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Comment Re:Yes Google Is Bad. (Score 1) 99

And because the meta for YouTube is to pump out as many videos as possible, so that a channel owner has more 'content' for YouTube to be jamming ads into, from which the channel owner gets a sliver of payback from, there is a constant drive to push new videos out as fast as possible, so anything that slows down publishing new videos gets kicked to the wayside. The channels that use AI narration just push the script through an AI-driven text-to-speech system, and don't care whether it's using the right pronunciation for heterophones (i.e., talking about the bow of a ship and pronouncing it like the 'bow' of 'bow and arrow', when they could go back and tweak the script to have 'bough' instead of 'bow' to force a particular pronunciation, but that's additional work and time), and then just accept YouTube's default captioning because that's easier and faster; adding captions manually would slow down their pushing out slop even further.

Comment Re:What size exaclty? (Score 1) 168

As I posted above, 100kWh of battery charging in 7 minutes requires a delivery of more than 850kW of power to the car. A home circuit rated for 100A at 220V is 22kW, 1/38 the needed power, so the 7 minute charge becomes almost four and a half hours at home, assuming that you have nothing else drawing power.

Comment Re:This is the right direction (Score 1) 168

7 minute stop is getting close to the same amount of time it takes to fill up a gas tank and the equivalent time to going into a convenience store to get something while you're pumping gas.

If you assume a 100kWh battery, charging it in 7 minutes means that your one charging station has to deliver more than 850,000kW of power to your car. Good luck finding a charging site with megawatt-scale power delivery, and even more luck finding one that isn't splitting that power delivery among eight or sixteen charging stations.

Comment Re:simple question (Score 3, Insightful) 221

Because 90% of the actual discussion ad business is done outside of the meeting in informal settings, often in a chance meeting.

It's all about the visuals. In a Zoom meeting, you can't be seen to be 'actively concerned' about climate change, so you're not going to get the publicity that having reporters photograph you displaying your deep concern about the climate and working to hammer out an agreement to phase out fossil fuels that will wind up honored more in its abrogation than its compliance. From the article: "But the real difference from half a century ago is that fossil fuel alternatives are ready for prime time." -- as Spain clearly demonstrated on 28 April 2025, when wind and solar was supplying 71% of the produced power, and a 5-second interruption caused tripouts across the Iberian peninsula and southern France, resulting in a total power outage lasting ten hours or more.

Comment Re:Farm pasture versus concrete buildings? (Score 1) 71

Are they comparing farm pasture temperature readings versus temperature readings of concrete buildings and paved parking lots?

The development around previously-agrarian weather sites into urban heat islands is already a big contributor to the rise in the temperature record attributed to anthropogenic CO2 emissions causing climate change. Now they'll just have a way to double the claimed harm -- the CO2 emissions from the power plants fueling the data centers, and the waste heat from the centers themselves sited on ex-farmland.

Comment Re:I don't get how this kind of thing works (Score 1) 122

Or with a router that lets you save access logs, track the host names the fridge accesses, and add them to a custom host table that maps them all to 0.0.0.0 -- and if it uses direct IP addresses for their ad servers, put them on a block list. If the ad connection attempt fails to exit your local network, you don't get any ads.

Comment Re:what? (Score 4, Interesting) 194

The price being what's marked on the shelf tag isn't the problem; the problem is going to the supermarket at, say, 0600 on a Tuesday morning and the 28-ounce container of Maxwell House coffee is $14.99, but if you shop at 1100 on a Saturday, the same product is tagged $16.99, because there are more shoppers and more demand. Or, in a more excessive case of fearmongering ridiculous scenarios, using AI hooked to the cameras that are all through stores to track shoppers, judge their financial status based on their appearance, and scale prices accordingly -- not only would this require a great deal more discrimination on the part of the AI system than they seem to be capable of now, but has the additional overhead of tracking the tagged price for the customer that took the product off the shelf and link it to the register -- and it doesn't account for trivial counters like person A doing the shopping, then turning the cart over to person B for the checkout.

Comment Re: multi-day? sure, with embedded charging (Score 1) 179

Lots of technical hurdles and scaling issues, but I think the chemistry and physics could allow it.

It's not the chemistry or physics that will determine if it gets done; it will be the economics of it. The power will have to come from somewhere, so even if a government uses taxpayer funds to pay for embedding these inductive charging circuits in the roads, it will need a secondary system to identify who's getting power from those circuits so they can be billed for it.

Comment Re:Say no more. (Score 1) 20

It's basically Boston Dynamics' "Spot" robot (a so-called "robot dog" platform) with wheels in place of "paws".

And from the image showing the package just being dropped out the back, it's perpetuating the account I recall from many years ago about MIT shipping a recording accelerometer to CalTech via, IIRC, UPS, with it recording periods of weightlessness punctuated by accelerations of up to 30G.

Comment Re:Well, that's the point (Score 2) 79

So, all parents have a natural incentive to make the Internet safer for kids. It makes things so much easier on them! And it aligns with their sense of decency too (you have so many other ways to get your hands on smut and violence and dangerous toys, you don't need all that on the internet too).

Yes, because burying an identification that essentially broadcasts to every site that a computer connects to that the user signed into the computer is underage couldn't possibly be used to target underage users for nefarious purposes. This sounds like an upcoming entry for another in the ReasonTV YouTube channel's "Great Moments in Unintended Consequences" videos ("Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?").

Comment Re:Task-based Education (Score 1) 235

People bemoaning LibreOffice not miming Microsoft Office are more likely people who have a Task-Oriented understanding of the software

My first thought reading the article was to snicker at the mental image of people saying "This office productivity suite that isn't Microsoft Office is worse than Microsoft Office because it doesn't look/work exactly like Microsoft Office" and wondering how they managed to get themselves so deeply grafted into the look and feel of Office that they're unable to cope with the concept that a different program will almost certainly have functions in different places.

Comment Re:Read carefully: proposed != passed (Score 1) 123

The problem, as I believe the YouTuber 'Loyal Moses' (if I'm remembering the name correctly) has pointed out in his uploads, is that once a platform is put in place where there is a central clearinghouse where STL files have to pass review before they are printable, is that this makes it easy to add new categories of 'banned' object geometries, where the prohibition is extended from an issue of fabricated public safety and extended to commercial convenience -- putting in a provision to make the printing of objects protected under intellectual property provisions, so an STL for a bust of, say, Iron Man would violate the copyright on the likeness of the character, and suddenly fails validation and becomes unprintable. Washington's proposed legislation would require STL files to be submitted to a verification service to be approved before they could be printed. Suppose you're working for a company developing a product using 3D printing for prototyping; is your company going to trust that the 3D designs you're required to submit to this verification service couldn't be obtained illicitly by a competitor and used to get a competing product out the door faster?

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