ElectronCharge

One is an objective measurement, the other is a completely subjective judgement.

As they say, there's no accounting for taste...

You're absolutely wrong on both points in my case.

I've driven many "real sports cars", and I'm not not just "posting numbers from the Tesla spec sheets", my Model Y is my daily driver.

Ironically, you're the one "projecting".

I've yet to have any issues with the battery overheating, and most if not all of the braking is regenerative (no brake pad wear).

By the way, the stock Corolla GR can pull right around .95 G, just like the Model Y Performance...

I also have an EV, probably the same one as the grandparent...a Tesla Model Y Dual Motor Long Range. It's rated at 0-60 in 4.8s. It also has good handling, with very little body lean through curves, and a lateral G force of around .85 G.

If I switched to the same tires as the Performance version, that would increase to .95 G. That is better than many legacy sports cars.

Those who love engine noise are the modern equivalent of those who, shortly after cars became mass-market, wanted them to include buggy whips. ;-)

This seems like a ton of hype for a marginal (if that) improvement over existing art.

We've had "truly random" numbers for a long time, starting with those based on radioactive decay.

Current hardware RNGs already take advantage of provably random physical processes. Intel's RDRAND implementation is one good example. Yes, it is probably not a "perfect" source of randomness, though one can always take other sources of entropy and mix further. Doing so will always move the output towards a more random state.

I find it unlikely in the extreme that some future tech will be able to "predict" values from such a random stream (like you could with a PRNG given the seed). In other words, your cyphertext based on a RDRAND+ generated one time pad is safe for eternity, unless the pad is compromised.

Most commenters here are focused on the Microsoft hardware, but the article mentions systems from several other manufacturers using the same hardware. Some of them, Dell and Lenovo in particular, have good Linux support.

Nvidia has also supported Linux well in general, so let's hope there's an attractive Linux option soon!

Personally I'd be just as happy with a small form factor desktop with the same hardware.

LOL! (And I haven't written that in a very long time...)

The article is delusional. In particular, these claims:

- The Iran war is over.

- Iran has "won" the war.

- The US has lost influence with Asian allies.

- The petrodollar is over.

- The US economy is weaker due to billionaires and the stock market.

It's especially laughable given the recent diplomacy with China.

I also predict a secular government is running Iran before the fall...

I'll have to take a look at OxCaml. I'm leery of "C-like" performance claims after Java has thoroughly failed to live up to a similar claim after thirty plus years of development... What it's actually achieved is about 50% C performance, IF you're willing to give it a huge heap, at least 2x the actually required memory.

Rust is clearly well positioned for deeply embedded work, and has actual C/C++ level performance. Given AI coding assistance, Rust is looking more and more approachable...and of course faster processors and compiler improvements will solve the compilation speed issue over time.

All that said, there's nothing wrong with a fast, safe language with ML syntax!

(One dark horse in all this is Mojo, which may provide Rust level safety with a more ergonomic language, and a much faster compiler...)

Illegal orders?

The disincentives to nuclear war are glaringly obvious enough that even politicians (and their masters) get it.

AI isn't like that. One problem is that it's rather generally misunderstood at this point. "AI" is not "intelligence". It's intelligence-adjacent, and something like LLMs is part of our psyche...the subconscious facility that allows us to form sentences without really thinking about it.

At any rate, I have to agree with most of the points the blog author brings up.

I agree that if the best we can do is something that can't be self-sustaining, Mars should wait until that changes.

I disagree with KSR's main points. Perchlorates are solvable, the effects of Martian gravity are not known (and are solvable if there is a problem), and finally radiation is a non-issue for those living in the only sane place on Mars, underground.

Whether or not Mars is a target in the near term, we need to proceed with our current plan of establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The only way to improve on Earth's resource limitations is to exploit the virtually unlimited riches available beyond her atmosphere, and the Moon is the first step. It's also a great place for heavy industry, not to mention astronomy!

LLMs are amazing technology. It's crazy to interact with something that knows a lot about effectively everything that's ever been written, as well as mimicking human cognition to a large degree.

