It's not just weight loss that Ozempic and the other GLP-1 drugs encourage. They also help people stop drinking to excess, and help lower pangs for other harmful drugs like heroin.
I believe that these attributes are so promising, that the idea of government subsidized Ozempic just seems like great domestic policy to me. I believe that whichever politician pitches this idea first will get a ton of support from the public and the press.
It feels to me like another one of Elon's stubborn whims. Sometimes these result in great innovations, like Tesla's giant car part 'gigacasting'. Other times, they result in deciding to rename Twitter "X" and forcing a team of engineers to spend over a year combing meticulously through the codebase to remove all references to "twitter.com"
> Tesla now focusing more on developing self-driving vehicles than on pushing for huge growth in EV sales volume, which many investors had been counting on.
Yep, don't count on Tesla for replacing fossil fuel cars. They had a good headstart but hopefully other manufacturers will now take its place to fill growing demand
In all likelihood auto manufacturers won't really be responsible for replacing fossil fuel cars. Designing and building the cars is straightforward enough, they need continued leaps energy storage and infrastructure to make that change possible.
> Tesla now focusing more on developing self-driving vehicles than on pushing for huge growth in EV sales volume, which many investors had been counting on.
Oh, come on. Yes, Musk announced that Tesla would announce a self-driving car with no steering wheel in August 2024. Of course, he said that in 2016, in 2018, in 2020...[1]
Reality is that Tesla, while signed up for California DMV's autonomous vehicle test program, didn't report any miles driven last year.
It actually says that they were attempting to gigacast their new vehicle as a single piece rather than three pieces, but that proved difficult so they are going back to gigacasting three separate pieces.
But your point stands: they are still gigacasting, just for now they are not doing the very ambitious "gigacast in a single bound" plan.
This reminds me of Steve Jobs and his absolute refusal to let flash run on the iPhone. I think we're better now for that, but we had a few rough years for that.
Maybe, or maybe it's like his refusal to allow apps to force everything to be a web app, and Tesla will realize they are better off just having more sensors and more data
I kinda agree with steve jobs on both of those calls. if your "mobile app" is just a wrapper around a web page, I'd rather just have a bookmark shortcut on my homescreen. what's the value add?
I don't think either of those is very similar to the wiper thing. one is using the leverage of owning a major OS to force third parties to do something better for the end user in a context where the stakes are pretty low (ie, no one is going to die). even if it works out in the long run, the wiper only benefits tesla. and in the meantime it is a serious safety risk for the end user.
Frame damage is actually pretty straightforward on cars that actually have a frame (i.e. aren't unibody).
The problem with repair costs in modern cars is all the sensors, cameras, complex paint jobs, airbags, etc. Those expenses add up quickly, combined with the added costs of body panels
and trim for certain brands and costs really get insane - it shouldn't be a surprise that car insurance costs keep growing much faster than inflation.
Definitely depends on the type of damage. Cracks and rust aren't a big deal at all, a twisted frame due to a corner collision is a royal pain.
In the context of price to repair though, I'd still rather be dealing with a car with a damaged frame rather than a modern car with loads of sensors, body panels, etc that all need replacing.
I think most of the time if you are in a serious enough accident to damage the gigacast in a way that it needs replacing, that would've totalled most other cars as well.
not doubting you but how does it take a year to remove twitter references?
surely twitter has some internal code search tool like Sourcegraph which would let them easily search for all variations of “twitter”, right? /twi?t*e?r/gi
I would like you to do this for one of your larger projects at work - just change its name with a simple regex like this - and see how many unit tests fail.
"But I'll just fix those!", you might say, and you might. Except your project is likely not as big as twitter, and fixing every problem is likely to become a much bigger problem.
Plus, you now have to catch all the stuff not caught by unit tests, which also includes design elements that a person has to look at.
My guess is that most of their ad business relations are managed out of their New York offices, and ads being the overwhelming majority of Twitter revenue, that's where he is now.
