“Lucky Number 7” is a common phrase, there was even a popular movie that played on this, “Lucky Number Slevin” (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0425210/). It’s one of the first numbers I’d think of as a “lucky number.”

Flakiest trains I’ve experienced anywhere in Europe were in Italy - rolling strikes among train workers are crazy frequent and cause so many delays and cancellations.

Where arrays and objects just look too similar (IMO), white space is significant, most strings are unquoted, etc. And personally I find it quite difficult to really understand what’s going on there, at a glance, compared to JSON (or JSON5).

When dealing with large YAML files, I find myself frequently popping them into online “YAML to JSON” tools to actually figure out WTF is going on. JSON5 is much easier to read, at least for me.

The Guardian are certainly a left-leaning, frequently political paper, but that doesn’t mean every story is political, and IMO this one isn’t.

Ultimately, the American legal system is pretty broken. If someone brings a frivolous lawsuit against you, and you defend yourself in court, nearly 100% of the time you’ll be losing money, often a lot of money. This is the core reason why patent trolls exist, why companies normally settle out of court - it’s cheaper to do so.

I have worked on software where individual customers pay millions for it, but not billions, and it’s also not a physical thing that can literally crash into earth or fly off into space if something goes wrong!

> Safemode is the satellite equivalent of a blue screen of death.

It’s about avoiding safemode, and more generally about the end-to-end QA/testing process for satellites before they’re sent up into orbit. It’s very clearly not about actual Windows BSODs, it’s just written in a tongue-in-cheek style. Those commenting about “wtf windows on a spacecraft” clearly didn’t read the article, just read the title.

FWIW I found the writing style engaging and the content interesting. I guess the title is a little click-bait-y, but not in a way that I minded much, and I probably wouldn’t have read an article titled “How to avoid safemode on a satellite.” It’s a fine line, but titles DO have to draw you in, otherwise you’ll never read the article.

Re: the article itself, I did think it was pretty wild that customers have to be informed of every incident where a satellite flips into safemode in TESTING! In real operations, sure, but in testing, that’s wild. Feels like having to report bugs caught in my local dev environment, that were never deployed to prod.

I would’ve agreed until recently. I always found basically all other forms of testing valuable (unit tests of almost everything on the BE, unit tests of FE business logic, BE integration tests, E2E tests), but not testing of the visual elements of the FE.

But the company I work at, ~6 months ago we gave this product a try, and honestly it’s pretty incredible: https://www.meticulous.ai/

They basically record sessions of real usage in our staging environment, and then replay them against your branch, like taking all the same interactions, and mocking responses to all network calls. It records tonnes of these sessions and is very smart about which ones it uses for a given change. It flags any visual differences, and you can OK them (or not). There’s a bit of work to initially integrate, but then you don’t write any tests, and you get pretty amazing coverage. It has the odd false positives, but not many, and they’re easy to review/approve in their web UI. They’re also a small startup willing to work super closely with you (we share a Slack chat with them, they’re very open to feedback and iterating quickly on it).

I swear I’m not a paid shill or affiliated with them in any way, just a user who really loves the product. I was skeptical it’d work well at first, but it’s honestly been great, has caught many potential regressions, I feel we’re getting much better coverage than we would with handwritten UI tests. It’s very worth a look IMO if you’re not satisfied with your visual tests. It’s not an E2E testing tool, because the network requests are recorded/replayed (so it can’t stop BE changes that break the FE), but it’s amazing for testing so many elements of the FE.

Amazon is one of the most famous successes of the era. Bezos quit his job, launched the business out of his garage, with seed money being $10K of his own savings, and was doing $20K/week in sales just 30 days later. And I believe their only VC round before going public was an $8 investment from Kleiner Perkins. But they were a company who proved their viability early on, had a real product with rapid revenue growth before getting any VC $$.

I’d say this SSI round is more similar to Webvan, who went public with a valuation of $4.8 billion, and at that time had done a grand total of $395K in sales, with losses over $50 million.

I’m sure there are good investments out there for AI companies that are doing R&D and advancing the state of the art. However, a $1 billion investment at a $5 billion valuation, for a company with zero product or revenue, just an idea, that’s nuts IMO, and extremely similar to the type of insanity we saw during the dot com bubble. Even more so given that SSI seemingly don’t even want to be a business - direct quote from Ilya:

> This company is special in that its first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then … It will be fully insulated from the outside pressures of having to deal with a large and complicated product and having to be stuck in a competitive rat race.

This doesn’t sound to me like someone who wants to build a business, it sounds like someone who wants to hack on AI with no oversight or proof of financial viability. Kinda wild to give him $1 billion to do that IMO.