This is interesting. I've noticed that most of my parrot's senses seem duller than mine (unlike with, say, dogs) - not as picky with taste (except staleness), no meaningful signs of a significant sense of smell, has trouble seeing things that are right near him sometimes, etc - but he seems more atuned to having rapid reactions to anything unusual than I am. Like, at my old place, whenever a chunk of ice would break off the roof and crash down to the ground below, he'd be reacting before my senses even registered the event. I wonder if the "high framerate" thing is in general a "fast communication with the senses" in parrots. Certainly there's a very short distance between most of their sensory organs and the brain. And it's certainly useful for a prey animal to be able to react to sudden events (like, say, a striking snake, or a diving hawk glinting through the branches)

"I'm here live . I'm not a parrot." ;)

They're intelligent social animals. Even just a change in eye contact from me alters my Amazon's behavior. He's incredibly attuned to my posture, tone of voice, mannerisms, etc, to clue in whether he's going to e.g. be getting a treat or scolded for misbehavior or whatnot. I can't imagine that a video without that back-and-forth would stimulate him.

I don't watch TV anymore, but he used to just tune it out. Rather, he'd tune into *me*. He'd laugh at the funny parts of shows and the like, not because he understood the humour, but because he was paying attention to me, and I was laughing, so he wanted to join in. And then I'd react amusedly to his taking part, he'd get attention, and getting attention was in turn a reward to him. They like getting reactions to the things they do. A video won't do that.

And yeah, he understands what screens are - same as mirrors. Some smaller psittacines are known to strongly interact with mirrors as if they're other birds, but in my experience, the larger ones don't do that; they quickly learn it's their reflection and stop caring. As a side note, I actually tried the mirror test with my Amazon twice, but each time I got a null result. You're supposed to put an unusual mark or lightweight object on their head where they can't see it, put them in front of a mirror, and if they interact with the mirror like it's another animal, they don't recognize it's their reflection; while if they use it to try to preen the hidden mark/object, it's a sign of recognition. But my Amazon didn't give a rat's arse. I might as well have put him in front of a wall for all it mattered; he gave the mark zero attention. Didn't care about the reflection of a bird. Didn't care about the mark on his head. Just sat there waiting for me to put him back on his cage :P I couldn't get him to interact with the reflection at all. Nor does he react to birds on TV. By contrast, he'll VERY MUCH interact with a real bird (he hates them all... he's very antisocial with nonhumans).

White dwarfs are composed of electron-degenerate matter. With most matter, volume changes with temperature. This is a natural check on nuclear reaction rates - as they increase, they heat up their environment, causing it to expand, reduce density, and slow the reaction. But degenerate matter's volume is almost independent of its temperature, so it lacks this natural counterbalance; degeneracy pressure is what keeps its volume, not thermal pressure. As a result it tends to be kind of... explodey ;) You have to get the temperature so high that thermal pressure becomes relevant again for it to meaningfully expand.

They're laying out their plans for up to the end of the decade. You think this is just a fraction of their NA plans, that they're hiding things from their giant "Look, We're Doing EVs!" press release?

Creating the training dataset is the *last* step. I have dozens of TB of raw data which I use to create training datasets that are only a few GB in size. Of which I'll have a large number sitting around at any point in time.

Take a translation task. I start with several hundred gigs of raw data. This inflates to a couple terabytes after I preprocess it into indexed matching pair datasets (for example, if you have an article that's published in N different languages, it becomes (N * N-1) language pairs - so, say, UN, World Bank, EU, etc multilingual document sets greatly inflate). I may have a couple different versions of this preprocessed data sitting around at any point in time. But once I have my indexed matching pair datasets, I'll weighted-sample only a relatively small subset of it - stressing higher-quality data over lower quality and trying to ensure a desired mix of languages.

But what I do is nothing compared to what these companies do. They're working with common crawl. It grows at a rate of 200-300 TB per month. But the vast majority of that isn't going to go into their dataset. It's going to be markup. Inapplicable file types. Duplicates. Junk. On and on. You have to whittle it down to the things that are actually relevant. And in your various processing stages you'll have significant duplication. Indeed, even the raw training files... I don't know about them, but I'm used to working with jsons, and that adds overhead on its own. Then during training there's various duplications created for the various processing stages - tokenization, patching with flash attention, and whatnot.

You also use a lot of disk space for your models. It's not just every version of the foundation you train (and your backups thereof) - and remember that enterprise models are hundreds of billions to trillions of FP16 parameters in their raw states - but especially the finetune. You can make a finetune in like a day or so; these can really add up.

Certainly disk space isn't as big of a cost as your GPUs and power. But it is a meaningful cost. As a hobbyist I use a RAID of 6 20TB drives and one of 2 4TB SSDs. But that's peanuts compared to what people working with common crawl and having hundreds of employees each working on their own training projects will be eating up in an enterprise environment.

