wolfram74

The CIA didn't read his contract carefully enough. He snuck it into one of the rider clauses.

Though even if you're getting an hybrid assist bike, if you're paying much more than 1500$ for a commuter, probably overpaying [1200 from the manufacturer]

https://www.aventon.com/products/soltera-2-5-ebike?variant=4...

I suppose if we had access to a public data set like this receipt bank, programmers could time themselves setting up a solution with off the shelf OCR algos. If they could clock in at under 10 hours they could advertise themselves as being "just as good as an LLM, but significantly cheaper." Downside for the managerial class that wants generative algos for the complete lack of legal protections.

I mean, at over 1000% the cost, the machine solution doesn't scale either?

Your name is well earned! "can't cure cancers" is impressively counterfactual [0] as 5 year survival of cancer diagnosis is up over almost all categories. Despite every cancer being a unique species trying to kill you, we're getting better and better at dealing with them.

[0]https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are...

Also, not like it just keels over and dies, that's just the 80% performance criteria. Most people wouldn't need to replace the batteries at that point.

this[0] page makes it seem 500~1000 cycles till 80% starting performance is common. So if you were charging it every other day from a 40~50 mile round trip commute, after 3~5 years you'd go to charging it every day.

[0]https://www.batterystuff.com/kb/articles/battery-articles/pr...

Do you think it's odd you only listed companies with already existing revenue streams and not companies that started with and only have generative algos as their product?

/Owning/ the truck would be imaginary/aspirational as you imagine yourself using it often enough to justify the expenditure. If it's for trips that are 3~4 times a year it probably makes more sense to rent.

Fortunately other chemistries are making their way down the learning curve lithium's been on, and after a few moment reflection it would be astounding if the same types of storage that are optimal for mobile consumers also happen to be optimal for grid balancing, as daily grid balancing can be done pretty reasonably with a c rating[0] of about .2 or even .1, and as long they aren't so heavy they need to be placed on massive foundation piles, weight is not really a factor. Just need to make it as cheap as possible.

[0] battery c rating is what fraction of the battery can discharge in 1 hour https://wikibattery.org/en/wiki-us/battery/charging-rate-cha...

What, did you read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time recently?

I'm juggling a baby approaching lunch time at the moment, so I can't go into too much depth on this paper[0] I found 40 seconds ago, but the conclusion seems to think that solar panel EROIE in siwtzerland is somewhere between 7 and 10, which as a proxy for carbon intensity, /probably/ means it will actually result in net carbon reduction.

[0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

It has some elements of standard tragedy of the commons, suppose nearly everybody is following the same rotation scheme, and holding some antibiotics out of rotation entirely as emergency last resort type of deal. Anybody who isn't playing along can be quite confident they're the only person using the emergency drugs and that they'll work quite well.

You got me wondering. Supposing the average post is 10 words, and a typical page of text is 250 words, that would only be ~50 pages of text a day over the last 10 years. Which I don't think I manage, but over 20 years I am probably in that window.

People without cars subsidize street parking and parking minimum mandates by forcing all other uses for land to be more expensive.

People without children subsidize public schools. Healthy people subsidize sick people's insurance. Part of living in communities involve subsidizing services you don't use, that it occurs is not a problem, you need to argue that it should not be subsidized in the first place, and moving people by bus is better than moving people by car in a variety of ways.

No, it's definitely shifting, based on [0] the carbon emissions per kwh globally are down from 542 g/kwh to 481 g/kwh in the last 10 years, that's over a 10% reduction. Countries that are staying flat are the exception, not the norm.

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

My impression is it's auto and fuel companies putting out this unworkable alternative to current technologies so they can appear to be concerned about climate change without having to actually stop making money, also if it does work they can crack the petro chemicals to get hydrogen out and people who point out it's basically as dirty as ICE engines will look like pedants.

The scientists are just there because if you give them the opportunity to work on hard technical challenges, they'll take it. The morality is much greyer than the ones being paid to contrive models with the initial goal of "higher CO2 is actually good for everybody."

I would imagine the supernova rate to be higher in the early universe, as we've already passed peak stellar formation rates and the heavier (and shorter lived) stars were more likely to be formed earlier when the average density of the universe was higher.

You're in luck! The author's earlier piece on the subject attempts to address that exact question. Learning curve effects and piggy backing off the computer chip industry are major factors if I recall, but I haven't reread the piece in a while.

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-did-solar-power-g...

I don't know, it's been a while since I've read on the subject, but I thought part of what drove the Irish to subsisting off of a monoculture was somewhat driven by necessity from the english consolidating lots of holdings to english lords and collaborators, tax policies shaping what little output they had left basically meant with the amount of arable farm land available to the Irish, it was only the surprisingly effective potato that could keep up.

If that recollection is correct, then while the english might not have lit the metaphorical fire, they definitely gathered the kindling.

This is a thing I've been curious about lately, how close do they have to be? 100 meters? 50 meters? 10? Grid tie ins at a certain point get way beyond my V=IR and V^2/R=W intuitions.

Given the length of the interconnect queue these days, I'm assuming a lot of industrial/large power draw systems will start to just colocate with enough pv+wind+storage to have a local grid with a very small if any connection to the exterior grid.

Obviously it's a cost, but it's one less action item on the set up process and one less possible area for delay, there will be cases where the cost pencils out.

I wonder if the waymo solution is very vehicle specific or if it could be easily applied to say, a 10~12 person van that could accommodate a wheelchair? It would be interesting to design a transit system around 4~5 times as many vehicles with higher interval or more responsive pathing with something like pick up kiosks.

What makes an "idea" atomic/discrete/cardinal? What makes an idea "complex" vs simple or merely true? Over what finite duration of time does it count as "simultaneously" being held?

The rationale mentioned was it was under the subheading of people interested in strong encryption, people who care about being unobservable might have something to hide. Maybe it's a good list? People who you might want to ramp up a new Bletchley Park? Probably not.

I've also been told learning too much about linux or the nuclear reactions in power plants or bombs puts you on a list. I just assume I'm on several.

Lovely word "materially" there, doing a load of work. That way you can just say that subsidizing renewables, or battery manufacturing, or efficiency refits for housing isn't "material" and now you aren't a liar!

Please provide a source for 110E3 TW for all fossil fuels, the US electrical grid time averages over a year about 0.4 TW in generation [0]. Did you actually mean TWh over a year, comparing instantaneous generation with annual production? was such a choice deliberate or accidental?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

We have such low standards for republicans, it's amazing. We complain that democrats are increasingly acknowleding that science is done by humans and humans will tend to ask questions based on what phenomena they've encountered and what explanations they've been given in their lives up til then, but totally give the republicans a pass on catering to groups that deny global warming, evolution or even that the world is more than 6000 years old.

1) 200,000 monkeys is considerably fewer than the trillions, nay, quadrillions of single celled organisms doing mutations through out biological history 2) They are not generating random ACTG strings ~3 billion pairs long, they are permuting a few at a time from a working starting point of the first tiny clump of self catalyzing chemicals.

You've done a bit of a bait and switch, "fulfill their dreams" and "decent quality of life" are two very different standards. One, sure, we're in a society and sometimes that calls for sacrifice, the other, if we can't promise a decent life we shouldn't be surprised when people break the contract and act in ways that hurt the common good.