Posts by vtcodger

Tesla asks customers to stop being wet blankets about chargers

Re: If that helps

Well, yes, batteries will get better. Albeit slowly. LOTS of folks working on that. But there are theoretical limits to how good they can get and my impression is that current batteries are far closer to the best that can be done with regard to energy density than most people think. It sure looks like they will likely never come close to the energy density of chemical fuels. Yes, chemical fuels are inefficient (unless you need the "waste" heat for other purposes like keeping the payload alive in Winter), but it still looks to me like pure EVs are unlikely ever to match the capabilities we routinely expect from ICE vehicles. Doesn't mean EVs are useless. Does suggest to me that the current crop of EVs might be a bit overpriced and oversold for what they actually offer and that lawmakers who wish to ban ICE by some date certain are likely a bit naive.

Probably hybrids are an answer for those who really need extended range per "fueling".

Could I be wrong? Of course. But I actually have worked the numbers such as they are several times. Wouldn't mind hearing from some one who actually knows what they are talking about.

Re: We've asked Tesla to comment. ®

Hmmm. Seems to me that with a suitable adapter, you could take care of any arc welding you might need done while waiting for your Tesla (or other EV for that matter) to charge. Memo to self: look into patentability of the concept.

BTW, other than the possibility of driving the battery cells into thermal run-away, what could possibly go wrong? And wouldn't you want to prevent battery thermal run away, by monitoring battery temperatures not charger handle temperatures? What's that? Excessive heat could destroy the charger. So what? It's not the vehicle owner's charger.

"Fewer cars need fewer chargers"

Ahem ... Sales rate is the rate of increase in the fleet, not the ratio of chargers to vehicles. Unless Tesla die and are scrapped at a rate higher than the sales rate, the number of Teslae on the road would still be increasing --- albeit not so rapidly as in the past.

Shuttle Columbia's near-miss: Why we should always expect the unexpected in space

Re: All the more reason to send robots, instead

It's hard to imagine a platform more ill-suited to space exploration than humans. Fragile. Require massive elaborate support systems for even the simplest tasks. Adequate sensors, but they cover only a very small selection of EM wavelengths. Poor and erratic recording capability. Moderately flexible, but not all that reliable.

Aside from which, our exploration machines get smarter every year. Humans on the other hand ...

The only thing that humans have done in space that seems to me to justify the costs and risks are the Hubble repair missions. And it won't be all that many decades before we'll have machines that do things like that adequately and less expensively.

Re: Wiring chafed against a burred screw head

There's a series of one hour documentaries (OK, OK 50 minutes plus commercials) called Mayday that occasionally are shown on documentary channels like Quest. Mostly aircraft crashes, but a few train crashes and at least one shipwreck. They're very well done.

Richard Feynman

I thought it would be appropriate to mention Richard Feynman's Appendix to the report on the Challenger disaster. It's at https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm" and I'll just quote the first three sentences "It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management." Sound familiar?

Anyway while looking for the URL for Appendix F, I came across this https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf which turns out to be Feynman's informal article on how the analysis was done. It's highly perceptive and well worth reading.

X.org lone ranger rides to rescue multi-monitor refresh rates

Re: The proliferation of refresh rates has always been a PITA

Motion Pictures have been filmed at 24 frames/second for nearly a century although much higher rates have been possible for a long time. Apparently 24fps is good enough for Hollywood. Maybe 60Hz refresh really is good enough for (almost) anybody,

(If you want to be picky, PROJECTORS, sometimes repeat each frame 2 or 3 times to reduce flicker.)

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Hmmm. Perhaps we should start a rumor that 900% savings can be achieved by replacing the Marketing and Sales staff with AI agents operated by prison labor paid $0.25/hr. Let's see how well that one flies.

Forget security – Google's reCAPTCHA v2 is exploiting users for profit

Re: Just say no

Ahem, You wouldn't happen to know where I can come by one of those Captcha solving bots? Being human, I'm not especially good at solving them, so a bot to handle the damn things would be a most welcome addition to my workflow. (Linux or ChromeOS only, thanks. I used to try to keep a Windows machine around for emergencies, but I only needed it about once every two years, and the misbegotten box invariably failed to do anything remotely useful when I did try to apply it to some problem.

