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Comment Pathetic; but classically so (Score 2) 32

What seems so strikingly pathetic is just how ordinary the attack is; but it sailed right through because "AI" hype seems to do some mixture of attracting drooling idiots and convincing people who ought to know better that if they don't abandon everything in the race for minimum viable product someone else will get to securitize the omnibrain forever.

Random guy just sent a pull request to Amazon's project and they were "OK, seems cool" and added it. That's how an idiot child would think a supply chain attack would work; except it turns out that it actually does.

And then, of course, they scrubbed it without a changelog or a CVE; because the memory hole is a totally viable communications strategy.

Comment I'm confused. (Score 2) 54

Does "The bias is in favor of clean athletes: that you can be clean and win' actually follow in any way from the discussion of various bike, itinerary, and diet optimizations that would presumably also be helpful to people shot full of veterinary hormones or whatever; or is this just Tygart saying what his job requires?

I'm definitely not a cycling strategist; but the various optimizations described sound like they are either neutral(like lower drag frames), or potentially even more helpful if you can find a way to sneak a few drugs in(like tighter diet control and better route planning that would potentially reward the ability to make quick metabolic adjustments under specific circumstances); none of those changes sound like they are skewed in favor of baseline users specifically.

Comment Re:Selection bias (Score 3, Informative) 28

And you do understand what a meta study is? You have to go through all 32 analyzed studies to look how they corrected for other factors (of which age is just one). What they did is, they accessed how those 32 studies corrected for possible bias (not only selection bias).

But for you, here a relevant quote:

Appendix 1 (pp 65–75) provides a summary of each study. In 34 (67%) of 51 studies, the minimum age of participants was 55, 60, or 65 years. The maximum reported age of a participant was 115 years and the minimum reported was 37 years, although not all studies recorded minimum and maximum age. For studies that recorded information on the distribution of sex, the proportion of female participants was between 43% and 72%. Three studies were exclusively in female participants6,64,67 and one study was exclusively in male participants.29 Reported follow-up periods ranged from 3 to 23 years, although many studies reported follow-up either as a median or mean. 20 (39%) studies were done in Europe, 17 (33%) in North America, 12 (24%) in Asia, and two (4%) in Oceania (both in Australia). Several studies reported on different dementia subtypes. 43 (84%) studies reported on dementia (including one study on non-Alzheimer’s dementia55), 24 (47%) on Alzheimer’s disease, 16 (31%) on vascular dementia, one (2%) on frontotemporal dementia, and one (2%) on mixed vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The studies reported on one or more pollutant exposures, with 40 (78%) reporting on PM25, 28 (55%) on NO2, 17 (33%) on PM10, 12 (24%) on NOx, ten (20%) on black carbon (BC)/PM25 absorbance, ten (20%) on annual O3 (O3 was reported on as warm-season or annual exposure, with two [4%] studies reporting on warm-season O3), six (12%) on PM25–10, five (10%) on carbon monoxide, five (10%) on sulphur dioxide, and three (6%) on nitrogen oxide. Additional pollutants were reported in two or fewer studies. 48 (94%) studies were cohort studies, two (4%) were cohort studies with a nested case–control analysis, and one (2%) was a case–control study.

Comment Re:Will it make ICEs irrelevant (Score 1) 169

I don't drive 600 miles without stopping. I could, however, completely understand not refueling in that time.

I expect to stop after about an hour or two on the road to use the toilet. After that, about every 4 hours until I'm there. I don't know if you've done much driving in the US, but the vast majority of our highways don't have service plazas such as are common in most of Europe. You actually have to exit the highway and find a gas station (or, if EV, charger). The only Tesla Supercharger in my area is in a place that makes sense from the company's perspective (fringes of an outlet mall parking lot, ready access to high-power lines), and yes, we all have GPS now, but it's decidedly not a minor detour to get to. From getting into the exit lane from the highway to being at the charger is a solid five minutes' drive each way, during which time you will pass two large truck stops that have all the amenities that long-haul truckers need (showers, e.g.) as well as a large selection of snacks and drinks, which the Supercharger doesn't - you'll have to walk to the outlet mall's food court. And once you're at the charger, it's outside and uncovered. Enjoy baking your car in the sun or soaking yourself if it's raining.

Anyway, the whole point from my perspective about insane range isn't how often I use it fully. I don't use up the 600-mile range of my wife's car (what we use for trips) fully, but 600 miles at ~80 mph with air conditioning or heating on probably corresponds to an 800-mile theoretical max range (at most-efficient speed, no climate control used). It's that I can count on 3/4 of that without worrying about it. And since you're going to protect your battery by keeping it between 10-80% most of the time, you're already limiting yourself to 70% of total capacity for typical driving.

I agree that charging that was as fast as fueling an ICE car would go a long way to mitigating that issue, but I still don't want every single bathroom stop to be 15-20 minutes (exit highway, drive to station, fuel/charge, drive to highway, get back on) when they could be ~5 minutes at a rest stop that just has bathrooms, not gasoline. Nor, once I've settled in for some serious miles, do I want to be forced to stop every 2.5-3 hours.

Comment Re:The Real Questions. (Score 1) 169

I think the bigger issue is burning EVs are much harder to extinguish.

Only at first, because fire fighters had first to learn how to extinguish them. But in the last years, there have been lots of improvements, and 40 gas car fires are creating a lot more damage than one EV fire today.

If gas cars are like grenades, EVs are more like Claymores.

And still, more people die in gas car fires than in EV car fires. Gas cars are far more likely to catch fire in an accident than EVs, where most of the fires happen during charging, when no one sits in the car anyway.

Comment Re:The Real Questions. (Score 1) 169

Yes, but the perspective of a EV-certified Firefighter or Homeowners Insurance Provider's questions are not that important to Mercedes-Benz because you are not offering them money.

Of course are those questions important to Mercedes, because they influence the marketability of cars powered by those batteries. If the insurance premium is too high, buyers will opt for other vehicles where the premium is lower.

In general, per mile driven, gas powered cars burn about 40 times as often as EVs, and the real culprits are hybrids, which burn 60 times as often. And that are the numbers from insurance companies, which have to foot the bill. But how often do you hear from pundits how dangerous hybrids are compared to normal gas powered cars? Hybrids are now so ubiquitous, that people have accepted their existence. The same will happen to EVs, and fire fighters and insurance companies will find relief because car fires are not really an issue anymore, as the dangerous moving gas grenades are slowly fading from the roads.

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