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Comment Re:Pyramid Company (Score 1) 69

"Spacex....is actually worth trillions" why and to whom? the total valuation of the global automotive industry is several trillion, likely no more than about $4T. for the pharmaceutical industry, it's about $2T total. what exactly about this one company makes it worth as much as either - or both - of 2 of the most impactful industries of the past century?

If (yes, that's an if) Starship is successful, it will bring launch costs down to a level that completely changes how we approach space. Assuming other companies don't manage to match the feat (another big if), this could indeed make SpaceX worth trillions.

Will it? Tough to say. If SpaceX does an IPO I'll probably buy some, but I won't invest my whole retirement fund.

Comment Re:Our infrastructure isn't ready for these anyway (Score 1) 93

30A @ 240V is not uncommon for most American homes to have or be installed and that ~5kW is more than enough to cover like 90% of peoples commutes and daily driving by just plugging the car in overnight.

Over 8 hours, that's 40 kWh, which equates to around 160 miles. I think the percentage of Americans who drive 160 miles per day, on average, is a lot less than 10%. If everyone could arrange for 5 kW charging at home, there would be very, very few people who couldn't easily switch to an EV.

Even an L1 charger (15A @ 120V = ~1.8 kW) would provide enough for most peoples' daily driving. With 8 hours of charging, that's like 50 miles of range. Some days will be heavier, but if your car has 300 miles of range you can stand a few consecutive heavier-than-normal days, and if there's an L3 charger around for emergency charges on the quite rare occasion they're required, it would be fine. And because cars charge fastest when the batteries are low, those emergency charging stops could be very quick -- 5-10 minutes, just like a gas station stop.

I actually commuted for a few years in an EV with only an L1 charger at home. It was fine.

Electric charging infrastructure doesn't need to and should not mirror petrol infrastructure.

Absolutely.

Comment Re:I don't think he should be allowed to sue (Score 1) 42

Only people who didn't choose to do business with Cheeto Benito and his crime family should be allowed to sue him at this point, because anyone who is paying even the slightest amount of attention knows he's a thief and a fraud. This fucker is just mad that he's not getting as much out of the fraud as he thought he would. Fuck him.

So you think it's better if Trump can't be sued for fraud? I don't disagree with your assessment, but I think we're still all better off if Trump's scam business has to defend itself in court.

Comment Re:Pardons are an even $1 million (Score 1) 42

It only costs $1 million for a pardon. Proof. https://thehill.com/homenews/a...

I don't think there's a price sheet. The amount will depend on what you can afford and on how much heat Trump will take for granting it. That second part is a weak consideration, though, as evidenced by the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted for doing exactly what Nicolas Maduro is alleged to have done (though Maduro probably didn't, not nearly to the same degree, though he was a bad guy in a lot of ways).

Comment Re:Make iCloud optional or enable Airdrop b/w devi (Score 1) 63

Precisely! While on that subject, my M1 MacBook Air only intermittently recognizes my 1TB Sandisk SSD. Otoh, it has no issues recognizing a USB thumb drive inserted in the same thunderbolt port. As a result, I have to copy the photo folders from my iPhone into my Windows laptop, and from there move it to the SSD

Try a different USB-C cable. Either that or you have one of the dodgy models of Sandisk SSD that's about to die. Maybe a good time to buy a new one.

Comment Re:Once again, la Presidenta loses (Score 1) 117

China is more insulated from the Epstein-Iran war than most because of their solar.

Also because of coal. Honestly, more as a result of coal, though they certainly have built a lot of solar. But the reason they've been building coal plants like crazy, so much so that many of them are idled from the day they go into service, is because it was their insurance against problems with the oil supply.

I'm a fan of solar power and happy to see the world is building a lot of it, but intellectual integrity demands that we also acknowledge China's investment in coal generation capacity.

Comment Re:But what do they do? (Score 1) 3

Ok, to clarify a few things:

Current designs I've put up:

1. A modernised version of the DeHavilland DH98 and Merlin engine, where I basically fed ChatGPT and Claude with all of the known historic faults and some potential solutions to various problems, then let them run wild, feeding off each other to fix, refine, and clarify the various design. The premise here is that we're using known designs with known properties, changing only materials but doing so carefully so as to ensure that the balance is unchanged from the historic design. The aircraft is probably the least interesting part, as it would be very hard to make that safe, but a fully modernised Merlin that starts where Rolls Royce left off is something that could be built with minimal risk and could be quite interesting in its own right.

2. A High Dynamic Range microphone. This basically riffs off assorted physics technologies for measurement and the basic idea in many HDR schemes that you can split an input into the fine detail (essentially an equivalent of a mantissa) and a magnitude (essentially an exponent), producing a design that aught to permit (if it works) the same microphone with no adjustments handling everything from a nearby whisper to the roar of a jet engine -- but with all of the fine detail still captured from that engine.

