There has been plenty of progress in using AI to control robotics; they use robotics-specific AIs for that, of course.
The fact that ChatGPT (or even LLMs in general) isn't particularly useful for robots shouldn't be a surprise, since robots (other than maybe C3PO) are about physical manipulation of objects, not about language generation.
At one point last week I pasted the first ~300 words or so of the King James Bible into an AI detector. It told me that over half of it was AI generated.
And seriously, considering some of the god-awful stuff passing peer review in "respectable" journals these days, like a paper in AIP Advances that claims God is a scalar field becoming a featured article, or a paper in Nature whose Figure 1 is an unusually-crappy AI image talking about "Runctitiononal Features", "Medical Fymblal", "1 Tol Line storee", etc... at the very least, getting a second opinion from an AI before approving a paper would be wise.
"Against oil" (meaning, development, business, jobs, etc) has been the big conservative complaint against the Liberals, that they sacrifice prosperity and jobs for their (wrong anyway) environmental tenderness.
They're now giving away precisely nothing: the commitment to get all the approvals through, the environment compromised, for a pipeline that's never going to happen.
The money simply isn't there for such a mammoth multi-project. Money is definitely there for tweaks and tricks to squeeze and extra million barrels/day out of the tar sands, and to get that extra million down various improved pipelines, for "just a few billion" in upgrades:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada...
But to fill a whole new million bbl/day pipeline, you'd need a major new oil sands mine, like the Kearl Lake Projects back in 2013, which added 880,000/day for a grand total of $20B. (Not just a new mine, you see, but facilities to dilute the bitumen, a pipeline from Edmonton to send diluent, another to send diluted bitumen back, at a billion each...15 years ago.)
So, even if there are new efficiencies, $25B for the sands expansion is conservative, and so is $25B for the next pipeline, even without the pandemic and giant '21 flood that put the last one up to $34B. After recent inflation for construction costs, $50B is really a rock-bottom estimate.
So, if they deliver a million barrels a day, each barrel has to pay the interest on $50,000, and then make a profit. They need over $40/bbl for operating costs, so they really must have over $50/bbl global oil prices...from 2030 through the early 2040s before they get into the gravy. Nobody not paid to be delusional thinks that prices will not go lower and lower as the market starts to decline. The Saudis will probably crash the price (as they did in 2014) just to drive competitors broke.
Nobody's going to risk that. That's the conclusion of the retired Imperial Oil economic/market analyst, Ross Belot, in Canada's Macleans:
https://macleans.ca/economy/wh...
So Mr. Carney can promise to shoot whales personally if they'll just build a pipeline, in the serene knowledge that it isn't going to happen. The only thing he has to do to stop a pipeline is not promise a penny of public money to back it. Since the government already had to pay for the last pipeline, he's got a popular excuse.
Yup. It's pretty hard to do the right thing when the oil cartel that has invaded Alberta keeps threatening to shit itself and is actively trying to engineer a separatist movement entirely for its own benefit. Here's hoping Carney eventually finds a way to disembowel them.
The last game Sweeney did the artwork for was ZZT. As much as I love playing around with AI art generation for fun, he's really not an expert on this.
Gas powered cars don't explode, but they definitely burn sometimes.
You must have read a lot of Slashdot: there's no elemental lithium in lithium batteries. The stuff that burns is the electrolyte, which is basically an oil.
FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:
2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195
Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.
The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)
This isn't some kind of 'our neutrino observatory is bigger than your neutrino observatory' contest.
That's exactly what it is. When your science depends on a big expensive piece of hardware that most or (best) nobody else has, that's what you tend to talk about. Especially in press releases and grant applications.
Neural networks generally don't extrapolate, they interpolate
You could test that if someone were willing to define what they mean by "generally" I suppose. I think it's fairly safe to say that they work best when they're interpolating, like any model, but you can certainly ask them to extrapolate as well.
I thought not. Your "main point" is based on two logical fallacies. You might be familiar with the saying "two wrongs don't make a right." Your "reply" was a third.
It was based on solving a maths equation.
True.
There's a big and very obvious difference between "scientific research" and "mathematics".
Ehhhhh
Nobody was out there putting clocks on satellites
Technically true, but they were definitely doing experiments. The inconsistencies in Maxwell's electrodynamics and previous physics were the hot topic of late 19th century physics. To the point where various people thought resolving them would put the finishing touches on physics. Even the popular account includes the Michealson-Morely experiment.
Einstein himself says in "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (i.e. the special relativity paper):
It is known that Maxwell’s electrodynamics—as usually understood at the
present time—when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do
not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor. The observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion of the conductor and the
magnet, whereas the customary view draws a sharp distinction between the two
cases in which either the one or the other of these bodies is in motion....
Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover
any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest that the
phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties
corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has
already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of
electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the
equations of mechanics hold good.
There were a whole bunch of relevant experiments. Lorentz reviews many of them in "On the influence of the earth's motion on luminiferous phenomena”, published in 1886.
Anyway, the author's point is not that AI can't think because it can't find the consequences of equations. Regular old numerical simulations and logic engines are pretty good at that, no AI required. His point is that AI can't think because it cannot generate ideas out of thin air, presumably the "pure reason" of ancient greek philosophy, and he uses Einstein as an example.
And as a supporting argument he used a fallacy. That's my point.
There is also the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine in California.
It has been opened and closed several times as the Feds and state of California tussle over it.
California greenies want it closed. The Feds want it to operate, even at a loss, for supply chain security.
It is currently operating with DoD subsidies, but production needs to be ramped up.
Gravity is a myth, the Earth sucks.
