These are tractable (if complicated) questions with real (if imprecise and inevitably debatable) conclusions. Ignoring them because you don't like argument and are confused by the talking heads on the news is, to be blunt, destroying society.

This is the core point, but it applies for the whole of the industry. Motors just don't matter. An electric motor is an almost vanishing component of the weight and complexity of an electric vehicle. Cut the mass of the thing *in half* and you're looking at 100kg savings, tops. You could do that with a Model Y by just changing the roof material to something boring and not glass. You could almost do it by shrinking the oversized-as-is-the-fashion wheels.

So... it's great that Mercedez-Benz is producing these, I guess. But it won't make their cars anything more than incrementally better. Which is why we're seeing them crow about it in a press release and not a spec sheet.

In fact it's arguably a feature. The ability of support staff to short-circuit nitpicky rules when there's an obvious external validation happening (e.g. you're on the phone with a user who's presenting ID in real time and correlating it with previous use of the account, etc...) makes for better data quality and happier customers.

Obviously, yes, you can then human-engineer an authentication breach. But that was very difficult, because people are "common-sense careful" in a way we haven't been able to tease out of AI yet.

Exactly! "Maybe not a long term great business" is exactly the opposite of what you want to buy in an IPO.

This is a "private equity can squeeze out a ton of cash from this asset portfolio" situation, and very much not a "in a few years this will be a trillion dollar business competing with the biggest companies in the world" bet.

Actually that seems to be fairly logical? Hardware is what xAI has, and it's in great demand. So sell what makes you money. The real story here is that that xAI hardware is going to be running Gemini and not Grok. Which is to say: Grok basically failed as a frontier AI and they need to pivot to a business model which makes money.

Obviously not everything Musk did was wrong. xAI bought a ton of compute when it was possible to get it. But the product they were going to build with it failed and so now they're deciding to be a landlord.

This IPO is just insane. No way do you justify a $trillion+ valuation based on what amounts to a bunch of commoditized rent seeking endeavors. Datacenters are buildings and chips, and everyone can build those. Starlink is just an ISP with lots of competition at scale (they have the high bandwidth mobile market cornered, but that's a very small market!). Mars is at best a grift on public funding. Even satellite launch services are commoditized and competetive these days.

Stop. Yes yes, you are a fine writer with excellent communication skills. You would never stoop so low as to allow a mere machine to write for you, and no such device is going to have anything but the most banal suggestions you would accept (I mean, even the most elite of us make the occasional typo, amirite?).

Many people (most, really) hate writing. It's just difficult, for the same reason that you probably avoid, I dunno, dancing or public performance. People have different skills.

And people who hate writing and know they aren't that great at it still know that their email is likely to land in the inbox of a snob like you. So... they ask for help where they can get it.

To wit: be nice. You're letting your ego drive you to some unpleasant places. There's a fine line between chuckling at inappropriately-AI-enhanced communication and just being an asshole.

Plenty of people do, but that only produces a blog post that will get you to the front page of HN. If you want VCs to drop $40M on your head, you need to pretend to reinvent the world.

Then, to further appease the rain gods, you need to sue the bloggers on the front page of HN who are challenging your world-changing narrative. Which will, heh, drop you on the front page of HN.

Our community is, literally, eating itself at this point. There was a time when we actually took "make something people want" literally. Now it's just part of the fiction.

It would, but I'm not seeing that as a suggestion? That was a very clever side channel for hiding the build-time payload. It wasn't remotely the "root cause" of the exploit, which was that a malicious actor got write access to the release process of trusted software. I mean, if you can do that, you can surely find other clever ways to hide your junk.

To wit: you're not wrong, you're just stuck on minutiae. By all means make the case, but at best you're proposing a small constant factor optimization.

If I'm reading the secondarily-linked blog post correctly, this was live for 12 days before discovery.

Yeah... no. Sorry, that's a wild misunderstanding of the economics of the Linux ecosystem, modern libertarian thought and the employment status of people with write access to the packaging layers.

The bug here isn't that we need to better authenticate already-trusted upstreams for packages, it's that the upstreams cannot be trusted as the sole source for security at all. Upstreams are a bunch of hackers[1] who aren't really interested in, nor will ever be good at, solid release engineering practices.

But some people are! The solution in the Linux world (and the one that saved us from xz-utils) is that there is a second level of human beings responsible for reviewing, auditing, packaging, and customizing those hacker-generated upstreams for the benefit of their users. These people have different eyes, different consumer requirements and different quality metrics. And they catch bugs and malfesance that the upstreams aren't prepared to do.

NPM (and cargo/PyPI et. al.) continues to think it can short circuit this requirement for human labor. It can't.

[1] In NPM's particular ecosystem, a bunch of web jockeys used to extremely fast release processes, loose compatibility requirements, and extreme reliance on reuse. This really explains why we see this with node packages more than Python or Rust: older and more conservative programmers just don't have as many rakes to step on.

Indeed, AUR is bad as a software distribution mechanism (really it's best understood as a proving ground for baby packages before they get real maintainers and distro blessing), but it's less bad than NPM which puts the malware in the trusted/default/automated path.

I mean, sure, I can torrent a copy or whatever. But there's a point at which you just don't want to deal with that nonsense. ChromeOS is Linux, in all the ways I care to measure. But it codes as "not Linux" to all the corporate overlords afraid of the nerds and hippies, and that has value too.

If you must use windows, then you must use windows and you don't have a choice. None of that has anything to do with the nonsense about Chromebooks not being "real computers" or whatever, that's just the rationalization you've decided on. Obviously they are real computers.

A Chromebook is a first class consumer device backed by a Big Threatening Tech Giant that works on all sites everywhere because no one wants to piss off Google. And it's still Linux and runs great. I'll take it.

Well... yeah. Likewise your post is clearly about your needs, which are different. But that's not what you said, you said it "wasn't a computer" and you couldn't use it "like a normal computer". Which is obviously wrong. But I guess "normal computer" means "windows" to you, which (especially given the forum you posted on!) is a little surprising.

So what you wrote (but apparently not meant) seemed mistaken to me, thus the correction. But if you want windows then just buy windows. Your market is well served.

As a data point: I'm 100% converted personally. A Chromebook is what goes into my backpack and the device I use for all my general day-to-day UI clickery, and it's a better fit for my needs than Windows (not nearly as bad as it used to be but still sort of a PITA to make work as a Linux-focused dev environment) or Linux (not nearly as much of a PITA for a connected consumer network device but still has the occasional wart trying to get something weird to run).