I work at Twitter and this article is nonsense. Yes, he is cutting costs, but there is no problem with the bathrooms that I've ever seen. Can't believe no one here is questioning this. I thought people on HN were smarter than this. Disappointing.
Because depending on how you look at it, Twitter suspending Trump (and Babylon Bee et cetera) was part of the motivation for Musk to buy Twitter in the first place.
I don’t think Elon has or ever has had any affinity for Trump. He left his advisor (or something of that nature) spot in the administration quite early on for a reason.
Speaking from experience. The last Apple display I bought was a 2008 24" LED Cinema Display. I paid $900. 14 years later, I'm still using it. It works perfectly, albeit it is very dated. Last year I thought an Samsung 32" 4K to replace it and it died within 2 weeks of having it.
I bought an Apple Studio Display the day they went on sale. Why? Because I'm expecting it to last me a minimum of 8 years. And it probably will.
On another note, listening to YouTube "influencers" is no better than believing a company's marketing team. Think for yourself and go by your gut.
I agree, Apple products tend to have much better reliability and durability.
Samsung in particular has terrible reliability. From TVs to kitchen appliances—everything I have ever owned Samsung has something go wrong with it within 2 years. Monitors from LG and Asus typically last a decade or more if take care of, though their build quality and quality control are certainly not up to the Apple standard.
With all that said, MKHD is a pretty good reviewer of tech and usually is very favorable towards Apple. He has some fair criticisms here. The Apple Studio Monitor is not a great “value” at $1,600, but he doesn’t say it is a bad product, just a hard product to justify buying. I know I would have a hard time justifying it despite loving the build quality and design.
I have to strongly disagree here. I own a Surface Book 3 and an M1 MacBook Air. There is no comparison. The Surface track pad is better than most Windows laptops, but not on par with a MacBook.
You're making a lot of assumptions here and basing it on the limited knowledge of a specifies that has failed to make any significant strides into exploring anything other than its own solar system.
There's an easy answer that coincides with our current understanding of physics. Then there is "Aliens have discovered tech that makes it easier for them to fling a half mile long object vs a satellite sized object across the stars at a relatively slow speed."
Sorry if I take "explosion makes rock go far" as being the more plausible explanation than "Aliens want to wait a million years for a brief glimpse at a distant solar system".
It's not the size/volume that matters, but the mass. Even with our limited science and technology, we have designs for interplanetary ships that drag hundreds of meters of radiator surface with them. It's not hard to imagine - and it has been imagined many times - a ship that consists of a core with a gigawatt-range powerplant, reaction mass, efficient engines, and kilometer-long radiators to dump the powerplant heat into space. If anything, based on our knowledge and assuming no magitech breakthroughs in space propulsion, you should expect interstellar ships to be large but light, maximizing surface area while minimizing mass.
To be fair, there is no need for the probe to have been designed for a mission to our star system. It could be that it was a craft meant for something else entirely that left its star system, like our Voyager probes have, and drifted for eons before happening to pass through our star system and be observed.
Of course, that is still less likely than some unusual rock doing the same thing.
Sure, just a bunch of energy for such a large object. "To see if they can" may very well be a reason, but that doesn't seem likely for a species that advances far enough to be able to accomplish such an achievement.
> Sorry if I take "explosion makes rock go far" as being the more plausible explanation than "Aliens want to wait a million years for a brief glimpse at a distant solar system".
Playing Devil's advocate, a probe that size would likely visit many star systems, the Solar being a random one in the bunch. The brief pass would be necessary to avoid the energy expenditure of braking and reaccelerating.
Can it be proven that there's not a teapot in the asteroid belt?
Extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence. A massive rock being hurled to by a supernova to our solar system is far more likely than advanced aliens dumping a ton of future tech to get this huge thing into our solar system for a split second.
Why? Because, it would cost a lot of energy, something I doubt an advanced race would spend. Further, an advanced race that wants to probe us wouldn't need such a huge object, it's far easier to observe from a far (think, james webb telescope but better). Sure, hard to know what aliens are thinking, but it just seems incredibly unlikely they are thinking "Let's build this half mile long space probe for a glimpse of a distant solar system and send it off for a million year journey".
A star exploding and sending a bunch of mass our direction is far more likely. Why? because we know that happens relatively frequently.
> it would cost a lot of energy, something I doubt an advanced race would spend.
While I agree with your overall conclusion, I don't see that we have any evidence that as a race progresses technologically, they spend less energy. The opposite seems to be true.
I can't prove it's not an alien probe, no. But I can't prove it's a piece of space debris that just wandered through, either, so why not assume that too?
The problem with "can't disprove" being used as evidence is that you need to consider the full universe of statements that we "can't disprove", but humans tend to think as if "alien probe" is a privileged statement simply because it is cognitively appealing and drives our imagination. If you put it on a list of the things we can't disprove about this particular object, it wouldn't really be the most likely one you'd find.
On the flip side, you also ought to consider the question of all the objects for which we can't disprove they are alien probes. It isn't just this particular object; the solar system is filled with millions of objects we can't disprove are alien space probes, things we've labelled as "asteroids" based on a streak someone took a picture of once. Apply the same standard to all of them that is applied to this object; does it now claim that the solar system is just filled to the brim with alien space probes? Probably not good logic.
Personally, I can't wait until we improve our detection a bit and detect another several dozen things like this object so we can get over this and real science stories can be written about these objects again. Guess this is a taste of what reading about pulsars must have been in the first few years.
My point is, have you read the book and can you specifically point to why his theory is wrong? I'm not saying he is right, but I think if you are going to cut him down, be specific about why he is wrong.
