FaceDeer

Full flow methalox for the new Raptor engines, stainless steel for the rocket body, the whole focus on full reuse (just the first stage for Falcon 9 but driving to the full stack in Starship). These are all basic things that nobody was doing before and now are being hurriedly copied as fast as can be done by competitors.

I’m most familiar with his SpaceX work, mind you, so there may be comparable decisions over at Tesla that are part of what put electric cars into the mainstream that I’m not familiar with off the top of my head.

My ancient laptop is Windows 11 home edition, not enterprise or server.

Really, if it’s taking almost a minute to open the control panel then there’s something literally wrong with that install.

And the list goes on.

Yes, he’s had a few duff ideas. But then the rest of your own comment is a list of things he made good decisions on, which have vastly outperformed the bad decisions.

Also NASA couldn’t do what SpaceX rockets do, and Starlink has full regulatory approval for what they’re doing.

From what I remember he bought Tesla well after it was making money

Your memory is wildly inaccurate. Tesla was incorporated in July 2003, Musk got a controlling share in February 2004 (7 months later), and the company began production of its first car model, the Roadster sports car, in 2008.

I don’t know what decisions he made with spacex

Basically everything to do with their reusable rockets and their decision to build Starlink.

and I don’t knowb if the boring company is still around honestly.

I think you haven’t actually been paying any attention to Musk’s activities beyond what the “hive mind” has been telling you. Which is exactly my point here.

That whole paragraph of stuff where you’re complaining about how awful Musk is had nothing to do with engineering decisions.

To go someplace that’s sure to get me many downvotes, I think Elon Musk is quite good at making high-level engineering decisions and the success of his companies really are in large part attributable to the decisions he’s made.

He’s an evil slimeball and his involvement in politics has been a massive detriment to the US and the world as a whole, but too many people go from that to “and therefore he must be stupid and incompetent and all his success is due to luck” or similar such excuses. No, unfortunately one can be both evil and highly competent - they aren’t mutually exclusive traits.

Takes a couple of seconds to open my Windows 11 control panel on my most ancient laptop, which I basically only use for web browsing and remote desktop at this point. Not sure what you’ve done to your install but I’d guess you’ve got something gumming up the works that isn’t typical.

I switched to LM Studio as my generic “run whatever GGUF I’ve come across today” platform and I quite like it. It doesn’t have the weird setup and configuration thing Ollama does, it’s got a nice built-in chat system like Kobold does, and it does dynamic model loading on demand so my various random scripts can call into it for whatever they need without me having to do any manual work.

Running stuff with straight llama would probably be more computationally efficient, but I value easy interfaces too.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.

Just having them be comparable is great, I’ve been very appreciative of China for keeping open weights cutting edge but monopolies are never good in the long run. Bring on the competition.

A bunch of their data centers just inexplicably exploded and burned down so whatever prominence they might have had until now is probably going to fade a bit more.

Well, “people” and “humans” aren’t the same thing. One’s a subset of the other.

Problem with getting too philosophical here is that someday soon the bots might also count as a subset. Then things get really complicated.

Phishing attempts that got far enough to actually show up in our internal corporate inboxes like that aren’t common, though. They’re normally blocked by the layers of firewalls and whatnot. We almost never saw email on those accounts from outside the organization itself, period.

And once you’ve run something capable of remote execution on a machine that’s inside the local network, with the sort of privileges that his machine had (he wasn’t just a bureaucratic sort of manager, he was writing code too), you don’t want to mess around.

A company I was in a few jobs back had several layers of IT department, there was the local studio department that handled our everyday stuff and a “head office” somewhere far away that set policy and handed out budget and whatnot.

One day “head office” IT decided it was a good idea to send out some fake phishing emails to “test” us. They didn’t tell the local IT department about it, I guess they were also being “tested”. My manager received one and only recognized it as a phishing attempt after he’d clicked just one too many things for it to feel safe to ignore. So he yanked the power on his computer and contacted the local IT department, as is protocol when something potentially dangerous just happened.

The local network went into lockdown while local IT tried to figure out if something actually dangerous had happened. It cost the studio as a whole several hours of work time, which for a studio our size translated to an obscene dollar cost. Nobody on our side of things did anything wrong, even that one extra “dangerous” click my manager did wasn’t something he could be blamed for - head office had crafted the fake phishing attempt well and his reaction to it would have prevented damage had it been real.

Head office never tried a stunt like that again.

Yeah, we’re here. I’m a professional programmer but I haven’t written an actual line of code in quite a while now, and I’ve been having so much fun with my local model (Qwen3.8-27B Q4) doing all sorts of cleanup tasks on my lifetime’s giant pile of accumulated files. For example, all my generated music - I ended up having Qwen build a GUI music manager and whipped up a website generator for my favourites so I can more easily share them through free hosts without having to hand them over to spotify or whatever.

I’m curious, is the game you mentioned modding Rimworld? I’ve been pondering modding it for some time now, it’s one of my favourite games, if you’ve got experience using AI for that I wouldn’t mind some pointers. It was always a “I know how to do this stuff but it takes way more time and attention than I’ve got available right now” sort of task but AI can help so much there. :) Your description of the “engine changed but compatibility is remarkably good” matches what I’ve seen of Rimworld’s recent 1.7 update.

Wait until you hear about a proposed new emergency method of keeping patients with respiratory failure oxygenated: enteral ventilation.

Some turtles do this naturally.