3. An electric guitar that operates not by magnetic pickups but by accurate mapping of string behaviour in two dimensions via lasers, where this is then turned into an accurate representation of the sound in an external device. So it's not a synth guitar in the classic sense, it's actually modelling the waveform for each string in two dimensions precisely. The reason for doing 2D modelling is that this has the potential for novel behaviours but without an obligation for it to do so.

4. A synthesiser/wave processor that looks at everything that they knew how to do, and allows you to link it together arbitrarily. It is designed in two forms. The first is engineered to match the components, materials, and knowledge available in 1964, so it is something they could have built if sufficiently insane. The second is a modernised extrapolation of that, using modern digital electronics, where I can show that the modern version is a strict superset of any existing DAW, simply because I started with none of the assumptions and metaphors around which DAWs were subsequently designed.

5. Multiband camera. An attempt to build a digital camera that is far smaller and more compact than a 3CCD camera, but (like the 3CCD design) produces a far better picture than a conventional digital camera, where I don't stop at three frequencies but support many, albeit with the limitation that the time required for a photograph is abysmal.

Each design I've put up has a detailed hardware specification (including wiring where appropriate), validation/verification documents, and testing procedures. Software is defined by means of formal software contracts and occasionally Z-like forms. The designs are extremely detailed, although not quite at the level you could build them right there and then. However, the synthesiser is described right down to the level of individual transistors, diodes, and connectors, and the Merlin engine specifies precise materials, expected temperature ranges, material interactions (and how they're mitigated), and other such information.

Again, it's precise but not quite at the point where an engineer would feed comfortable feeding the specifications into an AI, having it order the bits online, and be sure of building something that works, but it's intended to be close enough that (provided the AIs actually did what they were supposed to) that an engineer would feel very comfortable taking the design and polishing it to working level.

If, however, an engineer looking at these designs comes to the conclusion that the AIs were utterly deluded, then obviously they can't handle something as simple as selecting candidate items from ranged data.

Submission + - Mozilla Firefox uses AI to hunt bugs and suddenly zero days do not feel so untou (nerds.xyz)

BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla says it used an AI model from Anthropic to comb through Firefoxâ(TM)s code, and the results were hard to ignore. In Firefox 150, the team fixed 271 vulnerabilities identified during this effort, a number that would have been unthinkable not long ago. Instead of relying only on fuzzing or human review, the AI was able to reason through code and surface issues that typically require highly specialized expertise.

The bigger implication is less about one release and more about where this is heading. Security has long favored attackers, since they only need to find a single flaw while defenders have to protect everything. If AI can scale vulnerability discovery for defenders, that dynamic could start to shift. It does not mean zero days disappear overnight, but it suggests a future where bugs are found and fixed faster than attackers can weaponize them.

Comment Re:Probably a good choice. (Score 1) 63

Dude, he shamelessly supports trump, giving him gifts and over a million dollars of his own money for the inauguration, not to mention Apple donating for the White House ballroom. He is not a decent human being

I wouldn't call that "supporting". He plays the game by donating to both sides, so that whoever wins, they see him as an ally. And in particular, Trump responds to obsequiousness. There is a perception that by giving money, businesses can curry favor. Not saying that doing so is a good thing, but it definitely should not be interpreted as evidence that the business leaders are necessarily in favor of Trump's policies.

Comment Re:Took You Long Enough (Score 2) 92

do you not use knives in kitchens?

oh of course you dont ive seen your food.

There actually was a push in the UK a few years ago to outlaw pointy kitchen knives, but it met with great resistance and was dropped.

However, the point remains that stabbings in the UK are actually less common that stabbings in the US. This points out that while many think that guns are the cause of the US' violence problem, the real problem is deeper: US culture is just more violent.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Inventions to stress-test AI 3

I have been using AI to see if I could invent non-trivial stuff through recycling existing ideas (because AI is bad at actually creating new things). I've been reluctant to post this in my journal, as I dislike self-promotion, but there's so much discussion on AI and whether it is useful, that this isn't really a matter of self-promotion, but rather evidence in the debate on AI as to whether you can actually do anything useful with it.

https://gitlab.com/wanderingnerd50

Comment Re:Make iCloud optional or enable Airdrop b/w devi (Score 1) 63

Apple does make great computers, phones, iPads, watches, etc. But one simple thing they could do, which wouldn't cost them anything but make their devices more useful, would be to give customers the option of picking any alternative cloud storage service (or even their own homelabs' storage solutions), instead of locking them to iCloud

Not to mention a Time Machine clone for local NAS storage. I don't want my phone backed up in anybody's cloud. I use iCloud because Apple makes it d**n near impossible to back up locally except over a wire.

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