I don't really have a strong opinion on the letter because I agree with a few of the comments that the cat is kind of out of the bag. Even if we don't reach AGI, however you want to define it, I think we are headed for something existential, so I'm both skeptical of letters like this ability to work and sympathetic to the need to focus on the issue it's attempting to address.
So with that said, I find the "what about existing AI problems" and especially the "I don't like Musk comments" annoying. The current issues aren't as severe as what we could be facing in the not too distant future, and Musk is pretty tangential to that concern.
If the price difference is justified, I can't argue with a refurb. Most of my purchases from Dell (mainly laptops, a couple monitors) in the past 10+ years have been refurbs from the outlet. On a sale, about 20-30% discount over new, and they are essentially like-new with full warranties, etc. Never really had a problem except one laptop that was a little wonky at hte start, but got fixed and went on to last 7 years.
If someone is offering me $50 off a $800 device that has been "seller refurbished" , yeah, I'm just gonna buy new.
Scratch gets a lot of hate with semi-experienced programmers (the kind to browse this sub) because of its simplicity, but it's actually really good. It teaches you basic programming concepts without all of the complexity of other programming languages.
I remember back in school, some of the students in my computer science classes didn't understand the basic concepts of programming: variables, loops, functions, etc. and programming is 90% logic and problem-solving.
You can't teach programming by teaching the syntax of a language, you have to teach logic. If you know one language, figuring out another is going to be easy because most of the things are the same, the only difference is the syntax.
How do you define "consistent"? Consistent with what? Because at the moment it looks like it's using completely other terminology than the VCS I am used to.
Some software is not worth paying for to use. But other services might.
Look at nextcloud: they wouldn’t have been anywhere near as big if they weren’t open source. Very few people would pay for the product but instead users now provide pull requests and improve the product. Meanwhile they make money now through enterprise support and specific plugins they provide for business.
Probably an unpopular opinion, and I realize I'm kind of ranting on a relatively unrelated subject, but I have become really dissuaded with the Node ecosystems dependence on seemingly boundless dependency trees. The fact that Window's file system can't handle moving project directories (without deleting the node_modules), and relatively simple projects using megabytes of raw text to work... anyways.
While I understand that you don't want to re-invent the wheel, it seems like the this is an important enough part of your project that your own implementation would be the only one without compromises.
The whole metaverse thing has felt like a buzzword-without-meaning that was never going to live up to the hype (at least in any meaningful good way), but still sucks for the people losing the jobs.
I don’t think I could comfortably switch to only EV cars. I think I still need a gasoline car with my Tesla. However, both of cars are similar size and mileage. One uses electricity, the other uses premium gas, as a result… round trip from work, one will cost ~$6 dollars in electricity, whereas the other is ~$15 dollars. Plus there are still some trips we do frequently where there are zero charging station for miles so having a gas car does help
I am personally doubtful. The problem with BABA is that it is a variable interest entity (VIE) listed in the Cayman Island that means shareholders are technically owners of shell company rather than the Chinese enterprises that they they think they are buying.
I also think the divisions are worth less apart then together as retail has no margins, cloud and entertainment are overcrowded, and logistics is highly competitive.
The charging issue and grid use is a massively overblown problem. You only need to charge your car for a few hours every 300 miles. Nowhere near everyone is always charging all the time.
Renewables and stored heat batteries will cover night/low wind loads. Geothermal in the north.
Public transit options will continue to improve, electrified bikes make them an even more viable alternative.
We’re a clever group of people. The oil drilling to gas available on every fourth corner in the country system is vastly more complex than installing chargers on light poles.