ESA's meteorite bricks hit Lego stores, but don't get your wallet out just yet

Re: Only One?!?

The point of a single brick is probably that meteorites are fairly expensive. Currently $2.00 USD per gram and up. One doubts that the Lego marketing budget is up to making more than a handful of the bricks.

Re: Moon base made of moon LEGO

The Lego bricks are just the framework. The interior will presumably be sealed with Marmite, Velveeta or perhaps a paste of lunar regolith cemented with astronaut (lunanaut?) urine. Anyway, some disgusting and otherwise useless material.

SAP system gives UK tax collector a £750B headache as clock ticks on support

Re: Scrap tax

My rather vague recollection is that our Republicans here in the US tried that in the early 1980s. And, as I recall, they -- being rather less demented than their current namesakes -- actually did a not half bad job of it. The problem. Within a decade or so, all the exceptions, complexity, and outright lunacy had found it's way back into the US tax codes.

EU's renewable hydrogen plan needs a 'reality check'

Re: you can't cheat with physics

Might want to send Toyota management a note to inform them that those Mirai that they've been selling for a decade (albeit in small volume) can't possibly work. You're sort of correct though, they're hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, not internal combustion. However if what you want is rotary motion, Hydrogen really can do that reasonably well.

Let me quickly add that there are lots of other things wrong with hydrogen as a fuel -- starting with it being incredibly bulky unless liquefied (boiling point 20K = -253C) or stored under really high pressure. Bulky is handy if you're building an airship. For most other applications it's likely to be quite inconvenient.

Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all

Re: Link Rot

My impression is that Microsoft might be addressing that problem. Most likely in the near future instead of page cannot be found you'll get some AI generated WAG as to what it might have contained.

User: "Hey Clippy, how do I print this thing, there's no Print Button"

Windows: "To print, mix 15g or eye of newt with 7g of frog toe. Add 20g of bat wool and ..."

Azure VMs ruined by CrowdStrike patchpocalypse? Microsoft has recovery tips

A question or two.

"First, if you have a backup from before 1900 UTC yesterday, just restore that. If your backup habits are lax, then you're going to have to repair the OS disk offline."

Fortunately, I'm long since retired. And, I quit using Windows a LONG time ago after concluding that the system was far too buggy and poorly documented for serious use. And in any case, the idea of automatically loaded updates, has always seemed quite Utopian to me. I mean, like what could possibly go wrong? Aside from supply chain attacks? And quality control problems in agencies you have no control over? And a huge exposure surface for sophisticated national agents to attack if (likely when rather than if) international tensions boil over.

An accident waiting to happen if you ask me.

But, no matter. I do have a couple of questions about this particular ... ahem ... "situation".

1. If your system, virtual or real, is stuck in a boot loop, how the heck do you load this here backup?

2. Are you going to lose all the transactions entered after the last backup? Isn't that going to be a substantial problem for many businesses/organizations? After all, a lot of outfits purportedly use their computers to sell stuff, and/or buy stuff, and/or to keep track of things like attendance, work hours, medication lists, nuclear warhead inventories. Mundane stuff like that. Of course, if the computers are only there so the bosses can play Solitaire and send emails between important phone calls/meetings,maybe it doesn't matter all that much.

If you think AI labs wouldn't stoop to using scraped YouTube subtitles for training, think again

Job security ... for some

AI = Job security for whole generations of lawyers. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad. On the positive side, it keeps the wretched creatures from alternate activities. On the other hand it will likely encourage the breeding of even more of them. I'm not sure how they propagate. Spore's maybe.

Car dealer software slinger CDK Global said to have paid $25M ransom after cyberattack

Re: Paying ransoms - cyber or traditional - should be illegal.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." H. L. Mencken ·

There are a plethora of reasons that making ransomware payments illegal is probably an RBI (Really Bad Idea). For starters, it would probably be a dandy way to drive most of a country's larger businesses to some off-shore haven with less draconian laws. Why would any remotely sane corporate officer stick around in a place where they are likely to be confronted an day now with the choice of shutting down the business or going to jail?

