It's quaint that you think the United States is still a republic. It's a monarchy, and Trump's handlers are likely moving currently to make sure that when Vance succeeds him, that the Executive branch and a Congress that will be, through the use of naked force if necessary, remain filled with Republican paper tigers to complement the paper tigers in the Supreme Court, settles into the oligarchy the Framers always really intended it to be. The military will largely be used to recreate the American hemispheric hegemony. The National Guard and ICE will be used as foot soldiers within the US to "secure" elections.

The morons that elected that diseased wicked and demented man have destroyed whatever the hell America was. As a Canadian, I can only hope we can withstand this hemispheric dominance and the raiding of our natural resources to feed the perverse desires of the child molesters, rapists, racists and psychopaths that have already taken control of the US.

Doubtless, I will be downvoted by the remaining MAGA crowd here. You know, the guys that pretended they refused to vote Democrat because Bernie wasn't made leader, but are to a man a pack of Brown Shirts eagerly awaiting the time when they imagine they can take part in the defenestration of American society.

> The far more sensible way to view things when living in an infinite thermal bath of energy separated from absolute zero by a high value resistance is exergy defined as the available energy to do useful work.

We do not live in an infinite thermal bath of energy. It is, in fact, very very finite.

Exergy is based on the environment; Specifically, if you take some environment and bring the energy to equilibrium. This will be important in a bit, because you say a very dumb thing...

> Say the Carnot efficiency was maximized at 100C over room temperature of 300k, that would be 25% or 1-(300/400) because it penalizes you for the heat you got for free, the 300C

And there is the dumb thing.

You definitionally can not use any of the energy at 300C because that's your rejection temperature. You're not "using 100% of the heat energy you paid for" not only because you did not pay for the ambient heat, you have no mechanism in this scenario to move it to a lower temperature reservoir (and extract work from it) because it's already the lowest temperature in your system - by definition.

So yeah I guess "If you change the reality of the situation you can get different results" is technically true, but means nothing. You threw out the word 'exergy' (as if it was wholly unrelated to Carnot efficiency?!) and then quietly completely changed the parameters of the problem to do some bogus math. Exergy is about bringing a system's environment to equilibrium, and you tried to redefine the environment from a realistic and practical "Earth's surface" to a hypothetical "The entire universe."

> The earth has about 400k volts stored between its upper atmosphere and the ground where we live, with a net charge against true neutral of only a few volts making the surface voltage 200,000 or so. Your absolute electric car efficiency therefore goes from 200,800 volts to 200,000 volts never using the remaining potential to true neutrality.

For someone who claims to have a master's degree in mechanical engineering, I'd hope you'd have a better understanding that the Carnot Theorem only applies to heat engines and thermal gradients, not electromagnetic gradients.

Understanding that all voltages are relative, and that it makes no sense to use the average voltage between the ionosphere and the Earth's surface when evaluating anything other than discussing the voltage between the ionosphere and the Earths surface, is also something one should expect from someone with an advanced engineering degree.

> But thatâ(TM)s stupid because the current never flows to true neutral and canâ(TM)t flow to true neutral because of the giant resistor in the sky

It's stupid because even if it could flow from whatever the fuck "True neutral" is supposed to mean (midway point that is arbitrarily significant?), you're still dealing with a gradient that's tens of miles long but your car is only several feet high. Even if you created a conductive path to discharge the ionophere through your car, you'd still only get a fraction of a volt.

None of that is relevant here though, because you' don't use Carnot efficiency to describe something not operating with the flow of heat energy.

> So saying a thermodynamic process is effectively described in absolute terms by Carnot is just as silly as saying electric cars are less than 1% efficient.

Well no, because Carnot efficiency is a well established principle of thermodynamics - a direct consequence of the second law - that actually works in both theory and practice, and the electric car thing is some delusional bullshit you came up with. Big difference.
=Smidge=

They're dragging buzzwords through the water, so see whether they get any nibbles.

Your MBA/PHB eats this shit right up.

Well, I am still on fvwm and I have been for the last 30 years. I see not need to go to any other desktop as it works perfectly well and is customized to exactly hat I want. There are tons of other good and sane window-managers out there.

KDE? Gnome? I could not care less. This is not Windows, where you can be forced to use a specific broken desktop.

That thing is a partially built wreck that cannot compete with X11 on possibilities.

It is called "sane and solid engineering" and "not falling for any mindless hype". I guess you lack experience with both of these.

There are a number of problems with LLM-type AI being rushed in this fast. It can take jobs where the occasional massive screw-up does not matter much. Callcenters are probably one of those. The second one is that there are still not enough real applications that would generate profit and the number of failures is rising, while the number of successes is not. Hence this thing has gotten way too large and basically must collapse and the only question is when. Also, many are in denial and think they have a success, when really, they have a failure.

This could, for example, lead to a scenario where a lot of the workforce gets replaced (10% would be a lot) and then LLMs go away or become massively more expensive because the flood of investor money has run dry. Another one is LLMs finally find enough useful use-cases to justify the expenses of running and maintaining them, but the mistakes they make eliminate all profits by expensive lawsuits being won. And some more like that.

Yep, that is part of the money-laundering. The only reason ransomware payments went up dramatically is that with crapto you could finally launder large amounts of money. Before they were laughably low, like the $200 demand a person I know got. On that you cannot grow a larger criminal enterprise.

More like "dark times"...

Why would I have a prediction? Stupid actions have the most random effects. That is one reason they are stupid.

I currently have a student thesis running on that question. Results so far are that AI does not find issues above toy level reliably and not basically not at all on CVE level. Fine for a non-network connected prototype, a disaster for production code. At the same time, AI provides a ton of help for attackers that they did not have before.

I have a combination of prescriptions that mean that I can't use contact lenses. I see quite a lot of people wearing glasses, and Zenni, Warby Parker, and the other online companies have said they sell a decent number of frames with plano lenses (meaning no prescription), presumably for people who want the look.

Eventually, you won't be able to tell. Someone will come in wearing glasses, and the tech is going to be too small and streamlined. There are also companies working on embedding augmented reality capabilities in contact lenses fed by tiny cameras placed just out of the field of vision. You'd be able to see them only in very specific circumstances. Power feed is a primary challenge right now, but it's probably not an unsolvable problem.

Just looking at the technical side, the cost to the end-user of streaming that much data would be exorbitant. Compressed video or even once-per-second snapshots would eat up all the mobile data, and the battery life would be measured in single digit hours.

No one else is going to risk making a part that one of the big defense contractors has under copyright with an exclusivity lock even if the US government says they can. The smaller ones just can't afford the effects of a lawsuit or the risk of treble damages if they do. That's why forcing a right to repair into the contracts is so important.