Charlie Stross

@rook @techtakes The real problem would be persuading Gwynne Shotwell to stay on as COO/President in event of nationalization. (I know nothing about her politics but she’s the one who got SpaceX the NASA contracts and ramped Falcon 9 up to being the global launch superpower. If she’s a personal friend of Elon a takeover that pushes her out could cause chaos.)

@V0ldek @techtakes Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd’s/_of/_London

@pikesley @Soyweiser @fullsquare IIRC the coordination problem afflicts all engineering disciplines: with large tech projects like the LHC and ITER, costs scale as something like the fourth power of the energies they’re working with, and a large part of the reason is that managing the project is insanely difficult. I’d love to see some numbers for how the management complexity of large software projects (eg. operating systems, LLMs) compares to this.

@nightsky @techtakes Back when I was in software dev I had the privilege of working with a couple of superprogrammers (not at the same company, many years apart). They probably wrote *less* code: it was just qualitatively far, far more elegant and effective. And they were fast, too.