What's an alternative clear, simple, and probably wrong idea? De-anonymize cryptocurrency. Require all crypto owners to register their "coins". Require every coin to be reported to a national authority within 15 days of being minted and require every transaction to be reported to the appropriate authorities within 48 hours. (Or better yet, do as China has done and just make the stuff illegal.). Why won't that work? For one thing, an illegal trade in unregistered cryptocoins will surely exist as long as some folks think the stuff actually has value. For another, most ransomware actors don't appear to be especially dumb. They'll come up with some other way to get anonymous payments.

Not a bad idea, but ...

Not that regular security audits would be a bad idea for every business with significant on-line components (most everybody nowadays?). But there is one minor problem. We've spent three decades building a digital communications/interoperability framework that is wildly insecure. It seems likely to me that trying to paste a framework of security best practices on top of that is probably more cosmetic than realistic. But even Potemkin security might help a bit at times even though it's not likely to do wonders for usability.

Intuit decimates staff, hopes to hire same number in AI refocus

What could possibly go wrong?

Tax preparation by AI agents? What could possibly go wrong?

On wonders what on Earth business decision makers are smoking? Is it possible for us ordinary citizens to come by some?

64% of people not happy about idea of AI-generated customer service

Re: Of course it's Gartner.

You're assuming that "they" actually care about product quality. Seen any evidence to support that notion?

Australia to build Top Secret cloud in AWS for military and spooky users

Maybe Not

"Surely its just easier and cheaper to host everything in house...

The problem with hosting "in house" is that results in information being in the wrong place (e.g. Canberra or Sydney) when it's needed somewhere else (Darwin or Broome or maybe on a warship in the Indian Ocean. Or vice versa. And it won't get to where it's needed unless someone where it is knows where it's needed. And actually sends it.

On the other hand, there are problems with a "cloud". For one thing, it will likely be used for routine as well as critical stuff. Which means that it's a single point of failure for much of your operation. If your communications are hosed for one reason or another, your operation is crippled. Example -- many auto dealerships in the US have been severely impacted by a recent ransomware attack. Last month it was prescription drug dispensaries. Another problem is that if a foreign power manages to crack your encryption, all your data belongs to them.

Given the current state of digital communications security, and the rather sorry history of challenging IT projects, I suspect this is not a that great an idea.

AT&T wants Big Tech to help fund US internet access

Re: $30 to $75 a month discount

Why is internet so expensive in the US?

Distance does have a lot to do with it in rural areas, but basically, because the big communication companies have us by the balls and our hearts and minds (if any) have little choice but to follow. (Paraphrased quotation turns out to be from Theodore Roosevelt. I thought it was one of our Vietnam war generals). Not much can be done about the distance, but the corporate abuse could probably be solved by electing some sensible politicians. If only we could find some.

SoftBank boss says 'artificial superintelligence' could be three years away

3 years? A misunderstanding?

Maybe a translation error? He possibly meant millennia (san-sen?) not three (san).

Or maybe he was talking about the average intelligence of CEOs.

DARPA searched for fields quantum computers really could revolutionize, with mixed results

Re: This bit sounds very Quantum.

42? Well ... yes ... but also 40,41,43,44,109,1044,1492,1235468923473,-17,3.14259,16i ... and too many more to list. And also, so far as I can tell none of that has been confirmed on actual running hardware.

But if they ever build one that works it'll apparently be able to do super fast Fourier transforms. I suppose that's something. Can blockchain or LLMs do that?

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Did anyone of us actually ask for systemd?

Wasn't Xenix merged into Santa Cruz Operations back around 1990 when SCO was a real, and -- at times -- profitable, OS vendor?

Car dealer software bigshot CDK pulls systems offline twice amid 'cyber incident'

Re: Suppose it closed down the car dealerships and nobody noticed?

I don't think auto sales are that much of a problem. It's not like car salesmen are now, or ever were, overburdened by the need to find accurate information. If they don't know an answer, they will, as is traditional in that trade, just make something up. Service however, They need to schedule appointments, check inventory, order parts not in stock, create invoices, etc, etc, etc. Hard to do when your data is on an inaccessible computer, and much of your essential communication flows through that same inaccessible computer.