> During the final months of World War II, codenamed Cherry Blossoms at Night, the plan of Unit 731 was to use kamikaze pilots to infest San Diego, California, with the plague. The plan was scheduled to launch on 22 September 1945, but Japan surrendered five weeks earlier.
My great hope in these cold war-esque times of tension between China, Russia, and the US is that the field of battle becomes competition in Great Achievements for science, engineering, and space exploration.
Permanent human-staffed moonbases are a good goal to strive towards.
Agreed on the hope that the new cold war spurs more scientific achievements (just hopefully fewer Manhattan Projects).
However, I don't grok the point of human-staffed moonbases. I'm just a casual layman, but asteroid mining's the only thing I know of with a clear ROI in space. Or is the idea a moonbase would be like the ISS/Antarctica, an international scientific outpost?
> but asteroid mining's the only thing I know of with a clear ROI in space
I dont think asteroid mining at current transportation costs is a clear ROI - the same amount of resources could be used to mine the earth for a lot more.
I see ROI in micro-gravity manufacturing - stuff that is impossible to do in gravity could be the future! Things like nano particles that would not be possible to create under earth gravity, fine structures that could collapse easily could be sustained in space for example.
Also, a 2nd human habitat (moon or otherwise) as a backup isn't a bad idea, even if it doesn't generate an economic return for a while. We are one asteroid impact away from extinction!
I’m not an expert in any of the following, but a couple reasons might be:
1) Living on multiple bodies would do wonders for the imagination and further space exploration.
2) reduced gravity launches for spacecraft to places other than earth
3) a test environment for developing technologies in a completely different space. The ISS serves this somewhat, but it seems like the scalability is very limited, especially manufacturing.
The sooner we can permanently keep even a couple eggs outside our single basket, the better.
We're currently 1 real plague or 1 big asteroid away from ending our species. Up to now we've been very lucky.
I'd like to see in my lifetime our species able to live outside Earth in a self-sustaining way, with enough resources, infrastructure and know-how to make microchips, edit DNA, etc without calling upon Earth to do it.
That'll require tens of thousands of major innovations, not least of which will be the ability to survive lots more radiation than humans normally get exposed to, plus concerns like how space squishes eyeballs and ruins a person's vision.
If humans end up living on luna or somewhere between here and luna, they'll either be augmented with tech we haven't thought of yet or with DNA we haven't invented yet.
I'm excited to see us try, and I don't care which 21st century nation-state makes it happen.
Why do some people place such importance on humans continuing beyond Earth? Is it not just the ultimate hubris to think that we know that doing so is even a good idea?
Aside from some major religions mandating the expansion of humanity (or at least their faithful) - which I suppose could be hubris in the religion - why is it excessively prideful to want our species to continue to exist? What moral framework accounts for a desire to continue our existence in the negative column?
Why not? Seriously, why wouldn't we try to preserve and upgrade our species for as long as physically possible?
Would we complain if whales said "we don't want our species to end"? Or ants, for that matter?
"No whales, it's the ultimate hubris that you think you have a right to exist and continue existing."
Why is it hubris for humans, like all other species on Earth, to want to exist, propagate, and, since we're intelligent, learn and grow our intelligence, and spread it beyond home base?
There are a lot of things that we as a species have gotten wrong and are not worth preserving.
There are a lot of things that we as a species have gotten right and are worth preserving.
In the words of Prof. Brian Cox, it would be a tragedy if Earth is the only place in the galaxy where consciousness exists, and it would be wiped out by an asteroid.
Staffing humans on the moon requires efficiencies and innovation in rocket launches, landing, inhospitable settlement, and transport of goods and people between the Earth's surface and the moon.
It is a good stepping stone towards further exploration farther out.
Moon's gravity is much weaker than ours, which makes it an attractive starting point for missions to the rest of the solar system.
Launching anything from Earth's surface costs a lot of fuel. In case of Falcon 9, max payload is about 5 per cent of the total weight of the stack on ramp.
