Comment Re:Overheard (Score 1) 23
the vehicles start looking more like a wingless airplane than a car.
And what does the company's name mean?
Comment Re:Overheard (Score 4, Informative) 23
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.
Comment Arrokoth is such a neat body. (Score 2) 12
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.
Comment Me too! (Score 2) 12
Sometimes I wake up and start doing new science. But usually I just roll over and go back to sleep.
Comment They won't build a dann thing (Score 1) 45
Comment Re:SEC?? (Score 4, Informative) 213
pay for access to insider(outsider?) trading info?
He's creating a "middle class" - they will get the info after the regular insiders, but before hoi polloi.
He should have thought of selling multiple levels of higher tiers.
Comment Woo-hoo! (Score 5, Funny) 213
For a small fee you can get your bullshit before everyone else.
Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 155
Yeah, there's two main problems:
1) People entering the wrong fields. For example, medicine really needs workers, at all levels, but not enough people are going into it.
2) Certain manual labour fields, like field work and home construction, because... well, I think we all know why there's a shortage of workers in those fields.
Comment Re:That's stucking fupid. (Score 1) 262
I should have added:
"In general, renaming things does not fix a problem."
Though heaven knows, lots of stupid people try it.
Comment That's stucking fupid. (Score 5, Insightful) 262
Why not just discard the whole idea of DST instead of putting it into permanent effect?
The whole concept is an attempt to redefine time as a way of addressing perceived social problems. Schedule activities around the clock, not the clock around activities.
Comment I'm surprised (Score 4, Interesting) 147
Not surprised that someone exploited a vulnerability, but surprised that deployed military personnel are allowed to use civilian communication systems.
Comment Re:LLM output is Grey Goo and Ecophagy. (Score 2) 155
Or let's put this another way. Show of hands - how many of you "spicy autocorrect" / "stochastic parrot" people had "AI will start mass-solving Erdos problems" on your forecast list a couple years back? Huh, none of you? Fascinating!
Take some time to reassess your priors. And while you do so, understand that, yes, they are doing logic / reasoning.
Comment Re:LLM output is Grey Goo and Ecophagy. (Score 4, Interesting) 155
They weren't discovered by an LLM. They were known conjectures that were proven by an automated solving language that was linked to an LLM.
I'll take "Things That Didn't Happen For $200", Alex.
Only a handful of meaningful proofs have ever been done by automated formal theorem solvers (the Four Colour Theorem being the most noteworthy example - but its proof is so long that humans can't verify it). By contrast, AI tools have been solving Erdos problems en masse. The majority of them just bog-standard commercial models. In case you need help, the only ones on that list that were hybrid (AI / non-AI) in the actual solving phase are:
1) AlphaProof / DeepMind Prover Agent / AlphaProof Nexus
2) Aristotle (Harmonic)
3) Seed Prover / Seed Prover 1.5 (ByteDance)
4) AxiomProver (Axiom Math)
In each of the above, LLMs come up with the lemmas / strategies but then use Monte Carlo search ("brute force") or likewise to investigate what they came up with. These are a minority. In the "AI Standalone" category, these "hybrid" tools made up only ~20% of attempts and successful proofs. Hybrid tools actually made more of a contribution in the "AI Alongside Literature" (related literature found afterward) and even more of the "AI Building On Literature" (related literature known beforehand) categories, which is the opposite of what people like you expect.
And even with the hybrid tools, it's still the AI doing the heavy lifting when it comes to strategy. Non-AI theorem solvers, again, don't have a spectacular record for churning out novel proofs to unsolved problems. Tools like Lean are more about mathematical rigour - a passive environment that requires a driver (a human or AI) to feed it actual strategies, lemmas, and proof steps. And no, you cannot brute force "strategy" in the vast majority of cases, which is, again, why automated theorem solvers don't have much of a track record with unsolved mathematical problems.
Let's take a random example: the disproof of the unit distance conjecture. It was solved purely by a general purpose commercial GPT model, not custom-trained to mathematics, with no external tools. Read what the various mathematicians reviewing / commenting on it have to say (sections #3 and onward). Seriously, don't skip reading them, actually read them. This was one of Erdos's favourite problems. He mentioned it commonly in his lectures. Essentially every mathematician working in complex geometry has thought about this problem. The approach that the model came up with was highly novel approach, based on CM-fields and class field towers.
I know you don't want to accept this reality, but it is the reality, so you better improve your ability to accept it,. The field of mathematics is already doing so.
Comment Not age limits; go after recommendation systems (Score 3) 59
This kills doom scrolling, this kills these weird echo chambers where people look up a topic, and end up in a doom feedback loop most cults would be proud of.
If you don't search for it, you don't see it. Full stop.
This would pretty much break the back of the US tech firms in many areas.
I read an article from long ago in the very earliest days of youtube where they came up with a simple new recommendation system and it increased the chances of someone watching another video by something like 17,000%.
That was a simple one to drive traffic. But now, it is getting far more insidious. If you are a man looking at comments on a he said she said relationship video, you will generally see comments supporting the man's side. If you are a woman, you will see comments supporting the woman's side.
Just kill this sort of algorithmic behavior.
These dark patterns are nasty. If you go to that big shopping site, and look up something like, "replacement battery for pixel 7 pro", you will get a screen mostly of the correct item. If you sort by price (the last thing they want you to do) you will get a screen full of spatulas, insoles, and things which they very much know you are not looking for. They want to train you to not sort by price.
These algorithms are toxic to human society. They are a huge reason we are seeing such insane polarization in things like politics, but also why you have people feeling marginalized and attacked, when it is just influencers telling them that this is the case. I live in a place where certain very tiny group rights are not very well respected. I had a member of this group telling me they are going to leave before the government kills them. WTF? While my local government doesn't particularly like them, it isn't sending out death squads. Not only is their mental health more threatened by this sort of social media crap, than by the behavior of the government, the government itself is responding to people who are doom looped into hating this particular group.
This sort of crap is poison all over the world. Under 16 bans and other crap is a tiny step, but the reality is that if the poison is there, it is still bad, and teens will still end up accessing it in droves. If the poison is removed, the age ban largely becomes moot.