Guessing that your smooth brain is in your little head...

I think it's worth keeping in mind that much of the US private sector IS "government funded", in ways both direct and indirect.

And a total lack of zoning, or jurisdictional restrictions of any sort (save Isaac Newton). No one whinging about noise, water consumption, land use, or any of that. No state/local/federal politicians to pay off. No public meetings where you have to at least pretend to care about local citizens' concerns...

I've got no retort for that. But the potential upsides listed above are compelling enough that you better believe the AIntelligensia will keep trying to make it happen.

Yours is a far more eloquent way of saying what I had intended to: why is this on Slashdot? Is there any relevance at all? I fail to see it.

If these athletes were coached by AI, well... maybe, but that's a stretch. But they're not; they are just taking more extreme measures to performance enhancement than other athletes. And while I know (and employ) some smart jocks, I had the same experience as you in secondary school, because I, too, was not a jock.

Become Redhat? Seems like they are still pursuing that dream, albeit with contributions to the Linux ecosystem that are much less useful.

If you want to communicate "nuance", maybe start by not using the word "immediate" when you mean in "a few decades".

AI video technology is still nowhere even remotely near just "click a button and take what it spits out". I don't know how to break this to anyone here, but you're not just going to go to some video generation site and turn out Woodnuts without extensive skill about AI video tools themselves and a wide range of traditional video production tools, and without spending weeks to months and significant financial expense on the project.

Even if / when this changes, video production is still always going to be limited by the human at hand. Most people's movie ideas, plotting, scripting, directing, etc frankly will be terrible. The slop in this case is the human, not the tool.

If you shift school times, you impact parents who have to go to work, so businesses will need to shift their times, too. At that point, you've just reimplemented the clock shift, but in an ad-hoc, unsynchronized and patchwork fashion.

I've done it for most of my career, probably 20 of 35 years, including the near-decade I was a manager -- and I was WFH full-time, not half-time (1000 miles from the office). I did try to get onsite for a week every couple of months. Making it work requires a lot of overcommunication, but it can be done.

Nonsense.

Oh, there are some forces slowing us down, especially the orange man, but even if all of those forces went away or even reversed course 180 degrees there's no way we'd make "an immediate switch". It would and will take many years. It's complicated, there are a lot of moving parts, and we'll get to a point (CA is already there on a lot of days) where renewables frequently have to be curtailed because there isn't enough storage to shift that generation to times of low renewable generation.

Indeed. Case in point immediately above this post.

Indeed. Though, total capacity matters, too. I had a 2014 Tesla that only had ~200 miles of range, and road-tripping with that car was moderately painful. It was especially bad in areas where Superchargers were further apart and when there was a lot of elevation increase from one to the next, because it meant that I often had to charge to full to be able to reach the next. The smaller battery meant a lower miles per minute figure even at the best charge rate, but if you have to charge to full you're also waiting through the abysmal charge rate of the worst miles-per-minute part of the charge cycle.

I don't think you can really boil it down to just one figure. Though if I had to, "miles per minute while charging from 10% to 60%" is probably the best.

Thanks for the link. The smallness of the increase is good news, and I hope it holds true for the foreseeable future. I'd like to be wrong about at least some of the damage I expect AI to cause.

Absolutely wrong. A 1C battery is a 1C battery, regardless of how large it is. Different chemistries and configurations can affect this, but size absolutely does not, assuming the charger is capable of delivering power at the max rate the pack can take it at peak flow -- but 350-400 kW chargers are the norm.

Also, learn how to post. All it takes is trivial HTML markup knowledge.

Name-calling, especially when coupled with calling me clueless while demonstrating your own complete lack of understanding, earns you a Foe, which means it's unlikely I'll ever see your posts again.

Not really. You size the power to what the batteries can take at the fastest phase of charging. 350 kW is the norm for fast charging now. A 50 kWh 1C battery that charges at 4C when low (meaning that if it could sustain that rate for the whole recharge it would charge empty to full in 1/4 hour), would max out at around 200 kW. 3C is a more typical max rate, so 150 kW.

From the summary:

The small battery pack also means faster charging times

That's not how this works. Charging time is unrelated to battery size, except that in a given amount of time a larger battery can take in more energy. You charge all of the cells in a battery in parallel, so unless your input power is limited by something, charge time is dominated by how long it takes a single cell to go from empty to full. The number of cells (i.e. the size of the battery) is only relevant to how much power your charging system needs to deliver so that all of the cells can charge as quickly as possible.

There's a little variability among chemistries, but to a first approximation, the Li-ion cells we use today all take about 1 hour to fill from empty, when given power at the highest rate they can handle without sustaining damage. And they can take it faster when they're close to empty.

If you want to minimize the amount of time it takes to add X miles of range, what you want isn't a smaller battery, it's a larger battery. Suppose you want to add 50 miles of range in two minutes. Assuming 165 Wh/mile, you need to add 8.25 kWh. In two minutes a low battery (say, 20% SoC) can add about 10% of its capacity, so to get 50 miles in two minutes at the assumed mileage, you need an 82.5 kWh battery, and a 250 kW charger.

I'm sure Tesla has done the math carefully and weighed size and cost against range and charge times for their expected usage pattern and determined that 50 kWh is the right balance. But a smaller battery doesn't reduce charging times. For a given demand profile, a smaller battery increases charge time and a larger battery decreases charge time.