If you enjoy the podcast or the newsletters, I do recommend the Discord (https://discord.gg/oddlots) - the folks there are generally very smart and it is a great place to discuss everything from the economy to climate to transportation to defense.
Very smart people on discord sounds like an oxymoron: why would anyone very smart contribute to the siloization of knowledge and support grow a corporate entity possessing highly questionable incentives? Discord is not a great place to discuss anything of substance.
If that's not clear to some now, it will be once monetization kicks in and the inevitable blowup and loss of accumulated knowledge follows.
You're using Discord to describe the same thing that could easily be applied to any social network.
Yes, it's borne of teenagers and gaming, but for all it's dark corners it's just the modern IRC. There are good servers, there are bad servers, there are servers full of idiots and there are servers full of very smart people.
(and we're way past monetisation kicking in, the first paid options launched almost 10 years ago)
> why would anyone very smart contribute to the siloization of knowledge and support grow a corporate entity possessing highly questionable incentives
Some smart people aren't as concerned with knowledge siloization as other smart people. I'm sure if you went to their Discord and suggested an alternative platform with the same popularity and feature set they'd at least hear you out.
We’ve always been responsible for design and validation. Nothing has changed there.
It’s funny how the vibe coding story insists we shouldn’t look at the code details but when it’s pointed out the bots can’t deal with a “messy” (but validated) foundation, the story changes that we have to refactor that.
If you want to dig more, I suspect Microsoft got a lot (if not all) of it from blackshark.ai . They're one of the companies whose logo shows up during game start.
I knew their name because, when I worked for an Airbus subsidiary, we talked with them about a solution to generate 3D environments for any/every airport.
They had some cool stuff but also some wonky stuff at the time (like highway overpasses actually being rendered as walls across the highway).
blackshark.ai was used for generating building models with textured facades from footprints. Their thing for generating airports was actually not used in MSFS. The photogrammetry from satellite photos in MSFS 2024 was done by Maxar Technologies.
My side-project is working on addons, so I spend a lot of time with Flight Simulator.
2020 didn't have the photogrammetry from satellite photos, only from aerial photos in major cities. The blackshark buildings are used wherever they don't have any photogrammetry available.
Come now - you really believe that Elon saw DOGE as a good faith effort to cut costs in the government?
For someone with such a vaunted intelligence, he was either dumb or complicit. "Working things out from first principles" would have had him leave after the very first step.
> 2009, renowned artist Ai Weiwei published an image of himself nude with only a 'Caonima' hiding his genitals, with a caption "草泥马挡中央" (cǎonímǎ dǎng zhōngyāng; 'a Grass Mud Horse covering the center'. One interpretation of the caption is: "fuck your mother, Communist Party Central Committee"). Political observers speculated that the photo may have contributed to Ai's arrest in 2011 by angering Chinese Communist Party hardliners.
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