Taiwan reinforces its silicon shield.

This is all to produce a peak of 240k EVs per year. Production "starts" in 2028. It takes years for a factory to hit full production. Let's be generous and say 2030.

Honda sold 1,3 million vehicles in the US alone last year - let alone all of North America, including both Canada and Mexico. If all those EVs were just for the US it'd be 18% of their sales, but for all of North America, significantly less.

In short, Honda thinks that in 2030 only maybe 1/7th to 1/8th of its North American sales will be EVs. This is a very pessimistic game plan.

It's pretty easy to offer consumers a great deal when you're willing to dump wheelbarrows of cash into a furnace to do so.

Ford made the Ford Ranger EV 1998 to 2002, then the Ford Focus Electric from 2011 to 2018 before switching to the Mach-E. They are not "new at it". They're just bad at it.

To be fair, I have a lot more hope for Ford than GM, as Farley seems to actually understand the critical importance of turning things around and the limited timeframes to do so, unlike GM, which still seems to only care about press.

Copper is not "the last mile". It's the last five meters. If that. When people talk about "the grid", they're not talking about the wiring in your walls. Which you don't have to redo anyway for adding an EV. Nobody has to touch, say, your kitchen wiring to add an EV charger.

"The grid" is the wiring leading up to your house. Those conductors are alumium, not copper. Occasionally the SER/SEU cable will occasionally be copper, but even that's generally alumium these days. And that's only to the service connection point (not even to the transformer - to the point of handoff between grid-owned and the homeowner-owned, generally right next to the house), e.g. after the service drop line with overhead service that descends down to the building. The "last mile" is absolutely not copper. Approximately zero percent of modern grid-owned wiring is copper, and even the short customer-owned connection from the drop line into the house is usually alumium.

Grids are not copper. Period. This isn't the year 1890 here.

And no, grid operators don't make money selling power. They make money providing the grid through which power is sold.

I have never seen a single utility that charges a flat grid access fee to residential consumers, anywhere on Earth.

Distinction can be hard to grasp for someone utterly ignorant on the subject

Says a guy who thinks that there's a mile of copper leading up to your house.

The grid is not made of copper. You thought it was? Copper is for home wiring, if that. Up to that point, it's alumium, bundled with steel on major lines for tensile strength. Does it look like copper to you?

As for the article: grid operators don't build out grids on a lark. They do it to sell power, because they make money selling power. If people want to buy more power because they want to charge an EV, then that's more money available for them. EVs are a boon to grid operators. They're almost an ideal load. Most charging done at night, steady loads, readily shiftable and curtailable with incentives, etc. Daytime / fast charging isn't, but that's a minority. And except in areas with a lot of hydro, most regions already have the ample nighttime generation capacity; it's just sitting idle, power potential unsold. In short, EVs can greatly improve their profitability. Which translates to any combiation of three things:

1) More profits
2) A better, more reliable grid
3) Lower rates

    * ... depending on the regulations and how competitive of an environment it is.

As for the above article: the study isn't wrong, it's just - beyond the above (huge) problem - it is based on stupid assumptions. Including that there's zero incentives made for people to load shift when their vehicles charge, zero battery buffering to shift loads, and zero change in the distribution of generation resources over the proposed timeframe. All three of these are dumb assumptions.

Also, presenting raw numbers always leads to misleading answers. Let me rephrase their numbers: the cost is $7 to $26 per person per year. The cost of 1 to 5 gallons of gas per year at California prices..

You sure you're responding to the right person?

Funny that to you, "Israel" and "Jews" are synonymous. As if all Jewish people unconditionally support all actions of the state of Israel, even those which are highly controversial within Israel itself.

This false synonymy creates an extremely harmful backlash. Stop doing it.

Ukraine is not free

Give me a list of Ukrainian prime ministers since 2000, and compare it to a list of Russian presidents since 2000 . Thanks in advance.

Even before the conflict it was the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe

This is not even remotely true. Ukraine's Rule of Law Index in 2022 was 0,50; contrast with NATO members Turkey at 0,42 and Hungary at 0,52. And its scores were dragged down by the consequences of the war in Donbas.

with a military second in size in Europe only to Russia (hence the poverty)

Ukraine's percentage of GDP spent before the current invasion was 3,2%, and that was *with* the ongoing Donbas conflict . By contrast, the US, at peace, spends 3,45% of its GDP on the military. For some European contrasts:

Azerbaijan: 4,5%
Armenia: 4,3%
Russia: 4%
Greece: 3,7%

Before the 2014 Russian invasion, Ukraine's percentage of GDP spent on the military was 1,6%.