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Submission + - Tesla imports $29,000 USD ($39,490CAD) Chinese made Model 3 Premium to Canada

ArmoredDragon writes: After Canada dropped its 106.1% tariff on Chinese imports to 6.1%, (which is Canada's standard tariff rate for most favored nations) and raised 25% tariffs against the United States, Tesla moved its inventory manufactured in Fremont, CA back to the US and began importing its Shanghai produced Model 3 to take advantage of the lower rates. This presented a problem for the Canadian government, which currently has a 49,000 unit cap for Chinese vehicle imports, as Tesla already had all the necessary infrastructure in place to begin shipping and distributing cars, where the Chinese competitors such as BYD do not. By becoming the first mover, Tesla would consume most or all of the 49,000 cap before any other competitors have a chance to sell any units.

It's worth emphasizing that this is the premium version of the Model 3, not the newer but lower cost Standard version. It also appears to be made to the same specification as Tesla vehicles that were already being sold in Canada, including using the US EPA standards for EV range estimates, as opposed to the more internationally used WLTC or NEDC standards, or even the Chinese CLTC standard. Deliveries are expected to begin no later than June.

Submission + - Chrome silent install of 4GB AI model without consent gets expensive. (thatprivacyguy.com)

couchslug writes: Widespread unasked for downloads devour bandwidth squandering energy:

From the parent article:

"Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed [1]. The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched.

This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.

The legal analysis is the same one I gave for the Anthropic case. The environmental analysis is new. At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. That is the environmental cost of one company unilaterally deciding that two billion peoples' default browser will mass-distribute a 4 GB binary they did not request."

Comment Re:Wildfires in outer space? (Score 1) 77

Got me curioser, so I googled it. One source said what I thought:

https://www.scientificamerican...

"Because gravity is necessary for density differences to arise, neither buoyancy nor convection occur in a zero-gravity environment such as space. Consequently, the combustion products accumulate around the flame, preventing sufficient oxygen from reaching it and sustaining the combustion reaction. Ultimately the flame goes out."

and

"Researchers learned that flames extinguish themselves."

and

"Oxygen could still reach a flame in a gravity-free environment if someone blew the gas into the flame or let it "diffuse" in. It is the diffusion process that spreads the scent of a perfume in a room without air circulation: the perfume slowly mixes with the air to try to achieve a uniform distribution. This process, however, is too slow to sustain a flame."

Other sites don't directly contradict this, but say fires in the ISS are dangerous because smoke doesn't rise and set off smoke detectors on ceilings like in homes, so they install smoke detectors in the ventilation ducts. Also that fires on the ISS can survive on lower levels of oxygen than humans, and thus are much more dangerous if they linger on. That's confusing; if the smoke doesn't rise, then wouldn't it smother the fire like the first site says? But if the ISS has moving air from ventilation ducts, maybe that is what feeds oxygen to the fires.

Thanks for tricking me into not being so lazy :-) But all I learned is that I don't know.

Comment Communists demand Communism (Score 0) 82

So yeah your AI can outperform a doctor that gets 5 minutes with the patient before having to move on to the next one in order to keep their private equity Masters satisfied.

So, suppose, we stick it to the "private equity Masters", compel them to double the number of doctors — forget for a second, who is going to pay for them — and afford them a whopping 10 minutes with the patient.

ChatGPT will still beat humans... And it will be getting better with every month, whereas the humans will not...

Comment Don't seek an ideal (Score 0) 82

A new study from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess found that an OpenAI reasoning model outperformed experienced ER doctors at diagnosing and managing patient cases

AI is sufficiently anthropomorphic to be capable of making mistakes. Demanding perfection from it is stupid. It does not need to be error-free. It just needs to be better than humans...

Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 192

It isn't colonial, it is industrial. The current format of school is that of preparing for a factory workforce. We are post industrial, knowledge/AI/Whatever it will be called workforce.

Educators need to come to grip with getting EVERY child their MAX educational value we can. This means breaking the rows and columns of desks in a classroom, and getting kids their most valuable education they can get. This means some will do much better than others. Talent has gradations. Not everyone can be a Astro Physics expert.

I spent 20 years working in K-12 in a suport role. The issues vary greatly across population densities and social and economic status. The large district I worked for (~55,000 students) featured everything from schools where every kid must be prepared to go to college, to trying to arrest the pregnancy and dropout rates.

The problem is when education is treated as a monolithic bloc. Issues vary incredibly widely from school to school, from neighborhood to neighborhood. An additional problem is the attack stemming from the anti-tax crowd on public education, eroding budgets and thus paychecks, generating disrespect for teachers, and causing many to leave the profession for something that pays better. That leads to erosion of the system and it starting to break down.

Comment Re:Just build more roads (Score 1) 199

The Cypress Street Viaduct (the major double-decker that collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake) was built in 1957 by US contractors. Embarcadero was similarly built by US contractors in the 1960s. Russians had nothing to do with it. The only thing Russian about any of it is Embarcadero running near Russian Hill, which was named for a Russian cemetery near its peak.

Submission + - Should schools get rid of homework? Some educators are saying yes (npr.org)

Tony Isaac writes: Federal survey data shows that the amount of math homework assigned to fourth and eighth grade students, in particular, has been steadily declining for the past decade.

Some educators and parents say this is a good thing — students shouldn't spend six or more hours a day at school and still have additional schoolwork to complete at home. But the research on homework is complicated.

Some studies show that students who spend more time on homework perform better than their peers. For example, a longitudinal study released in 2021 of more than 6,000 students in Germany, Uruguay and the Netherlands found that lower-performing students who increased the amount of time they spent on math homework performed better in math, even one year later.

Other studies, however, suggest homework has minimal outcomes on academic performance: A 1998 study of more than 700 U.S. students led by a researcher at Duke University found that more homework assigned in elementary grades had no significant effect on standardized test scores. The researchers did find small positive gains on class grades when they looked at both test scores and the proportion of homework students completed.

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