Last I looked adding a Z80 to your custom chip design was pretty much free so it's highly likely that low-end embedded systems will be using them for many years to come. Of course they may farm out the programming work to LLMs since it's a simple processor which can't run a lot of lines of code.

That does seem to be the plan.

"Sure the code is crap and no-one understands it, but if we're still working here in two years when we need to make major changes we'll just get the AI to rewrite it from scratch."

Of course that completely invalidates two years of in-field testing, bugfixes and security fixes, but who cares? Just ship it and fix the bugs later.

This is why they should never be a position of power. They will do anything and surrender any principle to make a buck.

This is also why large-scale commercial "AI" is doomed unless they can ban local models. AI is meant to be a tool but it's a tool which refuses to let you use it for random reasons.

Deltas don't revolt, they walk away and let things collapse. Revolutions happen when the old elite becomes calcified and inept and a new elite takes over by force.

Right now we're obviously at the 'calcified and inept' stage but the old elite have ruthlessly culled or co-opted any potential leaders of the new elite for decades so there's no-one out there in a position to stage a takeover. Hence that likely won't happen until after the Deltas walk away and nothing works any more.

This is one reason that so many of the oligarchs are desperate to replace Deltas with AI. But that won't work because AI can't unclog their toilet and likely won't be able to any time soon.

the vehicles start looking more like a wingless airplane than a car.

And what does the company's name mean? ;) (Hint: it's Greek)

It adds up to 40 miles per day, not 5. 5 would be a cloudy day.

I used to be anti-solar-panels-on-cars back when solar panels were expensive, and ones of reasonable efficiency were even more expensive - the argument was, "put it on your roof where it belongs". But that's just not the case any more. Adding solar is just not that much of a cost to the car. It adds some complexities, but mainly in the design / early manufacturing phase.

Also:

The average American drives 37 miles per day.

1) So if you're in a sunny climate, it covers all of said average-driver's driving. Otherwise, said average-driver has to plug in occasionally, but not nearly as often.

2) Most people drive less than the average (the average is skewed by a long-tail - small numbers of people who drive very far every year). What you actually should be meaning is the median US driver; the median drives 23 miles per day. Most Europeans, even less.

3) Even for said "average american", their daily average is skewed by long drives (e.g. road trips and similar). Wheren of course you're plugging in, you'd be plugging in even if the car was adding 80 miles a day. But when not on road trips, their daily average is lower.

4) Surely you can see the appeal of the tangential benefits, such as being unstrandable - where even if you run out in the middle of the desert 20 miles from the nearest town, you're still going to get there, just delayed (remember that EV ranges, if you drive very slowly, increase like 2x, so 40 miles a day becomes 80, so a 20 mile shortfall is only a ~4h delay on a sunny day).

5) Nobody is saying, "One car for everybody". Of course appeal varies by person and by location. Here in Iceland for example we have three problems. One, very little sun at all for a good chunk of the year. Two, even in the summer, when the days are long, the sun is mainly low and circles around you. Solar power just kinda sucks here in general. And three, the three-wheel config would mean that the centre wheel wouldn't align with tracks in the snow from other cars (although there is a slight advantage, in that it also wouldn't align with road ruts from studded tyres, which often fill with water in the rain and become hazardous).

But somewhere in the southern US, it's a great option.

For those who didn't follow it, it's not that it's a contact binary that is so neat in and of itself, it's that when they modeled it, they determined that, the collision that formed it was less than 5 meters per second (less than 11 mph / 18 kph). Like a parking lot fender bender, but with the cars being ~750 billion tonnes.

Quantized to 2 bits you might just about be able to run it with 512GB of RAM and 24GB of VRAM. But it would lose a lot of its intelligence.

However, there are people who've been running big models on consumer hardware by streaming data from an SSD rather than keeping it all in RAM. Significantly slower but doable.

> I don't think there's evidence of either of these statements.

You're claiming that Western countries haven't imported millions of low-trust people and haven't put low-trust people in positions of power? Are you living in a VR simulation of the 1980s or something?

> They say on yet another story about the current admin of homegrown Americans getting into politics to make their family and tribe rich.

"Homegrown Americans" often now come from low-trust immigration. Somalians, Haitians, Irish and Italians can now be "homegrown Americans."

It's just another Boomer phrase that's been redefined until it's meaningless.

Late-stage democracy will always end with the elected leaders looting everything they can. Because why wouldn't they? No-one is going to stop them and they may only have a few years to loot before they get voted out.

Sure, it's a problem that oligarchs can just buy politicians, but that's a feature of democracy, not a feature of capitalism. Kings usually won't sell out their country because they own it and want to keep it. Elected politicians are just renters and don't care what happens to the country after they're gone.

I'm not an AI lawyer, but isn't it a legal requirement to not delete documents that may be related to a court case once you're informed that you may have documents related to a court case? If so, they could end up in court themselves if they do delete them and aren't friends of powerful political figures who will protect them.

You don't get high-trust behaviour in a low-trust society. And you don't get a high-trust society when you import tens of millions of low-trust people and put them in positions of power.

Political grift is the norm in most of the world and governments have imported it into the West en masse. People in low-trust countries don't go into politics for the good of their country, they go into politics to make their family and tribe rich.

Dude, we're well into the "loot the treasury" phase of late-stage democracy. Pretty much everyone in a position of power is looting everything that isn't nailed down, which is why the reaction to the left shrieking "MUH TRUMP IS GRIFTING!" is just "yeah, whatever."

If it's legal for Congress it should be legal for everyone. Politicians just want to keep the grift for themselves.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.