I guess you could go semi off-grid... i.e. turn the master breaker off at the meter most of the time. My installer says that if you haven't used any power from the grid in 30 days, the power company will contact you to find out what's up, and if you haven't used any in 60 days they will definitely contact you. Of course, you'll still have to pay the basic connection fees even if you avoid actually using a non-trivial amount of their power.

My power company already reduced the credit from $0.09/kWh to $0.04/kWh, and changed so they net out the credits and debits each billing period, where before they'd allow credits to carry over for up to 12 months. My ROI estimate is based on the current deal, which of course could change. Probably will, somewhat. I do expect the price to go up over time. Right now I'm paying $0.07/kWh off-peak -- and of course with the battery I should never pay on-peak prices.

I just installed solar + battery on my house (full commission is this afternoon, meaning I'll be able to net meter against the grid). As things stand now, the ROI is there, but the payback period is a bit long (~10 years), but that's only because my electricity is pretty cheap ($0.12/kWh is the average price here; I'm on a TOU plan where I pay $0.28 on-peak (6-10pm weekdays) and $0.06/kWh off-peak). Given the grid challenges I think it's reasonable to expect prices to go up and knock a couple of years off that ROI.

Of course, having the government pay for 30% of the system definitely helped, and that's not available after December 31. Unless/until it gets reinstated by a future administration.

Kind of, yes, and clearly we should stop, but this isn't the same thing. We're supporting an ally that has gone off the reservation, not doing the bad thing ourselves, and that distinction does matter.

Indeed. The US actions toward Venezuela are worse than China's against Taiwan.

That's true, and bad, but also completely different. China has much more intrusive spying of its own citizens plus actively and deliberately suppresses any kind of dissenting press (meaning shuts them down and throws them in jail or disappears them, not just ceases inviting them to press conferences) and openly and energetically works to block citizen access to any source of information not under the party's control.

Your post was largely a list of false equivalencies between pairs of vaguely-similar things, but this one has to take the cake.

I'm not prepared to agree that credit scores are actually a bad thing, but even if I were, those scores just rate how good people are at managing money (and whether they manage their money the way the banks like), not anything like a Chinese social score.

Indeed.

All true, and I don't think any of this is particularly "bad". Trading partners leverage their advantages, that's how it works. We let ourselves get into a bad situation on rare earths. That's hardly China's fault.

No, it's really not the "same shit". You're pointing out a bunch of bad things that we're doing, things that are objectively not equivalent to the worse things China is doing, and calling them equivalent. If you're willing to play that game, every country is terrible, because all of them are imperfect. The degree of badness matters, and the system's interest in and options for correcting the badness also matter.

Well, there's some reason to hope that American voters may realize that what our government is doing is not what we want, and vote to change it. That option doesn't really exist in China. OTOH, there's no guarantee that American voters will wise up, so...

His claim that we're as far away as ever implies that he has some ability to discern how far from AGI we are. My point is that he does not, no one does.

There's another objection that I did not raise, but it's worth mentioning: His contention that we have made no progress implies that the observable progress we've made over the last decades, and especially the last five years, is actually not progress at all. That implies that it must actually be motion in a different direction, orthogonal to the direction required to achieve AGI, because clearly he cannot be claiming that there has been no movement. If that's the claim, well, he's just delusional.

It is, of course, possible that all of our progress has been in the wrong direction entirely and that therefore we've made no progress. I think that's unlikely, because it certainly looks like we're moving in the right direction, but we can't fundamentally know what constituted progress and what didn't until we arrive, which brings me back to my point about the unknowability of our position.

"Make America healthy again"; unless it's bad for business.

Do you think you'll still feel that the presidency is above the law, allowed to override or ignore Congress, when a Democrat is in the office? I think the theory of the all-powerful executive that Trump is pushing is clearly unconstitutional, but let's suppose it becomes the law of the land. Do you actually think you'll like that outcome?

This really isn't accurate. Yes, SCOTUS has stayed a lot of injunctions, but I think most of the rulings on the merits -- where they actually do have to give some plausible reasoning -- will go the other way. I think the Roberts court wants to give Trump his way on basically everything, and I think they'll employ a lot of very twisty logic to justify what they can, issuing a lot of bad ruling along the way, but most of his actions are so wrong that they'll ultimately have to shut them down.

Nonsense.

