I find the various LLMs are helpful as a form of search engine, enabling me to drill down to potentially useful information more quickly. However at the same time they are far worse than a search engine because they aren't able to actually give you the sources to check. When ChatGPT generates a chunk of code, if you ask it where it got it from, it will say it didn't get it from a specific site, it just knows this stuff. Which of course ends up wrong half the time. So you end up with wrong stuff confidently passed off as accurate, which is ultimately stolen from real human sources. When I was in uni it was drilled into me to list my sources. Why should LLMs be held to any different standard? Google's AI summary does show sources, at least few, which is good. I always check them.

Even Claude AI which is supposed to be geared towards coding suffers from these same problems. I am trying to do some esoteric Qt 6 programming involving OpenGL, and all the AIs really struggle here because there's a limited amount of source material to steal from. It's certainly not capable of digesting the API documents and synthesizing code to do something without first seeing someone else's code. Claude AI seems to work best if you use a popular library or framework with lots of online discussion and github code for it. The popular languages and frameworks of the day.

Make more what? Dragon capsules? Currently SpaceX has no plans to make any more dragons beyond the five they currently have. I believe the fifth capsule had its inaugural flight this year with the private Axiom-4 excursion. These dragon capsules are currently rated for just five flights each, but SpaceX and NASA are working to extend their certifications to 15 flights each. Currently the contract with SpaceX does not include additional missions that would have been flown by Boeing. While it's possible NASA could try to buy some more flights, I don't think they will. SpaceX has the falcon 9 pretty well booked, and their other resources are fixed on Starship. I'm not saying NASA "needs" the Starliner, though. Just that it's not a simple thing to substitute Dragon for Starliner.

There is also the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine in California.

It has been opened and closed several times as the Feds and state of California tussle over it.

California greenies want it closed. The Feds want it to operate, even at a loss, for supply chain security.

It is currently operating with DoD subsidies, but production needs to be ramped up.

Well it's a problem or the US too. The last bastion of American industry is heavy equipment including construction and agricultural machines. Interestingly this is also a prime industry for Europe too. A lot of stuff is still made locally. But China is now making their own versions and just beginning to exporting them. And it's a double whammy. They can make them cheaper, but choose to just barely undercut western equivalent products (say by 20%), making a huge profit.

The Trump administration seems to think so. Increased government regulation through tariffs will fix it, along with bigger government. Ironic how the GOP has done a complete 180 over the years isn't it.

Except that in the case of Canada, there was a great deal of trade in both directions, in terms of commodities and also finished goods. It was a mutually beneficial trade arrangement too. It promoted the US' interests without ham-fisted authoritarian threats. This sort of trade made the US the powerhouse it was. In other words this was a sharp shift in US government attitude from one of friendship to one of an adversary (which is really how all relationships and business deals have ever been done in Trump's life). Sadly there's no going back. The damage is done and the US will never ever recover the good will and trade benefits it once had with its closest allies and trading partners, no matter what a future Democrat does to try to undo the damage, now that Trump's attitude has become the attitude of the GOP.

With China, though, there was no abrupt shift. China's goals have always been clear. The only thing they want from the west in terms of trade is raw commodities and foreign currencies. Whereas the west demands cheap goods, full stop. So China's domination of European industry and economies has been ongoing for years, and it's benefited by European policy and attitudes. China is happy to build high quality items and sell them for a premium, but there's no very little demand from the west. If there was demand, we wouldn't have seen local manufacturing capability disappear in the first place. Tariffs are not going to change these fact.

Very interesting point. For all the talk of how efficient EVs are, the fact is at higher speeds you need much more energy to accelerate. In other words going from 0-20 in an instant requires not much kw compared to trying to accelerate from 60 to 80 mph.. This is why EVs have such ludicrous motor power ratings for their direct drive systems. And in reality all EVs have a gear train even if it's a fixed ratio with few parts. It's a real head scratcher why more don't use a two speed gearbox to better handle the difference in energy requirements for high speed acceleration vs low speed. Could use much smaller and cheaper electric motors too with good efficiency.

In some ways US standards are way stricter than European. In other ways, not so much. So mainly the standards are different and focus on different aspects of safety. American standards focus on things like rollover protection more than European standards do. US crash test standards are higher too. I think this might have to do with everyone driving big SUVs here in North America. Europe focuses on other safety features including driver assistance technologies. AI tells me that European regs are now requiring emergency button to call for help. Also Europe allows headlights that have no clear high or low beam, but can transition between as the car detects oncoming traffic, and steerable headlights, which have stricter requirements in the US. Also different configurations are allowed for tail lights than the US does.

Besides the tariffs and outright ban on Chinese EVs, they would have to change their vehicles for North America, and I suspect they will once the US reverses the ban.

Canada is about to allow Chinese EVs in and reduce tariffs, but the reality is that only chinese Teslas will met safety regs here. Canada is way too small a market for other Chinese companies to build special vehicles for.

I always thought most CD-Rs have a pretty short shelf life. And recordable DVDs too. Thy use ink that changes color when the laser heats it to store data instead of a pit, and that ink degrades.

Caldera Linux was first released in 1997, which is 28 years ago. Slackware Linux goes back 32 years. Red Hat Linux was 30 years ago now. Hard to believe. I first used Red Hat 5.1 28 years ago during the libc to glibc transition. KDE 1.0 came out about that same time and was a huge leap forward in Linux desktop usability for new users. Also StarOffice 5. Memory lane.

Maybe, maybe not. However given that we know who the poster is and what he has contributed to the Arduino community, I would give what he says a lot more weight than what you say!

Although I do have to ask him, would it be okay if Qualcom took Arduino in the direction you've taken Teensy, with a proprietary, closed-source,and un-clone-able boot loader to prevent clones of the new Arduino boards? I'm quite torn on that one.

This is the first I've heard of this. I've been using my own phones for years. Right now I'm using my own phone which is a pixel 4a. I guess it's on the whitelist because I'm getting what it claims is lte+, which I assume is 4g?

AI slop documentaries are becoming mainstream now, sadly. I can only imagine what History channel is like these days, not having watched any of that in years.

I'm not surprised Curiosity Stream has jumped on the AI gravy train. I hope a lot of their creators will withhold permission to sell their work for AIs to copy, but I don't know under what terms their creators publish on that platform. I had thought it different and better in how creators were treated than on youtube but perhaps not.

Europe is plenty big. As big as the US but denser.

Sure most high speed companies run lines about 500km long, but there are plenty of connections through large parts of Europe that are high speed. And some individual runs are longer than 500km. You can travel through must of western Europe on high speed trains for distances much longer than 500km.

Someone talked about NIMBY and was modded troll, but the fact is they were right. Among the biggest opposition to high speed rail are NIMBY folks, and for understandable reasons. High speed, grade-separated rail really carves up the landscape, much like a freeway does, which deeply impacts people living near the proposed rail lines. Freeways have the advantage that their right of ways were carved out decades ago and people are used to them (and see the value). This could be true of rail also, but it would take several generations.

And when I see proposals to go from LA to SF, or from NYC to Chicago, I think that's great for people in those cities, but what about all the communities in between? What's the benefit to them? Is the high speed rail going to make some stops? By itself high speed rail comes up lacking in my opinion. We require much more than high speed rail, but that's never going to happen.

What should be of interest to slashdotters isn't the irony of someone associated with cryptography losing their private key, but that there exists an open source system to securely allow voting and also to absolutely verify that the vote was counted. All while still maintaining anonymity. Barring the issue of losing private keys on the part of those administering the vote, this sort of system is very interesting, and really could be used to promote voter engagement and democracy. I had heard of it before, but kind of forgot about it.