Putting people on projects they’re only partly qualified for, ideally with mentoring, and letting them learn even though it takes longer than having the mentor do it by themselves. Allowing people to fail and try again without risking their ratings or their career.

Book subscriptions and conference travel are quite cheap in comparison.

Even if it is fiction it is certainly possible for Google to get people into serious trouble by blocking their accounts.

Then let’s discuss those real stories, not someone’s Reddit fake posts with crucial details that make it a very different story (all linked accounts got banned)

There are very few purely capitalistic countries. All countries that I can think of use taxes and regulations to influence market equilibrium. „letting the market figure it out“ is usually the political expression for „I like the current state better than what the opposition proposed“.

Undefined behavior is worse than complicated defined behavior imo.

To be fair, Germany and Japan started the whole thing and were pretty determined not to lose easily.

It is my understanding that it always was about „rockets are good for dropping bombs on people“.

Well, I highly doubt that the kind of rockets they are developing for Lunar and Mars missions will be mich better, if any better at all, than current ballistic missiles armies around the world already have. Those space rockets are huge and meant to more or less safely carry people over a long distance in space. Warheads are meant to carry explosives while also being hard to detect or stop. I'm no rocket scientist, but I believe that huge space rockets would defeat the purpose, as they would consume a lot of fuel for nothing, while also being much easier to spot and stopped by shooting something at them.

So I think the opposite: we are way past the point of space exploration being directly useful for weapons.

The point now isn’t having better rockets for (ballistic) missiles, since satellites became a thing the game has been infrastructure. Future (hypothetical) missions to the moon and mars might not be for military research purposes directly, but the infrastructure that both needs to be and now can be set up to support those missions will absolutely be co-opted for military purposes.

The race is now to bootstrap your nation’s permanent presence in space, because at the moment there is a first mover opportunity for what is slowly but surely becoming just another frontier for economics, geopolitics, etc. to play out over (granted this is already happening, I suppose I’m talking about a step change in scale).

Well, it never hurts to be prepared for the war against Europaeans (aliens from Europa, satellite of Jupiter).

You can’t verify that there is no influence by the makers of Claude.

I would certainly expect everyone to assume that influence rather than not.

There is a bit about this in Greg Egan‘s Disspora, where a parallel is drawn between maths and art. It is not difficult to automate art in the sense that you can enumerate all possible pictures, but it takes sentient input to find the beautiful areas in the problem space.

I do not think this parallel works, because I think you would struggle to find a discipline for which this is not the case. It is trivial to enumerate all the possible scientific or historical hypothesis, or all the possible building blueprints, or all the possible programs, or all the possible recipes, or legal arguments…

The fact that the domain of study is countable and computable is obvious because humans can’t really study uncountable or uncomputable things. The process of doing anything at all can always be thought of as narrowing down a large space, but this doesn’t provide more insight than the view that it’s building things up.

Korea had the advantage of like seventy years of technological advancement from the first nuclear bomb.

Soviets figured it out in a couple years after we did, very much planning to keep it out of the soviets hands the whole time.

You can use old hardware.

Yeah, but it won't be cheap or easily repairable. And they don't make them anymore.