If I had to guess, I would guess that the space industry is going to move away from the Earth before, say, 2070. Among other advantages, energy in space is dirt cheap. You get the full solar constant when not in shade, no clouds, no rain, no wind or hail to damage your solar panels etc.
Before Helium-3 has any value you first need reactors to fuse it. We're not investing a lot into building those, and right now it looks a lot like renewables+storage will be cheaper.
I know what you mean, and I think the parent comment suggests that getting to the moon will empower enterprise and government to seriously consider further investment in those types of reactors. It is just one step to make it possible.
With the progress we are seeing in launching modules and supplies to space I think the calculus on what is cheapest might change (though I am all for investing heavily into renewables and improved storage as soon as possible)
Moon has a similar crust to earth, has never been mined before in all of human history, and doesn't have an ecology to ruin.
But the kicker is that the Delta-V requirements for moon->earth transport are quite modest; even to begin with. [1]
Delta-V requirements scale exponentially with gravity. With the inverse, at 1/6 of earth's gravity and effectively no atmosphere, all kinds of exotic transport and launch solutions that would be ludicrous on earth would be rather pedestrian on the moon. So the theoretical lowest possible price for shipping moon->earth would be very low indeed.
Assume there's mining/manufacturing on the moon already. Then at some point as people build out infrastructure, there's going to be a threshold point. First one factory might start to be able to build things and ship them to some of the more remote places on earth for cheaper than a similar factory on earth can do. At that point demand would increase and the price would keep dropping as volume increased.
Said factory just needs to be very careful to set things up so that at no point in time (past commissioning at least) they need to ship so much as a paper-clip from Earth, because that would immediately crater their budget. [2]
So long term moon-earth ROI is pretty good I'd say. Just getting to that particular threshold would be hideously expensive, since it requires a lot of earth launches. Possibly some intermediate steps might be needed.
[1] To slightly misrepresent the situation but give an intuition: The Saturn V rocket was needed to get to the moon; but the tiny spaceship-stack at the top of the rocket [LM ascent stage + CM/CSM] was sufficient to get back.
[2] Which is not to say that you can't sometimes ship things from Earth. While shipping from Earth is (comparatively) insanely expensive, one-off costs can always be amortized. But you can't practically include earth-launch as an integral part of your on-moon production or shipping processes and still expect to make a profit. This is part of the challenge.
But moon poles are eventually very valuable near earth real estate for storing vast amounts of volatiles and manufacturing. Not only craters, it can be extended by building a circumpolar wall that can also support uninterrupted solar energy. The permanent shade inside will provide cryogenic environment for free.
And just like a cold war, China is making a strategic move.
The lunar south pole seems to be prime real estate. One of two always lit / always dark positions, and it has more water ice and craters than the north pole. Definitely the better of the two spots.
Unless they're willing to share, they're shafting the rest of the world.
Nothing we do on the moon in the near term will require that it be to the exclusion of other countries. Landing a rover, or creating a moon base of a few hundred square meters still leaves a lot more moon for others.
Nothing except human nature ... see the current controversies in the South China Sea.
States are very territorial. There are emotional reasons for it, but also the exclusive claim for natural resources.
If water is found in mineable concentrations in only a few spots of the Moon, I bet there will be a serious conflict over those spots. It is literally a matter of survival for the future colonists.
Did you live during the Cold War? I struggle to understand why someone would want to live under that constant existential threat of nuclear annihilation.
> Did you live during the Cold War? I struggle to understand why someone would want to live under that constant existential threat of nuclear annihilation.
Ummm, we still live under that constant existential threat.
He didn't say he wants it. I think he means that times of renewed rivalry and tension are coming whether we want it or not, and he hopes some good can come from it.
Both Russia and the US still have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out much of humanity. All that changed is that we don't live under is the constant reminder of that existential threat.
MIT Technology Review interviewed the new CEO recently:
> Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed. One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. The scarce commodity today is attention. There's a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we're working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we're building, how we direct people's attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.
