I think there’s massive untapped demand for things like mini city cars and kei trucks.

Not just that, but even the more middle ground small cars. I'd love to have an EV truck sized the way they were in the 80's/90's (which was more or less comparable to a midsize sedan, just taller). The push to bigger and bigger wheelbases to take advantage of loopholes in the efficiency standards really doesn't need to be reflected in EVs, but it's what all the major automakers are doing.

It's worth clarifying this to "non-consensual", since "ending genital mutilation of children" is the drum pounded by the anti-trans movement.

Nah, these accusations of racism from a company owned by an Apartheid era South African emerald mine heir are too racist.

Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive.

This is factually untrue. For example, Stable Diffusion models are in the range of 2GB to 8GB, trained on a set of 5.85 billion images. If it was storing the images, that would allow approximately 1 byte for each image, and there are only 256 possibilities for a single byte. Images are downloaded as part of training the model, but they're eventually "destroyed"; the model doesn't contain them at all, and it doesn't need to refer back to them to generate new images.

It's absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images, but the product of training is a model that doesn't contain any of the original images.

None of that is to say that there is absolutely no valid copyright claim, but it seems like either option is pretty bad, long term. AI generated content is going to put a lot of people out of work and result in a lot of money for a few rich people, based off of the work of others who aren't getting a cut. That's bad.

But the converse, where we say that copyright is maintained even if a work is only stored as weights in a neural network is also pretty bad; you're going to have a very hard time defining that in such a way that it doesn't cover the way humans store information and integrate it to create new art. That's also bad. I'm pretty sure that nobody who creates art wants to have to pay Disney a cut because one time you looked at some images they own.

The best you're likely to do in that situation is say it's ok if a human does it, but not a computer. But that still hits a lot of stumbling blocks around definitions, especially where computers are used to create art constantly. And if we ever hit the point where digital consciousness is possible, that adds a whole host of civil rights issues.

Apple cider vinegar in a bowl with a drop of dish soap will be a lot more effective.

No, it's catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber, the thing that keeps the squishy humans inside separate from the tons-per-square-inch of water outside.

The pilot may not have been, although anyone described as an "explorer" is pretty likely to be wealthy. Three of the other four (including the CEO) were, and the last was one of the billionaire's 19 year old son.

Edit: Checked, the pilot (Paul-Henri Nargeolet) was also a billionaire.

If it was actually them, I'd guess they were banging on the titanium end cap.

I'm wondering if this is something he explicitly asked them to do, or if this is something the "Elon management team" put in to keep him happy while they try to get their fundamentally flawed system to work in reality.

There are reports that acoustic systems picked up banging noises at 30 minute intervals. Until I heard that, I was convinced it had imploded. Now I'm not so sure, and it'll only be worse if they aren't rescued. Implosion would at least have been fast.

The lack of an emergency transponder is their biggest problem, followed shortly after by the inability to exit without outside help (which is literally what killed the Apollo 1 crew over 50 years ago). Next up, as pointed out in another thread, is that the sub is made of extremely brittle materials because that makes it lighter. Honestly, using off the shelf components for the controls doesn't worry me nearly as much as those other issues.

I have no idea if they actually had spares, but there's something to be said for having three $30 off the shelf parts over one $200 custom part, provided that failure isn't immediately catastrophic.