Unregulated Nuclear Generation ?
That fills me with confidence...
573 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Nov 2011
How are you getting in to this thing if you have anything other than great mobility ? Never mind wheelchair users, even someone with bad hips or a dodgy knee is going to struggle getting in or out of this.
And, as others have said, if this hits any of the promised marks (under $30k, production by 2026, on the road by 2027....) I will not only eat my hat but Elon's too.
EVs can tow and drive long distances but the compromise is too great - the amount of time required to recharge makes those journeys far too compromised. To return to the screwdriver analogy, I can drive a phillips screw in with a flat blade screwdriver but it is such a PITA that the hammer is the better option.
The underlying problem with EVs as I see it is the combination of great expense and limitations of use - a car is the second biggest purchase you will likely make after your house and is hugely expensive (even more so if it is an EV). In order to justify that expense, it needs to meet as close to 100% of your use cases as possible, so whilst it is true that EVs are likely to meet 95% of most people's needs (daily commutes, local trips etc. are all likely well within the range ability), it won't adequately meet the other 5% - holiday travel, long journeys to see family, towing a trailer or caravan etc. This is why we end up with people who are rich enough owning one EV and an ICE car and people who are not owning just an ICE car. I think the market segment consisting of those rich enough to own more than one $50k + car is now saturated, hence the fall in sales growth.
I like to illustrate this by using the screwdriver analogy - I have many screw drivers of different shapes and sizes to match the many types of screws that exist but if screwdrivers cost $50k each I would only have one - a hammer. Is the hammer the best tool for driving any one screw ? Absolutely not, but I never came across a screw that didn't go in if you hit it hard enough with the hammer.
Not specific to this article but I still think it should be good reporting practice to quote EV ranges and charging times in the same context - if they are saying x minutes to charge from 10-80% they should also quote y miles of range from 80-10% charge, or x minutes from 0-100% charge and y range from 100-0% - to have a mix of the two just feels like cherry picking data.
..this is surely already behind the curve. The whole premise is based on the AI capable hardware only being produced by a small number of relatively easily controlled manufacturers but surely it is only a matter of a few years before your phone can do this and then everyone has one...
To extend the forest scavenging metaphor - the problem here is that each mushroom or few berries belongs to a different person but the pie that we sell from the end product of the industrial scale collection is made up of a mush of all the produce we collected. Having no real way of telling how much of each bit of food we collected went in to each individual pie, how do we reasonably determine how much to pay the original owner ?
In addition to which, why are we billing the mass collector company one amount but willing to give the food away for free to small operators (who may still be profiting from this, if only that they get a free pie to eat) - even if the small operators when taken as a collective whole may be taking as much food as the mass collector ?
This for me is the underlying point here - why is it any different just because it is an AI that is doing it. I do not see a difference between a human reading a lot of freely available material and then writing a work derived from a conglomeration of it all and a computer doing the same and yet we do not attempt to bill the human.....
"Not that today's kids would be allowed to do something as dangerous as learning to use sharp knives ... "
They do if you live in the US of A - my kids both whittled in scouts from the age of about 7, in between also doing welding, leather branding and, of course, shooting with all manner of guns.....
I never did understand why the push to have ultra slim phones that we then immediately put in a big fat case to stop them from breaking. Why not make the phone bigger, fatter and tougher but fill that otherwise empty padding space with more battery life. I too miss the Nokia brick phone days of "must remember to charge it on Sunday for the week...."
That's what I was thinking when I was reading it - surely this is just capitalism. right ? You charge whatever the market will pay and this system basically just automates that process, checks competitor prices and prices your stuff near it.
No company is really charging what it costs to make and market it's product plus a bit of markup, they are all charging as much as they can whilst still maintaining market share........
It's easy to work out how much to compensate a specific performer if their likeness is directly used to make new content but how do we work out how to compensate one of a hundred (or a thousand or more) performers all of who's performances were used to train the AI that then made the content ? Surely this still ends up in some sort of 'we own this material in perpetuity for this fee and can do whatever we want with it' arrangement just out of practicality.
Also, I have to say that it will not be too far in the future before the AI is doing the whole thing all by itself.....
The black powder work around is crazy, I live in the US of A (and own several guns) and I was entirely astounded that I got, through the post, a .44 caliber 1851 black powder revolver. It takes a minute to load it (you have to load in the black powder pellet, wadding and bullet into each chamber then cap the nipple* with a blasting cap) but once it is loaded I can get 6 shots off in a couple of seconds easily as accurate as my 9mm at anything out to 25 yards and it makes a much bigger hole in the target....(in addition to which, once it is empty it is so big and heavy you could beat someone to death with the blunt end). This thing barely counts as a 'gun' for most applicable laws over here (although as I live in the communist hell-hole that is Maryland, I still need a license to concealed carry it - but not to buy it).
*Fnarr.
I would prefer the option of a 'no security' flight - if you are willing to take the risk on being exploded without any compensation then you and your like minded risk taker fellow passengers can just get on the plane straight from the parking lot and fly immediately.
702 is constitutional because it only allows this level of snooping on non-US citizens (who are not protected by the constitution). The mis-use of the law to snoop on US citizens is the problem, often in the scenario of one side of the intercepted communication being a valid (non-US citizen) target and the other being a supposedly protected US citizen.
This is why we have Amendment 2.
In the instance of background extras with non-speaking roles the technology has already surpassed the issue, "uncanny valley" problems with movement and expression are obvious in main characters who are in close-up but for these $200 a day extras the game is already over. The only reason to keep employing them is that, for now (but not much longer) I suspect it costs more than $200 to animate via CGI than just film the real person.
If the studios are smart they will agree to pay $200 for the day's work that does not license the likeness in perpetuity knowing that digitally re-mapping randomized AI-created faces onto motion captured extras will bypass the re-use regulation anyway (how do you prove that your motion captured performance lies under the CGI background character in some other movie ?)
Recording calls between US citizens is illegal, if one of the parties is not a US citizen then it's fair game......the constitutional protections do not extend to non-citizens, even if they are physically in the US at the time of the call.
My real pet peeve with EV reporting is when you read a review in a car magazine and they always quote the range as 'up to x miles on a full charge '* and then in the very next sentence tell you it can recharge "from 10-80% in x minutes"** - pick one or the other, you can't tell me the full range from 100-0% charge but then the charge time for just the middle 70%. The use pattern is either run for 70% range and charge quickly or run for all the range and take ages to charge, anything else is cherry picking data to pretend that the inherent limitations are less than they really are.
*Which is also a made up number under ultra-ideal conditions, but so is the petrol car MPG number so.....
** Again, under ultra-ideal conditions with just the right kind of charger of which there is one within 50 miles of you and it is broken.
My dog once ate an entire tub of dry fish food flakes. This resulted in several days of the worst fishy smelling sharts ever to have been inflicted on mortal man. I wonder if the veg/fish heavy diet has a similar effect within the confines of a space capsule and if this will be the eventual cause of them just cracking open a window for a minute.........I feel that further research is warranted.