Maybe they could turn it on optimizing performance and fixing compatibility issues next.

They seem to want AI in the browser, so here's an idea for free. Have an AI agent that launches when you click a "site is broken" button, and it figures out why it is broken and fixes it in the browser. Bonus points if it can handle privacy enhancing add-ons breaking sites too.

Ok, to clarify a few things:

Current designs I've put up:

1. A modernised version of the DeHavilland DH98 and Merlin engine, where I basically fed ChatGPT and Claude with all of the known historic faults and some potential solutions to various problems, then let them run wild, feeding off each other to fix, refine, and clarify the various design. The premise here is that we're using known designs with known properties, changing only materials but doing so carefully so as to ensure that the balance is unchanged from the historic design. The aircraft is probably the least interesting part, as it would be very hard to make that safe, but a fully modernised Merlin that starts where Rolls Royce left off is something that could be built with minimal risk and could be quite interesting in its own right.

2. A High Dynamic Range microphone. This basically riffs off assorted physics technologies for measurement and the basic idea in many HDR schemes that you can split an input into the fine detail (essentially an equivalent of a mantissa) and a magnitude (essentially an exponent), producing a design that aught to permit (if it works) the same microphone with no adjustments handling everything from a nearby whisper to the roar of a jet engine -- but with all of the fine detail still captured from that engine.

3. An electric guitar that operates not by magnetic pickups but by accurate mapping of string behaviour in two dimensions via lasers, where this is then turned into an accurate representation of the sound in an external device. So it's not a synth guitar in the classic sense, it's actually modelling the waveform for each string in two dimensions precisely. The reason for doing 2D modelling is that this has the potential for novel behaviours but without an obligation for it to do so.

4. A synthesiser/wave processor that looks at everything that they knew how to do, and allows you to link it together arbitrarily. It is designed in two forms. The first is engineered to match the components, materials, and knowledge available in 1964, so it is something they could have built if sufficiently insane. The second is a modernised extrapolation of that, using modern digital electronics, where I can show that the modern version is a strict superset of any existing DAW, simply because I started with none of the assumptions and metaphors around which DAWs were subsequently designed.

5. Multiband camera. An attempt to build a digital camera that is far smaller and more compact than a 3CCD camera, but (like the 3CCD design) produces a far better picture than a conventional digital camera, where I don't stop at three frequencies but support many, albeit with the limitation that the time required for a photograph is abysmal.

Each design I've put up has a detailed hardware specification (including wiring where appropriate), validation/verification documents, and testing procedures. Software is defined by means of formal software contracts and occasionally Z-like forms. The designs are extremely detailed, although not quite at the level you could build them right there and then. However, the synthesiser is described right down to the level of individual transistors, diodes, and connectors, and the Merlin engine specifies precise materials, expected temperature ranges, material interactions (and how they're mitigated), and other such information.

Again, it's precise but not quite at the point where an engineer would feed comfortable feeding the specifications into an AI, having it order the bits online, and be sure of building something that works, but it's intended to be close enough that (provided the AIs actually did what they were supposed to) that an engineer would feel very comfortable taking the design and polishing it to working level.

If, however, an engineer looking at these designs comes to the conclusion that the AIs were utterly deluded, then obviously they can't handle something as simple as selecting candidate items from ranged data.

I post the AI-derived designs to my gitlab page:

https://gitlab.com/wanderingne...

I really should add this to my journal.

That's why when Israel bombs an apartment building, everyone in it is automatically enrolled in Hamas/Hezbollah first.

This is perhaps the biggest transfer of wealth in American history. Most of those companies will just pocket the refund and no pass any of it on to the consumer. If prices go down at all, they won't be back to pre-tariff levels.

You paid the tariffs, but you ain't getting the refund.

You can do maintenance on EVs too. Lots of people work on older ones themselves. They aren't super complicated, and the level of lockdown is about the same as a fossil - it varies by manufacturer, and generally the more you pay for the car the worse it is.

There is much less maintenance you need to do on an EV anyway. Brake pads last forever, and some need a motor oil change once every 5 years or so. Batteries are good for at least 250k miles, more than even a well maintained petrol engine.

The market for working on them is more mature in some countries, particularly Norway. Even in the US though, it's very doable. Rich Rebuilds on YouTube makes videos about the ones he works on.

Norway has got that way already. It's a pain to go find fuel in a lot of places. Most of the petrol stations have been converted to charging stations.

I see that a lot, e.g. people saying Ukraine should not have given up its weapons. What would Ukraine have done with them? Nuke Moscow, get nuked back, and now everyone is dead and their country is a radioactive wasteland? And that's the best case scenario, where they don't start WW3 and get everywhere nuked.

It would have been the same conventional war that they got without nuclear weapons. You can safely ignore Putin's threats to use them too.

There are two seater sport EVs, you just aren't allowed to buy them.

Maybe Hyundai will do one eventually. Like their sport version of the Ioniq 5, with fake gears and everything. That's not really what I'd call a family car anyway.

I was going to say, they are stretching the definition of "delivered" in that second video. Lobbed on the driveway where it is highly likely to be stolen, perhaps.

Doesn't it screw Amazon? In the UK, it's their problem until you have it in your hands. If it gets stolen, they have to refund or replace it.

That's why I was surprised that eBay started offering a delivery service here. I've had a couple of things arrived damaged with it, and they refunded both me and the seller, and presumably claimed from the courier. But of course, the seller could have just shipped a broken item in the first place.

The current plan is to use SLS and Orion to get to lunar orbit, then transfer to the lander which will make its own way there. Then on the return, go back to to Orion in lunar orbit and head for Earth.

Not so much in the south because it rarely snows enough to be worth it, but up north they do clear footpaths as well.

Japan seems to have a good system where the local government just leaves bags of salt and grit around for local residents and business owners to spread as needed, but of course they wouldn't last 5 minutes here.