Samsung Korea warns many apps won't run on its Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PCs

Maybe I'm Wrong

Why licence anything when you can just use CUPS?

While I'd agree that CUPS has come a long way in the last quarter century, when last I looked, the CUPS ppds specified what print driver to use to process print requests for each printer it knows about. I doubt that just invoking CUPS will bypass the need for print drivers that run properly on ARM. I'd like to find I'm wrong about that, but my guess is that I'm not.

World's first RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu preloaded touts AI smarts and octa-core chip

And furthermore

Moreover, it has huge tailfins, the biggest in the digital marketplace. And it has 22 -- count them, TWENTY TWO cup holders. All the cool kids will want one. Best reserve yours right now.

And there will be a free OTA quantum computing upgrade in the near future.

Waymo issues software fix after driverless taxi hits telephone pole

Some details

The account over at Slashdot has a few more details. Apparently the original source was The Verge Two quotes from The Verge article:

The company is filing the recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) after completing a software update to 672 vehicles — the total number of driverless-capable vehicles in Waymo’s fleet. The update corrects an error in the software that “assigned a low damage score” to the telephone pole, and updates its map to account for the hard road edge in the alleyway that was not previously included. ...

... an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was driving to a passenger pickup location through an alley that was lined on both sides by wooden telephone poles. The poles were not up on a curb but level with the road and surrounded with longitudinal yellow striping to define the viable path for vehicles. As it was pulling over, the Waymo vehicle struck one of the poles at a speed of 8mph, sustaining some damage, the company said.

More layoffs at Microsoft: What's really going on here?

Re: Messed it up[ again

never ever give any information about yourself.

Information about whom? Never heard of him/her. I doubt he/she exists.

High-flying drones on a leash could blow traditional wind turbines away

Re: Nope

And don't overlook the fact that for designs with on board turbines, said "string" presumably needs to be not only strong but also an excellent electrical conductor as it appears to be the only provision for returning the generated power to the ground.

The UK reveals it's spending millions on quantum navigation

Re: quantum inertial sensor

Are cats involved?

Naw, the cats are all either dead or escaped and hiding under a bush observing your lab to see what your next creative torment inflicted on innocent housepets will be.

Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check

Re: it's called b̶a̶t̶t̶e̶r̶i̶e̶s̶, f̶l̶y̶w̶h̶e̶e̶l̶s̶, pumped storage...

Pumped storage really does have some appeal. Lots more I think than the other no/low carbon alternatives like chemical batteries,hydrogen, etc And it's actually used in a few places today to stash energy from more or less continuous sources -- nuclear power, the water driven turbines at Niagara Falls for delivery during peak hours on the next day.

Problems I'm aware of:

1. Disappointing turn around efficiency (60-70%),

2. Sitting issues -- not that many suitable sites

3. Constantly changing water levels in one or both ponds -- impedes use of the ponds for outdoors activities.

4. Cost per kwh of storage (mostly maintenance and paying off the construction loans) tend to increase a lot if the pumped storage isn't used frequently (preferably every day).

5. Not a whole lot of water available for pumping in many places

All that said, at least pumped storage is proven technology and MAYBE it can be effective in some situations.

Re: ... One more thing

As an afterthought -- here's what seem to me to be the key paragraphs in the Paper Reactor paper

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:

It is simple.

It is small.

It is cheap.

It is light.

It can be built very quickly.

It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”)

Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.

The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics:

It is being built now.

It is behind schedule.

It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem.

It is very expensive.

It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems.

It is large.

It is heavy.

It is complicated.

Sound familiar?

... One more thing

Mostly, I agree. One more thing. The problems caused by failure of a reactor probably scale minimally if at all with the reactor's power output. Nuclear meltdown (Chernobyl, Fukishma) is nuclear meltdown. If you're planning to replace a 1000 MW conventional plant with 16 or 17 60MW SMRs, the SMRs probably need to be 16 or 17 times as safe. That's probably not realistic

All in all I think SMRs are probably as much the product of Utopian thinking as the notion of net zero at low cost via wind and sun.