What LLMs are NOT is intelligent in the same way as a human, which is to say they are not "AGI". They may be loosely AGI-equivalent for certain tasks, software development being the poster child. LLMs have no equivalent of "judgement", and they lie ("hallucinate") with impunity if they don't know the answer. Even with coding, they'll often do the wrong thing, such as writing tests that don't test anything.

It seems likely that LLMs will be one component of a truly conscious AI (AGI+), in the same way our subconscious facility to form sentences is part of our intelligence. We'll see how quickly the other pieces arrive, if ever.

According to current theory AIUI, cosmic inflation greatly influenced the CMB. It ended approximately 10^-32 seconds after the Big Bang:

"Cosmic inflation is believed to have occurred in an incredibly brief, rapid, and exponential expansion phase lasting from approximately 10^-37 to 10^-32 seconds after the Big Bang. During this minute interval, the universe expanded by a factor of at least 10^26, and potentially as much as 10^50."

Quite a theory, cosmic inflation...

Any Faraday cage, bag or not, will eliminate surveillance of the phone until it comes online. Physics wins again.

Sadly, I’m old enough to remember that Ada was the result of a US initiative to standardize a capable language for embedded development.

A good friend worked on the well regarded Telesoft compiler…

Total nonsense. Just avoid Minnesota…

I'm surprised the author of this article thinks Go is a "system language".

Go uses GC, and therefore can't be used for hard real time applications. That's disqualifying as I understand it.

C, C++, Rust, Ada, and Mojo are true system languages IMO. It is true that as long as you can pre-allocate your data structures, and disable GC at runtime, that GC-enabled languages can be used. However, many of them rely on GC in their standard libraries.

I think there are some major problems with this thinking. How does this relate to human artists who studied prior art and then produced something?

I’ll grant you that AI isn’t actually intelligent, but I’ve seen many images and video that exhibited a good bit of originality, and were at a minimum a derived work…

… TBC

Ayn Rand had many insightful ideas, however she took them to an extreme.

What you see as “corrupt government” others see as a “virtuous cycle”…

The main problem with your thought process is that your conflating “wealth accumulation” with “wealth creation”!

One reason foreign enrollment is declining is concern about (mainly) Chinese espionage. That’s entirely reasonable, given the vast amount of stolen engineering and research…

Buy a Tesla with FSD. No, it’s not L5 autonomy, but it’s already safer than the average human driver…and autonomous cars will only get better.

From your linked article:

"Musk has recently said that President Trump has agreed to shut down USAID"

Anything DOGE did was approved by the Executive Branch, as required.

I hope you're right, the nuclear option is looking mighty good right now! ;-)

An "administration" doesn't add debt - Congress does. Power of the purse strings, no?

I'm not sure what you mean by "this administration". Are you including DJT's first term?

Regardless, here are the numbers per Investopedia:

"Based on total dollar amounts, Joe Biden contributed the most to the national debt, adding $8.5 trillion during his presidency, followed by Donald Trump ($7.8 trillion in his first term) and Barack Obama ($7.7 trillion during his two terms)."

DJT's first term had the excuse of the COVID pandemic. Other than the final year when that was an issue, his spending was reasonable. 0'Biden on the other hand, had no such excuse for his spending binge, which was consistent across his (thankfully few) four years in office.

The "talk of lowering debt" is necessary, since right now we're spending 25% of federal revenue (about $1 trillion) paying the interest on our current massive national debt.

The hope is that a supercharged US economy can raise revenues enough to ease the pain of paying down the national debt that's largely been accumulated since 2000. It must be done to avoid the inevitable consequences.

Seeing the downvotes, I'm fascinated with the effectiveness of propaganda in 2025. Truly amazing!

The midterms should be fun!

I'd gladly wager some real money were such a thing feasible. We'll see who's "wildly out of tough [sic] with reality"!

I'm not sure of your understanding of America's government.

Conservatives control all three branches of government to an extent. The Senate GOP doesn't have 60 members, so the Dems can block legislation (the GOP hasn't invoked the "nuclear option" that would prevent that). That's why there's a government shutdown, 100% of that is on the Dems.

The Supreme Court exists only to interpret law in terms of constitutionality. Even with a conservative majority, it shouldn't, and almost certainly won't, violate the Constitution.

As I said above, events leading up to the midterms, and the midterms themselves, will determine the way forward...quite democratically. :-)