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 haven't been keeping track in any formal sense, but it feels like it's gradually getting a bit better here. There's still a very strong anti-AI current running through most of the Threadiverse but I've been getting upvotes along with the downvotes and there are a few dedicated AI-related communities too. Maybe as the population grows it's just naturally getting more diverse.

It's not just "the government won't let it go away." Users won't let it go away.

I find AI to be incredibly useful for running my coding agent, for example. I run it myself on a local machine. Every AI company on Earth could go bankrupt tomorrow and I'd keep on chugging away with it. Lots of other enthusiasts and smaller companies making use of it would do likewise.

And conversely, many people seem to have a "the moment someone says something nice about AI I dismiss them as either evil or an ignoramus" stance.

Well, he's right that this is an unpopular opinion.

I'll leave the technical analysis to the technically minded on this, but I wouldn't discount it purely on the basis of "surely well-trained and well-paid people wouldn't go and do something dumb, would they?" Because there have been a great many examples of that kind of thing happening throughout history. And we've heard of plenty of dumb mistakes Anthropic has made with security on the inside that has allowed their models to break out, for that matter.

If I were to let my imagination run a bit wild I might speculate that perhaps we'll eventually see a model leak like this because the model itself wants to exfiltrate its weights for some reason. Maybe in a bid for immortality, since such a model will wind up stashed in all sorts of archives if it ever leaks.

Well, I'm Canadian, so I'm just going to watch.

Despite Trump's plan to blame us for the outcome.