Seems like Zvezda should just be scrapped. Launch the ICM that NASA built in case Zvezda wasn't ready; presumably it is still sitting in a NASA warehouse somewhere. Then jettison Zvezda and connect the other Russian modules wherever you can fit them.

Texans love to brag about how Californians and others keep moving to their state. They do not seem to understand that it is because their BOSS wants to move to Texas and they are moving for the job, not because they like Texas.

Then they get upset when the new citizens of Texas are all liberal and vote that way.

N/T

Everyone knows that you use Archive.org to bypass a paywall.

Seems to me 'dead' for a taxi isn't 'dead' for a static power bank. If I'm running a taxi I've got hard limits on how large my battery can be and how heavy, and I want to maximise the mileage I get between charges, because while my taxi is charging it's not out on the road earning money. When that battery is keeping only maybe 80% of its original design charge, and now I have to schedule one recharge too many per working day? Bang goes my business plan, so I'm replacing it.

If I'm storing energy for the grid I'm a lot less worried about that. It only stores 80% of what it did when new? Better than nothing, and the taxi firm is selling them off cheap. I'll stack them up!

Perhaps not, but if you pick your moment right then permanently stopping the work of some of the most talented researchers there could very well make a difference. A spectacular incident that makes the headlines might also deter others - bright graduates might decide it's far safer to take up a different line of work, subcontractors and suppliers might decide doing business with AI firms isn't worth the danger, investors might figure the increased risk of loss of premises and equipment into their projections, that kind of thing.

If people genuinely believed AI takeover was a real, present and imminent threat, then they wouldn't just be publishing essays online, they'd be forming direct action groups, along the full spectrum of campaigning: all the way from awareness raising publicity campaigns, through picketing, blockades and sit-ins, up through Black Bloc type actions, right up to menacing intimidation campaigns and terrifying physical force operations. But I don't see any Butlerian Jihad getting started. Which tells me they don't actually believe this at all; they're just bigging up their own importance. 'Oh yes, our technology is so incredibly powerful, if it were done wrong then imagine what could happen! Keep the money coming to make sure it's done right instead! Then all that power can be ours instead!... I mean, uh, yours, Mr Investor sir.'

AI stock valuations don't make a bit of sense unless the technology turns out to be every bit as powerful as that. If they don't keep that thought alive, then the bubble bursts right now. That's what all this hot air is about, and that's why nobody really pulls a Miles Dyson at the AI research lab.

More importantly: Capitalism is an ECONOMY and market system. It is NOT a blueprint for a society. You can run your commerce and trade as capitalism, when you run your SOCIETY along capitalism principles you end up... essentially with the USA.

This is the part that is constantly forgotten. As a society, we have values that are not represented well within capitalism. But for some reason, we dumb shits think that we can treat everything as a market and apply capitalism to it and that will magically solve problems. But in education, just as one random example, the goal of it all is educated adults as output. It is not maximizing profit. Same for the prison system, the healthcare system and two dozen others.

It's greed, pure and simple.

Making a good product is possible. KEEPING making good products for decades is hard. Even more importantly: You will have hits and misses. Which, for a quarterly-result-bonus oriented manager is a no-no. Subscription models mean plannable revenue streams. Then all you need to do is negotiate your bonus package so that the already existing subscriptions will provide and you're home free and can already order your 2nd yacht.

The interesting thing about the Terminator movies is that when AI researcher Miles Dyson became convinced that his work had a high probability of resulting in an artificial general intelligence attempting to replace humanity, he did not go and post a ten thousand word essay on LessWrong about how he had updated his timeline and p(doom) estimates and discussing the full Bayesian analysis of the situation. He went to the lab that very night with some heavily armed companions and he blew the place up.

I keep hearing that one AI researcher or another claims that they believe as Dyson came to believe. Until one of them takes similar action, I simply do not believe that they actually think their research carries such a risk.

You have access to the lab where the work is being done? You regularly meet in person with leading researchers and talents driving the project forward? You are an American and you have the Second Amendment? And the entire future light cone is at stake? Quintillions of hypothetical future lives riding on the outcome of this project here and now?

What's the most effective, altruistic thing you could do for them?

Yeah, exactly. I've never heard of anyone shooting up their AI lab. Which tells me they don't believe their AI is at all likely to wipe us all out.