I read it differently than "shaping public opinion". The reality is that social media (and Twitter especially) is toxic. That underlying toxicity comes from humans of course, but recommendation algorithms accelerate and highlight it because it leads to high "engagement", and thus more money. These sites already "guide" conversation, just using metrics that can end up being harmful.
A social media CEO that's interested in breaking the cycle there and trying to recommend content that's more constructive than inflammatory sounds like a great thing to me. Yes, there are a dozen pitfalls awaiting anyone that tries, but it's still worth attempting.
The problem here is that "toxic" is subjective, what I find toxic and disagreeable may not be the same thing you find toxic and disagreeable. Take for example hot button issue of Gun ownership, I believe it an essential right and extension of self defense, others view any talk about guns as toxic that should be banned.
Who's worldview should win? Mine, your's, Twitters?
IMO platforms like twitter should not be making the choice as to what is or is not toxic, they should be giving users the ability to curate their feed's.
> others view any talk about guns as toxic that should be banned.
Do they? Are you sure? I’ve certainly seen many calls for the glorification of violence to be limited, stuff like that. But banning actual discussion of guns? I’d be interested to see examples of people advocating for that. In any case, Twitter can simply ignore people asking for that because it isn’t a reasonable request.
You can have sensible, level headed discussions about guns and gun control. You can also have inflammatory, toxic discussions about them. It’s interesting to think how you’d develop a system that prioritises the former without bringing along the latter.
> Who's worldview should win? Mine, your's, Twitters?
What does "win" mean, here? If you're the CEO of Twitter then Twitter's worldview should always win. Of course, as CEO you also get to choose what Twitter's worldview is.
>>I’ve certainly seen many calls for the glorification of violence to be limited
Guns was probably a bad choice for Twitter, would have been better for YT as YT has recently cracked down hard on firearms content.
However even on twitter the "the glorification of violence" is very subjective. For example people celebrating the jury verdict in the Rittenhouse trial, who many believe was an attack on the very right to self defense, has been reported by many as "glorification of violence"
Even more recently, I have seen attempts to censor conversation, and video around the shooting / death of Chad Read.
Then you going to have a conservation around Self defense use of guns it will include violence, there is no way around that, if you are going to censor violence then by necessity you have to sensor guns or relegate it to a discussion about hunting only.
> However even on twitter the "the glorification of violence" is very subjective
Sure. Running a company is subjective! That's why we celebrate CEOs rather than try to perfect an objective CEO algorithm that runs in the cloud. Lines have to be drawn somewhere. You could draw the line at "absolutely anything is allowed" but that might not be a wise business decision.
> who many believe
> has been reported by many
> I have seen attempts
I'm sorry but these are all very vague assertions. I don't know what any of us are supposed to do with them.
Yes they are pretty vague when you take them out of context and do not look at the over all statement, if however you read the entire thing it is pretty clear what I am talking about. If you have followed that news event then you would also be more aware of what I was referring to. if you did not follow it you may have a harder time with the context but I think it is still pretty clear
Twitter will amplify the most extreme positions on both ends, the ones to cause most outrage
- Ban all guns, completely!
- No restrictions on gun ownership should be allowed whatsoever, not even age limits!
These cause the most outrage / emotion => therefore they get the most retweeted => create a distorded mental picture of even deeper division. We're never going to solve anything that way.
The problem isn't one of free speach and censorship. Its a problem of amplification of emotionally manipulative content. The amplification is exponential (because the retweet process is exponential). This is a disaster.
It's their tool, so they get to build it to their liking, until law is created requiring them to do otherwise. The question in the meantime is, "what is moral?" and "do we as an entity (twitter) enforce our morality at all, and to what extent?"
For example, millions of people believe the lie, the fabrication that the 2020 presidential election result was fraudulent. If there are organizations on your platform amplifying messages that are fraudulent or intentionally misleading in nature, should Twitter take action?
The new CEO seems to think the answer is "yes".
