That does not match my understanding of fair use at all.

>Anything that depends on the messy world of human - world interactions will require humans in the loop for translation and verification purposes.

I really don't see why that would necessarily be true. Any task that can be done by a human with a keyboard and a telephone is at risk of being done by an AI - and that includes the task of "translation and verification".

Sure, but at the risk of running into completely unforeseen and potentially catastrophic misunderstandings. We humans are wired to use human language to interact with other humans, who share our human experience, which AIs can only imperfectly model.

I have to say I don't feel this huge shared experience with many service industry workers. Especially over the phone. We barely speak the same language!

> Any task that can be done by a human with a keyboard and a telephone

The power doesn’t stay on solely from people with keyboards and phones.

Yeah, the ability of chess engines to play like a human of a given rating is a pretty recent development.

And it's still a constant complaint that Stockfish suggests moves that no human could really play and follow up correctly.

I remember being a high paid techie getting 19 hours of paid work done between Melbourne and New York, on a laptop in economy (and a long layover in LAX due to a storm). It was fricking glorious, most productive day of my life.

How did you run your laptop for 19 hours in economy class without a power plug? Not even M-series MacBooks last that long.

I mentioned the layover in LAX. Also including an hour or two before takeoff.

Boy that "st" ligature in the subheading font is eye-catching, to the point of distraction.

There's a lot of it in the article. Very distracting, I just didn't know what to call it (I searched for 'tail' before posting my own comment).

Indeed totally unbearable to even read the article

Agreed. I thought it was weird on the ct ligature on something like the second sub heading and the next one had a st ligature. I stopped reading the article and was just scanning for st ligatures in the text itself (there are none) and then realised the main font was a less legible serif font and the headings that were bigger and shorter were sans serif which makes the ct and st ligatures stand out even more.

I didn't read any more of the article after that, and the primary reason was just this weird font choice.

I stopped reading the article because of it.

I will definitely credit Elon with building a company that made reusable self-landing rockets seem routine and boring. That was definitely "impossible".

Pretty much everything else though is just vapourware.

First new car company in America in IDK how many years and first popular electric car in the world doesn't seem hard to you?

I guess everything is relative and I'm well informed on everything but no, "first new car company in America in a long time" doesn't leap out as a wildly difficult challenge in a time of great innovation. It was followed a couple of years later by Rivian.

First popular electric car...maybe hindsight helps, but it was kind of a matter of time with battery technology improving, although certainly they did a very good job.

Both difficult, for sure, but not quite as mind-blowingly impossible sounding as reusing a rocket dozens of times. To me.

> That was definitely "impossible".

It was impossible in the sense that nobody else did it before. It was not impossible as in you need to violate basic laws of Physics or elementary Economics.

Before reusable rockets, the idea made sense. Building a rocket is expensive; if we reuse we don’t have to keep spending that money. Fundamentally, rockets are rockets. It’s not like they invented anti-gravity or anything.

It’s like climbing the Everest. Before it was done, it was still something people could plan and prepare for. But you’re not going to climb all the way to the moon, even with oxygen bottles. It’s a completely different problem to solve.

The most difficult point to argue against for people who want to defend Musk’s delusions is simple economics: at the end of the day, when you’ve solved

- the energy source problem (difficult but probably doable);

- the radiation-resistant chips issue (we know we can do it, but the resulting chip is not going be anywhere near as fast as normal GPUs on Earth);

- the head dissipation problem (physically implausible, to be charitable, with current GPUs, but considering that a space-GPU would have a fraction of the power, it would just be very difficult);

- the satellite-to-satellite communication issue, because you cannot put the equivalent of a rack on a satellite, so you’d need communication to be more useful than a couple of GeForces (sure, lasers, but then that’s additional moving parts, it’s probably doable but still a bit of work);

- the logistics to send 1 million satellites (LOL is all I can say, that’s a fair number of orders of magnitude larger than what we can do, and a hell of a lot of energy to do it);

- and all the other tiny details, such as materials and logistics just to build the thing.

Then, you still end up with something which is orders of magnitude worse and orders of magnitude more expensive than what we can already do today on Earth. There is no upside.

(creator here)

Yeah, there's a lot of interesting administrative quirks like that throughout the database. And there are kind of interesting details about exactly which types of trees are catalogued. Generally the data I've been finding and incorporating is where every tree has been individually planted, managed, catalogued.

There also occasionally exist data about natural bushland that has also been audited, but sometimes also bushland that has been sort of described in aggregate.

And then there are datasets of significant trees only (as opposed to every tree within a given park/roadside...).

I wish there were datasets of trees on private land too - they'd be much more useful for ecology etc.

Falling Fruit actually uses some code derived from OpenTrees, although massively improved.

Oh, hi! I was just trying to figure out why there was suddenly a bunch of data source suggestions.

Is it "dead"? Hmm. It's complicated. It's true the data hasn't been updated in a long time. The biggest issue is that most of the data sources that were present on OpenTrees are no longer online.

So if I do a fresh harvest and rebuild, a lot of that data will disappear, which is a bit sad.

I'm in two minds about what to do, and have been for a long time.

So, it's not "dead", it's just very indecisive.

Ah yeah, that's a tough position to be in. Perhaps keep the old data but flag it as stale somehow?

Could also be cool to try to somehow load some of this data into OpenStreetMap -- then if the sources go away, local mappers can potentially pick up the torch.

I actually really appreciate the honesty of this. Much better than undue confidence.