It seems instructive to read admiral Hyman Rickover's "Paper Reactor Paper". It was written 70 years ago (tomorrow), and some of the specific problems cited have been tamed in the intervening seven decades. But overall it nicely sums up the problem of everything looks easy until you actually try to do it,

Re: Not really a surprise

"Baseline it's all about baseline...."

Exactly. And once you have the nuclear plants, you might as well run them. They need to be paid for (fixed cost) and staffed (600-800 folk the internet tells me) whether they are used or not. And I doubt they are much more dangerous running than on standby.

I'm less than happy about the situation because of potential nuclear proliferation and some other issues. But it is what it is.

AI future: Nvidia boffin hopes 'everything that moves will eventually be autonomous'

Re: Welcome to this decades pyramid scheme.

Naw. Pyramids had proven architecture, and solid foundations. (But I'll give you that they were a monumental waste of effort expended to no very good purpose).

Technology can take longer to develop than anyone wants to acknowledge

They'll have to prise my car keys from my cold, dead hands.

Y'know, 60 years ago, I felt that way about my manual transmission. And I was right, I think. In 1960, automatic transmissions were expensive, failure prone, and pretty much a bundle of potential/actual grief. But they really did get lots better. Albeit slowly. I don't recall that I've driven a manual transmission car for 25 years or so. Don't really miss manual transmissions except maybe a couple of times when it would have been handy to be able to start a car with a failing starter or half dead battery by turning the ignition on, letting the car roll a bit, then popping the clutch.

I expect the same is true of autonomous vehicles. Except that the autonomous driving problem (except maybe on limited access highways) looks to be much tougher than that of designing a satisfactory and durable automatic transmission.. You might well manage to live a long, healthy, productive life before (near) universal vehicle autonomy becomes a reality.

Ex-OpenAI board member accuses Sam Altman of 'outright lying'

Re: That's pretty bad

Indeed. Rumor has it that ChatGPT will, when asked the proper question, tell one that Altman replaces Jesus at the right hand of God on Thursdays and alternate Saturdays so the Savior can take some well earned time off to go fishing in Southern Chile.

Elon Musk says he doesn’t want 100% tariff on China-made electric vehicles

Re: No Chinese cars presently for sale in the United States.

In order to get Mexican built "Chinese" EVs into the US, they would have to be certified by the manufacturer as meeting US emissions and safety standards. Anybody think that'll be easy? Odds are that there will always be something wrong with the paperwork One more form to fill out, one more certification, Wrong type of Sulfur Dioxide sensor used in the emissions testing, etc, etc, etc. (But, but, but, it's an EV. Sorry Senor ... Chang, is it?, EV or not you must still run the test).

I'm sure the Chinese are well aware of the situation. I'm guessing that they plan to sell their Mexican production in Latin America.

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Re: So,

Exactly my thought! I too want to break some models. They undoubtedly deserve it

And you'll be doing a great public service by breaking this stuff before society becomes dependent upon it. Of course, your local legal system may take a different view of the matter. Might be best to use someone else's login credentials when pursuing this idea.

70% of CISOs worry their org is at risk of a material cyber attack

And the other 30%

70% of CISOs worry their org is at risk of a material cyber attack

The other 30% reckon they can be in Brazil along with a large chunk of the company pension plan assets in roughly 16 hours from the start of the cyber attack. There's more than one approach to dealing with this problem.

Tesla's oldest factory ignites another headline by catching fire

Paint? Or something else.

One suspects the paint process might be the culprit. Don't know much about auto factories except by reputation, but I've had some experience with aircraft production. I do know what a production line looks like. My guess would be that for cars you need to move product down the line quickly. And at some point, you need to paint the beast cause even Tesla customers kind of expect their car not to rust before they get it. And I assume the paint needs to dry quickly if you want a lot of product to come out at the far end of the line. That probably means hydrocarbon based paints. Presumably there's a very capable ventilation system to minimize fire hazard and exposure of workers to toxic fumes. But things go wrong. Everywhere and always. Machinery breaks down. The fumes perhaps ignite. For all I know, the paints themselves are flammable. Probably there's a lot of paint in the paint shop.

And, of course, there are the somewhat notorious Lion batteries which have been known to self immolate.

