1) You are right and its impressive if he can use AI to bootstrap becoming a farmer

2) Regardless, I think it proves a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident.

The AI may be truly informative, or it may hallucinate, or it may simply give mundane, basic advice. Probably all 3 at times. But the fact that it's there ready to assert things without hesitation gives people so much more confidence to act.

You even see it with basic emails. Myself included. I'm just writing a simple email at work. But I can feed it into AI and make some minor edits to make it feel like my own words and I can just dispense with worries about "am i giving too much info, not enough, using the right tone, being unnecessarily short or overly greating, etc." And its not that the LLMs are necessarily even an authority on these factors - it simply bypasses the process (writing) which triggers these thoughts.

  Good point. AI is already making regular Joes into software engineers.

I'm surprised they made critical material purchasing decisions based on what some guy thinks he heard in a meeting, rather than official written documents written by and cross-checked by multiple engineers.

I disagree. I once had someone say that if you were to smash an iphone into tiny tiny pieces and put it into a plastic bag and shake it, given enough time, it would reassemble itself into a working iphone, the pieces randomly ending up where they need to be in order to operate like it did originally.

While it is technically possible for that to happen, the probability of the intricacies that make up the iphone's circuits and screen, the chemicals that make up the battery, etc, assembling themselves into a complete and working phone, even on an infinite timeline, is not that high. And it could, in theory, never actually happen, since if there is still time that you can move forward into, there's still the chance that the moment the iphone assembles itself into a working phone lies somewhere in the future, and always will. It could just never happen before the heat death of the universe.

Possibility does not guarantee probability.

That was only because Elon wanted to get his billion dollar payday.

I grew up in Alberta, too. Intellectually, I knew what a rat was but I'd never seen one in my life. After school, I moved down to California and was leaving work late one night (Sunnyvale, CA) and saw this crazy thing walking along the curb near my car. It was like a really small cat, or a huge mouse, or a short weasel with a long tail. There I was, all alone in the parking lot in the middle of the night shouting at this rat, "Hey! You're a RAT!"

The rat was not concerned by this.

There are conflicting systems in macOS at play here as a result of choosing the "Option" key as your "Meta" key. The basics of the Cocoa Emacs Keybindings (DefaultKeyBinding.dict) do allow for M-f/M-b/M-d to work as us Emacs users expect, however there is a conflict with the default US Keyboard Layout, which hijack these useful Option key sequences to allow for the easy input of letters with various diacritic markings. If you want to undo this, you can use a Keyboard Layout Editor like Ukelele[0] to make a custom layout that allows these key sequences to arrive unmolested at the Cocoa input system.

[0]: https://software.sil.org/ukelele/

So, just from the top of my head and rather recently:

1. the NSA lost all of its malwares/zero days to the Russians

2. The NSA lost a huge amount of documents detailing a large amount of their billion dollars sigint sources and tech catalog

3. China was able to steal US nuclear weapons design

4. The CIA itself lost its entire internal wiki

5. Top secret documents were on discord for over a month

Yet somehow these omnipotent organizations can keep the secret of how they killed the US president. Without a good answer as to what was their interest to do something so extreme in the first place