Linux and ARM would disagree. Probably loads more too.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

I can understand all that, but it still doesn't say why acting deserves special treatment.

Coders enjoy coding. AI has taken a chunk out of that, and people treat it as beneficial. It's taken a lot of translators out of the picture. They enjoy what they do. It's taken a slice out of countless jobs that people enjoy doing, and there's been a bit of a murmur about job losses.

Then we get to acting, with a famous actor being deep faked into a movie with the consent of his estate, and everyone is up in arms because actor and celebrity.

The sad bit is yes, this obsoletes many aspects of human engagement, just as the industrial revolution rendered a lot of manual work. It will continue to do it. The question is how we as a species adapt to it, and utilise it to our benefit.

It's not just a child. It's a child plus a network of organised crime that specialises in tooling for illicit compromise, which said child has access to, plus contacts with compromise experience to learn from. This changes things significantly.

Cybersecurity is a hellishly expensive thing if done to the degree that's found in financials and the like (where a bad compromise could have serious international ramifications).
Most places don't have the budget to hire enough of the right staff to protect against a dedicated attacker with up to date compromise tools. It only takes one flaw for things to start going very wrong indeed.

It's a case of "Taking security as seriously as you can afford to" as an operational expense, and keep insurance up to date for if you're ever compromised.

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

Yep, there's a very good reason that engineers poke and prod at things for years before marking something as safe for a life critical area.

LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

A little bit of friction can sometimes be a good thing. At the moment the mentality is to rely on AI as if it was a panacea for everything, and jobs are being lost that shouldn't have gone (there was a /. article about one instance not long ago).
Change is an inevitable, but well managed change takes longer and makes fewer disasters along the way; that's what the Unions are aiming for. Their power in the UK is significant, but not overwhelming enough to stop the march of progress.

There are plenty of AIs that can give medical advice, with the proviso that they're giving that advice to a medical professional, and in a very narrow field for which they're trained (e.g. medical imaging to identify artefacts on images that are of interest, or in planning to contour radiation dose delivery etc.).

There are no generalised AIs out there that offer General Practitioner level medical advice that I'm aware of though, and certainly not licensed to do so (which was what I suspect you were getting at).

It's a hard answer. By stating "You will categorically not be paid if you try to ransom us", you're cutting out the part of organised crime that does stuff for a profit. There will be no profit in attacking a hospital. They will not pay, and you'll take an awful lot of heat for no return (and potentially be liable for any deaths that occur if they eventually catch you, increasing the sentence that's meted out to you).

However, there is still the vulnerability to politically motivated attacks, so safety still isn't assured, it just demotivates regular organised crime that just wants to make lots of money.

Having backups, and having tested backups is pretty much what everyone has.
The critical thing that people are finding is the metric to follow with Ransomware attacks is the Recovery Time for the entire estate. Not one system, but potentially hundreds of interlinked systems that all fail catastrophically at once.
That can take weeks of forensics to work out what's happened (and needs to be done before you can make an effective recovery, otherwise you may find you're back at still being compromised and ransom attacked within minutes of being back online). Then it can take weeks or months to recover and sync all the systems affected.

All the while, your primary business (in hospitals, for example, keeping people alive) is in measures that most likely can't handle the load long term with paper based recording and tracking. They certainly will have difficulty managing planned appointments and making new ones, which is why many business continuity plans have a time scale by which a given system needs to be recovered, or else things go south quickly after that period.

I've read so many people saying "should have had backups", but nobody has considered the time to rebuild from catastrophic failure. Every system and server is down, full restore and recovery to a time before infection (and validation of that).
The company was a transport company with 500 trucks on the road. That's a lot of logistics in play that need to have continuity, each one with cost of probably tens of thousands a day, or more, with heavy non-complete penalties for failure.
Full catastrophic failure can take weeks, or months to perform. In this time, you've haemorrhaged customers, who have had to try and make alternate arrangements where they can (and will likely not be back), no ability to schedule new business, and bills that still need to be paid.

The cash flow can easily drive a low margin business like transport into failure just by the time to recover from a complete loss of function by malicious infection. All the backups may be there, they may even have off site, and have done everything by the book, just the operating company as an entity could easily lose more in the recovery time window than it was possible to financially recover from.