It means shrewd.

E.g. we should keep our wits about us when someone is making big hyperbolic claims about LLM that they directly benefit from, because maybe they have a motive to mislead either themselves, or us

Almost every endeavour has non-zero potential future utility - even as a counterexample or lesson to learn from. I think that definition of "useful" is probably too broad to make an argument against, and so not a useful definition.

She writes as a VC (I think?) where her job is to allocate capital for shorter-term "useful" (read: profitable) outcomes.

If you mean it's not outbound as in it can't message arbitrary random users out of nowhere, well yeah, and that's a very desirable trait.

Your other potential buyers are malware distributors and scammers, who usually want a vuln that has some staying power (e.g. years of exploitability). This one is pretty clearly time-limited once it becomes apparent.

So no, I don't think persistence-through-time is a good metric. Probably better to look at cyclomatic complexity, and maybe for a given code path or module or class hierarchy, how many calls it makes within itself vs to things outside the hierarchy - some measure of how many files you need to jump between to understand it

Which these stem cells, if they pan out, very specifically fix

DNA is the ultimate demoscene exe

I think your position is based on very cynical premises. There is no reason to assume with high confidence that humans will obliterate each other in that next 50 years (especially if we do something about one of the major stressors causing conflict)

There is also no reason to believe that reducing greenhouse gas emissions over 15-20 years will cause "more" damage than the worst impacts of climate change? Can you cite sources on this claim?

It is still possible to mitigate the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change.

I don't recall Hiro's motorcycle being much a part of the story, it might also have had the smartwheels but isn't discussed until later...