No one knows how far we are from AGI, and anyone who tells you they do is either deluded or lying. It's impossible to know until either (a) we achieve it or (b) we have a sufficiently well-developed theory of intelligence that we can explain it. And, actually, even knowing whether we've built AGI is difficult without the explanatory theory, because without the theory we can't even define what AGI is.

We might be decades away, or we might have already done it and just not noticed yet.

About the only thing you can say for certain is that there is no logical reason to believe that we won't build AGI eventually. Unguided evolution, which is just random variation and competitive selection, achieved it. Our own knowledge creation processes are also variation and selection, but because they operate at an abstract level without the need to modify a physical genotype and wait for phenotypic expression and outcome, they run many orders of magnitude faster. So we will succeed at creating AGI unless we collectively decide not to, and collectively decide to be very serious about enforcing a ban on AI research.

There similarly is no reason to believe that AI won't become superintelligent. Silicon-based intelligence has obvious advantages over the much less-capable substrate that evolution cobbled together. And even if that weren't the case, we would just devise better options. So, the only logical argument against superintelligence is that there is some law of physics that dictates an upper bound to intelligence, and that the peak levels of human intelligence have already achieved it. And even if there is an upper limit on intelligence, and we're it, we should absolutely expect our AIs to reach the same level BUT be orders of magnitude faster than we are, thanks to better miniaturization and faster signal propagation. Imagine the smartest people in the world, but make them able to think and communicate 1000 times faster. Could we even distinguish that from superhuman intelligence? And it seems far more likely that there is no upper bound on intelligence.

The author of TFA may be right that some people are using discussion of AGI and ASI as a way to amass political power now, but that doesn't change the underlying reality that AGI and ASI are almost certainly coming, even if we have absolutely no idea when. Personally, I think it's more likely that the author is uncomfortable thinking about the implications of the arrival of AGI and ASI and prefers to retreat into political theories that keep humans in the pre-eminent position, maintaining the comfortable view that we only have to be concerned about what humans do to each other.

FTFY.

For years they adamantly insisted they didn't need to upgrade their room making and navigation tech while Asian companies hungrily iterated improvements.
When other companies integrated vacuum AND mopping tech, Roomba refused because they'd rather try to sell you 2x separate $200 devices.

This is simply a case where an early leader got it's head so far up it's own ass it didn't realize it was being left behind. Or rather, it saw all the signs and insisted they were wrong.

Oh well. Evolution requires death of the unfit.

"Polar bears are still sadly expected to go extinct this century," with two-thirds of the population gone by 2050," says the lead researcher on a new study from the University of East Anglia in Britain.

Well.
As recently as 2018 widespread studies showed that only 3 of 20 wild population groups were decreasing, and the overall number of polar bears was increasing steadily.

Now the propaganda engines have gotten going, the litany is "well we didn't know the data very precisely before so we were guessing, making it appear that populations were growing when they weren't"

Funny how data is only considered precise when it validates that the sky is falling.

There are two polar possibilities (ofc there are gradations between, for the pedants) :

94% of the time Trump is wrong and the Supreme Court is simply ruling on ideological grounds to support him
Or
This is a signal of vastly out of control lawfare, where legions of well funded legal teams cherry pick activist ideological judges to give them the rulings they want, which then fail when finally tested against strict rules of constitutionality

Personally I'd say leftists are just pissed that their usual passing lane is blocked - using the courts when they can't get legislation passed has been their (rather reliably successful) tactic for 50 years.

iRobot and Amazon say EU approval was the problem. Not sure if they had a specific reason to be selectively truthful and focus on only one of multiple regulatory hurdles; but they don't mention the US.

It also looks like the sale is basically formalizing their plan to gut themselves. Shockingly enough; firing everyone you can and switching to rebadging stuff from an ODM because that's cheaper puts you in "what would you say you do here?" territory pretty quickly.

230 prevents sites from being prosecuted. So, right now, they do b all moderation of any kind (except to eliminate speech for the other side).

Remove 230 and sites become liable for most of the abuses. Those sites don't have anything like the pockets of those abusing them. The sites have two options - risk a lot of lawsuits (as they're softer targets) or become "private" (which avoids any liability as nobody who would be bothered would be bothered spending money on them). Both of these deal with the issue - the first by getting rid of the abusers, the second by getting rid of the easily-swayed.