nucleative

"A company cannot disrupt itself" - Clayton Christensen

Toyota has mastered precision replicable production of internal combustion engines and related components.

This has been Toyota's perpetual money tree. I'm sure the reward systems inside Toyota management favor those who improve it and protect it.

I'm sure at first they laughed at these pipsqueak EV guys with software backgrounds.

Toyota engineers who propose and work on alternative fuels, like ammonia, are probably not laughed out of the room - which is also full of other career internal combustion engineers.

This applies to me. GPT4 increases the speed of simple tasks significantly.

I needed a WordPress plugin but I'm not a WordPress developer and it's been a while since I spent much time in PHP. Ultimately I don't have time to come up to speed on this and I just want the plugin now.

I wrote a ChatGPT prompt explaining the plugin in great detail, and it responded with the entire plugin. I installed it and it worked on the first try. I went back and forth for a few iterations to adjust things like css and button titles and now it's running on a live site.

Had I assigned the project to someone else, I'd still have needed to write the "prompt" and I'm not sure it would have saved me any time.

I hate that you're right. And almost all of us will eventually be that customer with a problem someday.

>It (OceanGate) added that the classification agencies "slowed down innovation… bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation".

As a private pilot who is considering building a kit aircraft, this is certainly true. It can be exceedingly expensive to prove safety standards have been met for new designs, which is why so few new certified aircraft are on the market and old designs are so expensive. This leads to the whole industry slowing to a crawl. But that absolutely doesn't mean safety standards haven't been met with new designs.

However, if I build a kit plane, the FAA will require it be emblazoned "Experimental" and commercial activity - such as paying passengers - is forbidden.

I hope the paying customers of this sub were well aware of the level of risk they were taking.

All that being said, I'm supportive of anyone's right to go and build a contraption that may end their life, so long as they don't take anybody or anyone else's property with them.

Pretty much. With blackjack and hookers...

Before the web 2.0 style social networks we had community forums, frequently run on phpBB or some other BBS forum tool (before that Usenet, before that... actual dialup BBS systems).

My point is that while most were not profit driven, the VC profit models of myspace, Facebook, et al. attracted massive investment that enabled a much wider reach and therefore a superior network effect and accessibility. Suddenly you could tweet at your favorite celebrities or businesses and they might respond, and in many cases we found this a fair trade for occasional advertising.

From what I can see the advantage of Lemmy is that you can use the same login across multiple forums that are independently operated with minimal central control, and you can take your reputation with you as you move between forums. Hypothetically, like the old days, some could be profit driven while others are fully community supported.

This model does seem to offer many advantages, so long as they can continue to match the accessibility and performance of the centralized social networks.

The subreddits with the most focused discussions are often those with just a few thousand subs. Perhaps the tipping point is around 10k users... when conversations become much less personal.

I bought a Quest 2 over the holidays to see what the state of the technology is. Usually I am more at the bleeding edge with all tech but this genre never really seemed interesting until recently.

I am impressed, the technology is developed far enough that you can lose yourself into the virtual worlds. But that is also a problem, as I'd rather not "lose myself" by disconnecting from reality too often.

The experience isn't casual enough because you need to make time and physical space and then check out of your first reality.

There is a popular game called BeatSaber which is an innovative demonstration of what VR can do and a way to burn time, but it's by no means a killer app that warrants the start up expense.

More interesting from a utility perspective is app called VRChat that puts you inside a virtual house, or lounge, or a club or something and you can talk to other people's avatars as if you are sharing the same room. This could be really interesting for long term relationships and socializing (for example, to play chess together), but I can see why nobody would fire this up when you could zoom call.

I have doubts as well that this tech can ever be more than a medium sized niche.