IMO people should be able to curate their own feeds, but Twitter has the full right (and perhaps the moral obligation) to flag content that is bullshit as bullshit. The danger, of course, is that the kinds of people who fall for conspiracy propaganda from fascists on the right will then think, if their leaders' lies are called out, that the calling out is itself a conspiracy, and further entrench themselves rather than heed warnings.
"How to keep a social media platform from enabling anti-democratic demagogues" is an unsolved problem.
There are many facets of this comment I would like to address.
First lets make the assumption that I agree false information should be (or even can be) curbed on social media, things like Flat Earth... The problem here as we saw with COVID picking "authoritative" sources is not always accurate and tends to curb legitimate dissent as much as it does false information. Anything from the origins to COVID to the flip flopping nature of mask wearing, to discussions over mandates have all been censored in various ways under the guise of curbing false information. That is very very dangerous IMO, in fact to me it more dangerous than the false information itself. It is akin to the legal standard of "better 10 guilty people go free, than 1 innocent be imprisoned falsely" well to me, it is better than 10 false statements be spread than 1 true statement be suppressed
Then you have to take into account the clear political bias in deciding what is "false" information, you talk about the "big lie" of election fraud, but what about the continuing lies about the Rittenhouse trail, the protests / riots, the Waukesha Atrocity, Russia Gate, and many others continuing to be spread by the "authoritative sources" that many of these platforms use as Ministries of Truth. None of which has any kind of censorship or fact checking attached to it, it seems only one political camp has these fact checker flagging deployed to them. If you are going to fact check the "Big Lie" on election fraud, then I want to see fack checks on all those other topics as well.
Then you talk about Twitter "flagging" content, I actually agree that is the correct path. What twitter (and youtube) does to add a flag, or content message directing people to different sources is a good thing, I have no problem with this I just want ti deployed in a political neutral, fact based way. Today it is not being done that way.
What I do have a problem with is suppression, bans, and other direct forms os censorship often employed by twitter and other platforms. I am a firm believe that the solution to speech one believes is false or "bad" is more speech you believe is true or "good" not attempts to censor and suppress which often has an amplifying effect.
There are better ways to win the hearts and minds of the population than authoritarian control of what people see, hear and say. No one likes to be controlled by someone else. Censoring discussion of the issue is only going to make more people assume the election was in fact "fraudulent". Similarly Sam Harris has said in a podcast how laws against Holocaust denial do more to create more Holocaust deniers than they help because they automatically make people assume you have something to hide, even if you don't.
In general, intelligent people feel an intellectual responsibility to question what they are told.
The irony is that millions of the people you’re trying to defend as free-thinkers who can look at any speech and make good choices, are literally controlled by Fox News and Alex Jones propaganda.
Side note: In fact I believe there’s a legal path to suing Tucker Carlson out of existence by proving, with real data, that people really do believe the nonsense. The only reason Carlson is still trumpeting destructive lies from a megaphone is that so far, judges have accepted the argument that “no one in their right mind believes that what Carlson says is true; he’s obviously a satirist.”
> are literally controlled by Fox News and Alex Jones propaganda.
You think you've got it, and though that may seem obvious I must set you straight even if it scares you as much as it does me: it is the other way around; those are mere reflections ultimately under their control (as much as anyone controls their beliefs).
Your parenthetical statement casts a large shadow over the rest of your statement, because yes, control varies, and people with low control (correlates with low education) are precisely the ones who fall prey to cynical propaganda.
There's this idea that there are millions of mind-numbed conservative zombies out there, blindly following Trump or Tucker Carlson or spokesman x, but I don't see it. What I think is closer to the truth is that there are a ton of angry cultural conservatives who distrust everybody, but begrudgingly watch Carlson because they perceive him as better than the actively-hostile rest-of-the-news. That doesn't necessarily mean they're making good choices, but it's good practice to understand why people make the political choices they do.
The theory that a huge percentage of Tucker's audience is watching it knowing full well that Tucker is a full of shit zero-content "satirist" just isn't convincing at all. Unfortunately, though, it has been convincing to some judges but like I said I hope that will change.
