representing tokens. They must learn perceptual abilities from scratch, developing specialized mechanisms in the process.

Its not quite anthropomorphising but there is a lot of poetry there explaining a statistical model

This is great! I’ve been telling everyone who will listen that we should be doing this but that since it’s more expensive than clear felling land for a solar plant that’s installed on the ground, it needs legislation. Anyone know of other countries that have done this? I hope more will follow

So, I think the payload bay has an internal diameter of 8 m so a floor area of 50 m². A studio in New York is roughly between 250 and 500 square feet (23 - 46 m²). They show one and a half levels here and I agree the double airlock and the equipment locker are below this level and a half. My point is, whats rendered is huge compared to current craft (or living quarters on a submarine or military boat), but compared to what most humans are used to living in its not an absurd amount and they have both volume available and very little rendered that would be used for day to day living. I doubt they would ship without more thought to the living space and that makes these renders seem pretty vague and low quality to me

It looks like the internal volume for the payload bay has a height of about 15 m and that’s a little more than five floors assuming they are roughly the same height as an apartment? Agreed that is an absurd about of floor area but I don’t think as absurd as a close to empty volume

That said, I did go back and look at the renders again and they’re not as bad as I remembered them. I’m probably mostly reacting to people getting excited by them since I don’t think they add any new info and I’d be surprised if the ship came out close to those renderings

I disagree, the interior images are the ones that seem the most half baked to me. If you mean that the lunar images are similar to what we’ve seen before then I’ll agree.

Even with Starship being huge, floor area is still a massive win and leaving it under utilised like in the diagram seems really, really improbable. The area where the astronauts are sitting with the ladder down, seems unnecessarily hazardous. The fact the whole area is so bare makes sense for locking things up but I’ll be surprised if there aren’t some features, for example a circular locker in the middle or beds. I did have an issue with the chairs they are sitting on looking like foldout chairs and expecting a little more around them, but looking at the images of a dragon capsule they are surprisingly similar, its just that with the dragon being smaller its not as obvious how minimal they are.

It just seems like they rushed to put together an image and haven’t thought through or discussed what’s useful in the mission enough to bother with a layout

Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of the renderings. They seem to not really show much besides an artists rendition and seem more a response to recent political pressure than a decent update, at least to me

First your post presumes most animals can talk in a sophisticated way instead of some primitive signals. Then it presumes scientists aren’t working on understanding animal communication.

Scientists did this with whales and the story broke. The reality of that story was that it was like some musicians splicing some bird songs together and a bird came to listen for a little and leaving. It got blown up by excited people who wanted to believe we were talking to animals.

Did you even bother to open up google scholar and do a half assed search before posting that and then adding it here?

I didn’t bother reading it but I presume an attempt at compelling reporting. Mice and elephants have some morphological differences that are influenced by their size differences and these have been used to explain some high school physics for at least decades but I presume longer

(like the internal volume to surface area ratio meaning the elephant has issues dissipating heat and thats part of the function of their ears, or how the elephants legs are stocky and below them but smaller animals don’t even need their legs below them)

I’d be curious to see that with dosage. Like maybe they’re just more sensitive to caffeine than originally expected, kind of how humans were way more sensitive to LSD than expected. But also, the effects of LSD in humans seem to plateau unlike alcohol, it would be interesting to see if the caffeine web is the spider falling off a metaphorical cliff

I would guess that either the author at popular mechanics just found it / just dug it out of their reading list or one of the authors of the paper reached out as part of promoting their research?

I think a year ago as someone learning biology from Khan Academy and reading about endosymbiosis and reading what I could about LUCA theories with some chemistry background then whats written here just seems like a likely possibility. The paper doesn’t seem like strong evidence and it seems like there is a lot of guess work for early life. The teams making artificial cells are doing interesting, scary work there.

But I’m no expert here, I was just pointing out the source material and a summary

deleted by creator

Downvoted.

This article points to another article:

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-genetic-code-textbook-version.html

And this article points to the study:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2410311121

The phys.org article is decent, unlike the one linked in the OP, but the information isn’t as huge as the title would suggest. The core of it is basically these two paragraphs:

The study revealed that early life preferred smaller amino acid molecules over larger and more complex ones, which were added later, while amino acids that bind to metals joined in much earlier than previously thought. Finally, the team discovered that today’s genetic code likely came after other codes that have since gone extinct.

The authors argue that the current understanding of how the code evolved is flawed because it relies on misleading laboratory experiments rather than evolutionary evidence

I think most modern biologists would agree this was probable even if it wasn’t codified yet

I read the post three times. Maybe it’s because its the middle of the night but I don’t understand how the content matches the title, what the content is about, or why the OP has mostly upvotes

I found this and it says it links to the original (but the HTTPS cert is old so I didn’t click through):

https://onthelineministries.com/are-contradictions-in-bible/

Its not the source but it goes through each contraction and I think for all of them argues they’re not a contraction. Their arguments seem convoluted but might make sense. They’re obviously committed to saying they’re not contradictions so a pretty biased source but I’m guessing so was the original.

They also said some things that are in comments on the OP:

One of the funny things I noticed about this is that some (many) are actually duplicate questions and questions of such a similar nature that it is almost pointless to answer them one by one as I could group many together into one single answer.

But the fact that question #7 and question #9 are EXACTLY the same, word for word, I believe it gives a clear testimony to the deception the image attempts to give

Save yourself the click:

• It used to be rich in the 50s
• It is defensible (mountains and oceans)
• It has mostly weak neighbours (besides Brazil)
• It has a good climate for agriculture
• It has a good river system for logistics
• It has a good natural port
• It has resources

It ends by using a chess analogy instead of saying the country didn’t play its cards well and wasn’t well governed. From my scan it somehow missed or didn’t put much emphasis on the 1976 military coop and the situation that lead to it or any instability since

It’s probably trying to tie into the US funding Argentina but uses a lot of words to not say a lot

It’s not just uncomfortable though, it’s hugely time consuming. And like, I think we’re getting to the point where more collective time has been spent explaining the world is not flat than the human hours it took to find out the world is round. If the person happens to be knowledgeable then they can kill a lot of time through out “what about X?” arguments (like missing links for evolution) and that requires someone with a lot of knowledge to slowly explain, so the approach also biases towards locking up the most knowledgeable people instead of them being more free to do other things (in the evolution example, maybe biology research).

I guess I’m not arguing against the empathy first communication, just lamenting how effective the flood the zone strategy is.

I don’t think my IDEs are quite as colourful as his. Did he choose a deliberately bad colour scheme to try to make a point?

Trying hard to justify their epiphany… and trying to justify their plugin and advertise it.