So you are stating that there has been no change in how clinical trials are required to be run, and the associated costs, since the changes immediately following the thalidomide catastrophe?

Agents increase the velocity of OpenAI and Anthropic; whomever has the best in-house agent moves the quickest.

Any publicly available evidence to back that up? There have been post-exit blog posts from OpenAI employees on HN before and it did sound like the only black magic they use there is that many employees work 16 hrs a day during launch of new features. I know that some current Claude Code devs are doing interviews where they claim that they use Claude Code extensively but they clearly have a conflict of interest while they are still employed at Anthropic, so it would be like asking a barber if you need a haircut.

Look at the number of features (PRs) being pushed by these companies.

The talent that was originally driving SpaceX is gone. And I don’t mean Elon’s brain. I mean the real engineers designing the rockets.

The talent has mostly gone because the US is fiercely politically divided, and musk changing teams from democrats to republican pretty much meant his whole staff were forced to jump ship because he no longer aligned with their values.

Do you have any evidence of this? I don’t think there have been a lot of high profile departures in the past few years.

Every single xAI exec left...

Same with most top Tesla execs since he changed political sides.

That's pretty high turnover for a company with RSU's tying people in seats

We're talking about SpaceX, not Tesla or xAI, which only very recently joined SpaceX.

A civilization on Mars would not create value. It would be a money incinerator. Mars is a shithole with nothing to offer humanity economically or in quality of life. Quite the opposite, in fact.

250 years ago, you could make this exact argument about the British colonization of Australia, and it would be entirely correct. The early colony was a pure fiscal drain on Britain with almost no return.

Yet today it's the 13th largest economy on earth.

Think on a longer time scale.

The difference is that Australia is on earth... where we all live.

In fact, Australia already had people living on it.

We also have a lot of easily accessible resources via agriculture and mining, things Mars does not have. And even if it did having mining potential, the cost of returning the goods to Earth would be wild.

The cost of agriculture and mining at all, without combustion, would be astronomical

>Think on a longer time scale.

On a longer timescale would it only be spaceX on Mars?

Australia was built by forced and indentured labour.

I guess the unspoken part of a Mars colony is that it would be penal.

So you’re investing with a 250y time horizon? Do you even expect profits from your investment? Or is it purely ideological?

Jamestown was a total failure, too.

They control for that. Sun exposure correlates with decreased mortality (with a dose dependent relationship) for people at the same income level. One of the figures plots it for “moderate income.”

The housing shortage is due to humans breeding and overrunning their habitats. It’s not something to be fixed. It’s badly needed backpressure which keeps the planet livable. Do you want to live in a concrete jungle? Do you want to kill the earth? Do we need any more people?

Selfish influencers are trying to get housing built in “cool” spots, (because they don’t make enough money) rather than wait their turn or make other neighborhoods cool. Ignore them and their campaigns to ruin everything.

A prototype without an explosive warhead? Congrats on doing the easy bits.

For some people, a layout which spares the pinkies is preferable. The BEAKL layouts, for example, are optimized using a hand model which keeps the pinkies as idle as possible. Sometimes this can make all the difference.

The Linux kernel isn’t that complex. It’s mainly device drivers. Linus wrote the first version himself as a hobby, for crying out loud. AIs will be creating custom kernels within five years, from scratch, as customized as you wish. Probably based on BSD, or other liberally licensed code, for legal reasons.

v0.01 took Linus months of work and even then it barely ran anything. It wasn't POSIX compliant. It couldn't run GNU userspace. It only ran on one arch and had no concept of multi-arch support and limited to no real driver compartmentalization.

It wouldn't be until 2 years later that almost a hundred devs joined the Linux project and they'd gradually have achieved compatibility with GNU userspace. Full POSIX compliance wouldn't come until later.

And it wouldn't be until another year or two later that they'd finally reach a "production ready" 1.0 by which point hundreds of devs were contributing to the project.

You are vastly underestimating the insane amount of work that went into the Linux kernel in the early days to get it to where it is today that it can be developed at such scale and with support for so many intermixed, overlapping, or mutually incompatible features, devices, and platforms. To call that effort (just for core linux, not the drivers) anything less than herculean is frankly an insult to all the people who have dedicated so much time and energy towards that project.