There are options that don't involve forcing everybody to prove their age and provide ID verification to access social media

I expect radial will still dominate for at least another decade or so outside of premium performance focused cars. Radial has been battle-tested and proven. Axial still has a few more years to prove it's reliability in the field. Higher loads and stresses, tighter tolerances could make the axial motors less reliable overall especially at mass market trims. Mercedes is probably over-engineering for reliability and performance on the premium car

Radial is also "good enough" for most applications. The efficiency, form factor and weight improvements of axial is nice, but they aren't the limiting factor. Radial is already highly efficient, reasonably light and small. The real level for weight is the battery

If you look at SpaceX plans and ambitions, they hope to deploy massive compute to orbit (multiple Terrawatts, hundreds of thousands of sats). If their ambitions even slightly materialise it would make ground based compute pale in comparison.

Whether or not they succeed in their plans is beside the point - the point is they know that terrestrial electric infra can't sustain the growth they need

Huge gamble - If they pull it off I wouldn't be surprised if other companies follow

I'm just a software engineer, all I need to know is SpaceX is aggressively pursuing this - that's enough for me to believe it's viable

SpaceX operates literally orders of magnitudes more satellites than anyone else. If anybody understands the physics and engineering of space compute, it's SpaceX. Lay people debating this online is just showing their ignorance as far as I'm concerned, and it mostly comes from an emotional place of wanting Musk enterprises to fail

and yet now we have far bigger rooms with far bigger computers anyway

Hardware may improve exponentially, but demand for compute increases double-exponentially. we'll always need more, bigger computers

What they want is the massive user base, the data (Cursor has a lot of high quality coding data for training), the teams expertise in coding models and agents, and the Composer models

60 billion is a large number but these frontier labs are burning billions a month in compute alone, and SpaceX is IPOing soon so they'll have a lot of cash to spend

Getting the most out of LLM tooling is a real skill that needs practice just like any other

"mass" is a strong word but the first one came off their production line 5 days ago

ramp to high volume will probably be extremely slow

Several companies, most notably Tesla, have done this well enough to drive in all manner of traffic. I'm not going to comment about if lidar is strictly needed or not to achieve better-than-human safety, that's yet to be proven one way or another by anyone. The point is that cameras + local inference can do a pretty good job at distance estimation