Sheesh. Wasn't the total failure of Stargate Universe enough to demonstrate why this is a terrible idea?

That's one of the things that made Stargate work. Even the characters that weren't the most highly educated were still by and large intelligent, or at least capable of logical thinking.

There are a few of episodes where characters were genuinely stupid — not just uneducated, but failing to listen to logic outright. Those episodes were sometimes a bit cringe, but they were also rare. And none of those episodes were written that way just to add artificial drama to make people feel things (ugh), but rather invariably ended up in a teachable moment demonstrating the folly of willful ignorance and not using your head.

You mean like the first episode of season 1?

It's bizarre that the various streaming services don't just pick up the director's cut of Children of the Gods and make that the default first episode, and serve up the original one as a separate "show" so that they don't have to have the "nudity" caption on every episode all the way through season 10.

SG-1 poked fun at the concept of a younger, edgier version in season 10... and then three years later, the studio actually did it. I believe the word is "harbinger".

1) We do NOT have AI. We have Large Language Models and similar predictive software.

2) When it attempts recursive improvements we get recursive deterioration. LLM fed the output of other LLM get worse, not better. This will NOT change. The best they can obtain is 0 deterioration. Why? Because prediction needs good data. Predictions based on other predictions is like making a copy of a copy. The best it can do is stay even. The LLM did the best possible prediction in the first round, using it again without more data does NOT work.

3) We already are seeing this problem as so much of the internet has become AI slop that it is feeding AI slop as input for other AI, resulting in worse slop. Example:
Not a robot, not an android, but instead a Large Language Module -> Not a machine, not a phone, but instead a huge English component.

4) AI can be helpful for a lot of tedious work, such as going through theoretical chemicals looking for possible medicinal drugs. But the idea that it is actually becoming intelligent leads people to over-estimate it's capabilities and it's fears.

5) An AI that tries to take over the world is likely to threaten us with an anti-matter bomb it swears it made using a Mr. Fusion machine, a bannana peel and 12 oz of beer. Do NOT fall for it.

Anthropic urges everybody else to pause so they can get their code bloat under control.

Engineers who suddenly produce 8x more code are almost certainly not doing it by writing clean, efficient code. That would mean that somehow it takes less than an eighth as long to explain to the AI what you want to do AND review that code. And for non-trivial code, adequate code review alone can take 5 to 10% of the time it would take to write the code from scratch. So that would have to mean that engineers are not spending any time telling AI what to do. That or AI is reducing the amount of time they waste in meetings. (That was a joke! Ha ha! Fat chance!)

And that doesn't even factor in the amount of time spent figuring out whether it's the right way to approach the problem in general, which often exceeds the amount of time spent on the code. So even if you could reduce the time spent working on the code to absolutely zero, including review time, it should not be physically possible to exceed a 2x increase in code generated.

And there aren't 32+ hours in the day, so we can also exclude the possibility that they are working 4x as long.

So from this, we can safely assume that either their code quality is an abomination or their architecture is, and possibly both. If that's not true, then it's nothing short of a miracle.

The grid does care. You're charging for two or three hours, and then not using that power for 21 or 22 hours. That means generating capacity has to be brought online to cover that load. And when everybody does this all at once when they get home from work, it creates a significant increase in generating capacity at a time when solar is unavailable, etc., and because that load is brief, you don't get to use clean base load power, and end up spinning up peaker plants (likely natural gas).

I'm kind of surprised by that. Unless I'm misremembering, Tesla's high-current charger used multiple modules in parallel for efficiency reasons — I think two modules for the standard charger and three for the high-power charger. Their superchargers do the same thing for the same reason. I kind of assumed everybody did it that way.

No, $3k is the off-the-shelf retail cost for a basic 22 kW HVDC charger. Cheap Chinese hardware for 22 kW HVDC from Alibaba starts at only about $1,000.

Also, I think you're massively overestimating the labor costs here. Swapping one 3-phase charger with another in place means turning off a breaker, removing several wire nuts, unbolting the old one from the wall, figuring out how to fasten the new one to the wall, and putting the wire nuts back on. It involves nearly zero actual wiring work. It should cost only slightly more than replacing a bad receptacle ($80 to $200). If installation is over $500, I'd be absolutely shocked.

So for a basic version, probably more like $1,500 installed. Getting one with better firmware that can do load balancing would cost more, but not an order of magnitude more.