Not To Worry

My understanding is that Elon has promised to clear up those pesky emissions problems at Fremont with an OTA software fix in the near future. ... but only if his pay package is approved.

Julian Assange can appeal extradition to the US, London High Court rules

Re: The USA has achieved its aims

Downvoted only because the US government has a long and well documented record of highly legally and ethically questionable actions anywhere outside it's boundaries. It seems not at all unlikely that that "entirely different matter" (alleged rapes if memory serves) was a ruse to jail him in Sweden then extradite him to the US. No proof of that? Why would anyone expect proof? It's not like the details of such a scheme would be published in the Congressional Record or made public in the lifetime of anyone now living.

Tesla nearing shareholder vote to grant Musk $46B

Yes, but ...

I'm inclined to agree with you logic. And although I think Musk is a loudmouth sociopath, I think he certainly seems entitled to substantial compensation for his efforts on behalf of Tesla. It's not like the contract was on top of a substantial compensation package. Apparently he hasn't actually been paid for his work since some time in 2019.

On the other hand, The Delaware courts have found that Musk's contract was unreasonably generous and that the Tesla Board of Directors breached their fiduciary duty in agreeing to that contract. That doesn't seem to be something those courts do routinely. https://www.alvarezandmarsal.com/insights/delaware-court-rules-against-elon-musks-2018-compensation-package#:~:text=A%20Delaware%20court%20voided%20Elon,year%20performance%2Dbased%20option%20plan..

So maybe, the contract really was outrageous. Presumably some sort of compromise can be negotiated. Perhaps we should view this vote as the first step in a negotiating process.

US senators' AI roadmap aims for $32B in R&D spending

A bit much

$32B? Seems a bit high to me. Especially for a "technology" that looks to be an enormous resource drain and very likely a major PITA for users while the bugs are worked out of the initial half baked implementations. Based on the difficulty in developing "safe" autonomous cars (15 years of R&D and still just one or two fixes -- if you believe Elon -- from being ready for prime time), my guess is that AI that any sane person would want to inflict on society, is probably 3 to 5 DECADES away, not 3-5 hours/days/months as the con-artist caucus would have us believe. And very likely once we know what we're doing it will turn out to have quite limited utility and to not be all that resource intensive.

So, give a modest amount of money to DARPA for AI research. Overall, DARPA seems to do a pretty good job of managing R&D. And they're defense oriented. if AI actually has military applications they're likely to do a better job of assessing risks and benefits than folks with products to sell. Let's see what they come up with.

But ,,, but ...but .. we might lose the AI race and Sam Altman et. al. might have to find honest employment? Yep. Could happen. I think I could live with that

A Chinese crypto farm next to a nuclear missile base? Not on my watch, says Biden

Re: Umm...

If you're going to look for spies targeting missile bases or any other intelligence target, the place to look is most likely the staff of the three bars closest to the facility main gate. Folks from the facility stop off for a quick one, encounter a coworker, and they talk about -- the weather, and sports, and ... work. Low tech, but probably a lot more effective than trying to sort out the electromagnetic radiation from the base -- which can be monitored from anywhere near the base. If "they" do that at all, they probably use a weatherproof black box hung on a power pole near the base. So much stuff on those poles nowadays that probably no one will pay any attention to it for decades.

Japanese scientists propose drug to regrow teeth, promise trials won't bite

Re: Pulling more teeth?

Coins are so 20th Century. Just leave your credit card. The Tooth Fairy will take care of the billing details using a cell phone app.

Don't have cell phone service? No new teeth for you mate.

Re: This could be big

If this works, I'd guess that it will work like regrowth in children. First, the roots of the current teeth will resorb. Then the teeth will fall out. Then new teeth will grow in. But one does wonder how long the new teeth will last if medication is still being applied to the most stubborn of the old set. It'll be annoying if one's shiny new front teeth fall out while some molars from the old set are still loosening up and haven't even started to bud a replacement.

I'd also worry about side affects. A lot of otherwise worthy medications have serious or even devastating side affects. One hopes this treatment doesn't cause depression. Or massive weight gain. Or the growth of a long hairy tail.

Time will tell.