That said, I now a bunch of people firsthand who are getting brainwashed on Tucker and Alex Jones. They really do believe the crap.
The problem is of course, he won't ever do that consistently. Instead he will simply decide that people he doesn't personally like a "lying" and "spreading misinformation", whilst people who are powerful or who he does like, never do.
Consider that if Twitter censored everyone who believed a lie or fabrication, every public health person who claimed masks didn't work and then that they did, would all lose their Twitter accounts or be hidden. Guess what, they will never do that.
Thus it is reasonable to interpret their use of the word "healthy" to be "heavily left wing biased".
To not promote toxicity, one could just avoid amplifying anything that’s a hot button or divisive issue. However, incentives don’t align with that.
The key is the issue is the amplification. Promoting of content you’re not following in feeds.
Of course, completely changing it back to only content from those you follow in chronological order and allowing you to curate would solve that problem as well, but there’s no way they go back to that as there’s far less money involved.
It doesn't mean "something I don't like". It means an outright lie, or a statement made in order to mislead or bait people into useless or malicious behavior.
Trolling, lying, saying stupid and libelous things with the intent to anger. Bad faith is about intent.
I also look forward to the day that "censorship" is allowed nuance. If you think Twitter deciding it won't be a party to disinformation campaigns is "censorship", we have bigger issues.
It probably is not what you personally mean, but outright censorship is what will likely happen if we do not actively resist the calls for silencing the deplorables. Freedom of expression is not the default state of the world.
Do you believe that Twitter banning the Hunter Biden laptop story (to the extent that you couldn't even DM a link to it to other users) before the election wasn't an act of political corporate censorship?
Youtube for one has banned a lot of discussions around guns, and gun channels. There is a very limited number of things they allow and gun channels are walking on egg shells. The Rittenhouse trial cause alot of banns, strikes, and etc as well. Including one of the most popular law channel's getting taken down for a time.
That is one example, I can instead highlight any number of other topics like abortion, pronouns, gender, sexuality, any of the other "culture war" topics.
I subscribe to multiple high-sub-count YouTube channels that post videos about guns on a regular basis. Are you referring to their rules about violent/explicit content? That is absolutely not a subject matter ban like 'you can't discuss guns' and the facts don't support a claim that they ban guns.
YouTube's rules enforcement for videos is notoriously bad and has been forever, but that doesn't change their actual policies.
Enforcement is more pertinent than policy. If their policy allows for such videos, but in practice removes them, it doesn't really matter what their policy is.
That’s unfortunate. This is exactly how I want Twitter not to be. I just want a feed filled with Tweets by the people I follow, ordered by the time posted.
But as seen on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, this is not most effective way to make money.
He's only acknowledging that they're already algorithmically guiding the conversation and shaping public opinion. The algorithms are just bad: there are tons of feedback loops, too much emphasis on amplifying the already-popular and virtually no effort to de-emphasize the trash, and so you end up with a dumpster-fire / cacophony that Twitter is today.
Hacker News discussions are great because they're so well-moderated. It's not hard to imagine Twitter doing a better job of algorithmically demoting some of the obvious rage-bait, fake news, straight-up hate speech, etc.
> Around the same time that Kambhampati’s latest application was turned down, another arm of the government, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, gave Dr. Lana Ray, a professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., a $1.2-million grant to study cancer prevention using traditional Indigenous healing practices. When the award was announced, Ray said “We need to stop framing prevalent risk factors of cancer as such and start thinking about them as symptoms of colonialism.”
1B is very impressive but more than twice that in the same time really puts the capacity, scale and reach of the Chinese State at a different level. Still I am curious why China is not opening up the borders to visitors?
As far as I have read China heavily locks down regions if covid flares emerge, tests everyone in the region within a few days, then opens everything up less than a week later. This doesn't fit to the way more laissez-faire approach in the West.
"A large multi-country Phase 3 trial has shown that 2 doses, administered at an interval of 21 days, have an efficacy of 79% against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection 14 or more days after the second dose. Vaccine efficacy against hospitalization was 79%."
