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Comment Re:We don't need so many PhDs. (Score 1) 56

More pressure to get results generally gets more results, yes.

And some fraction of those results won't be good ones, true.

BUT - the whole way science is set up is self correcting, so the bad results... just plain don't work. So you won't ever be harmed, by, say, getting the wrong diagnosis from a Theranos machine. Because it just doesn't work. Instead, people will have egg on their faces, get fired, waste money. (hey wait, wasn't Theranos a business side venture not academia? Surely that must make it immune to ... pressure?)

But: more research means more results overall, some fraction of which is good, so, more overall good work out there, more useful stuff for humanity.

Not mentioned elsewhere in this thread: the fact that grad students do much of the actual research work out there. They're motivated, learning, and make the whole process go (and then go on to be the next generation of scientists, both inside and outside of academia). Fewer students directly scales to less research output. Research output, in the exact modern sense of the phrase we're talking about, is why we're not still living in the 1940's. The Unabomber is sad about that. Why are so many slashdotters?

Comment Re:Surely (Score 1) 133

The best approach is to ensure that your child makes the right choices and doesn't _want_ to buy those things. Using their brain to exert self-control is incredibly valuable and transfers to many of these issues. It requires being even more disciplined as a parent, though.

An area where we see this is in food intake: no legal age restrictions and good parents spend lots and lots of effort from a very very young age to imbue their kids with healthy eating habits. And it works, even for highly attractive sugary food. The kids of bad/lazy parents are not so lucky, though. They develop a very unhealthy relationship with food.

Social media is very similar, but most parents spend way too little time in training their kids and preparing them for life on/with social media.

Comment Re:Joke's on them (Score 3, Insightful) 69

This is actually a very important point, because an argument that local Google subsidiaries frequently use to try to get out of lawsuits is that they aren't the ones providing the service, and the litigant must instead sue their US parent company (not the Irish one for some strange reason). It is of course much harder and much more expensive to sue a US company, and to enforce any judgements.

EU courts don't fall for it. Structuring their international corporation to make suing them harder doesn't fly. Their local subsidiaries are substantial and considered to be representatives of the parent corporation, for the purposes of legal challenge.

Comment Re:Kinda Funny (Score 1) 69

It's funny that Europeans can only use Google.

"Users have a choice" is not much of a defence in the EU, if your company also boasts about it's dominant market share.

The basic principle is that the bigger and more dominant a company is, the greater its responsibility to not distort the market. They can compete fairly.

Comment Re:What do you do with all those batteries? (Score 1) 104

You turn them into static batteries that sit there and be backup power for a house. Even if they're real crap and only 50% SoH, that's more than enough capacity for sitting there providing a power reserve. Because it you rally want 100%, you buy two 50%'s and hardly notice the physical size difference, since you're not driving your house around.

Comment Re:Geany is similar to Notepad++ (Score 1) 230

Unfortunately the website doesn't show the edit menu, but where most alternatives are lacking is the extensive tools for manipulating text that Notepad++ has. When you need to wrangle some text, like say you copied a table out of a PDF and need to bash it into the shape of a set of C macros, it's very good. Does Geany have that?

The other really nice thing about Notepad++ is that you never lose anything. If you create a new document it saves it internally, even before you save it to a specific file. If you make some edits to a file they are cached on disk. It's saved me a few times when a computer has failed to resume from hibernation, or a dodgy Intel GPU driver has crashed.

Comment Re:It's linear (Score 1) 104

It's also doable as a DIY job. Some cars are easier than others, but for example a Leaf can be done on your driveway if needed (it's easier with a lift). You can even do cell replacement in Leaf batteries yourself. There are companies that make brand new replacement battery packs too, but the issue is always the shipping cost due to their size and weight. That should improve over time.

There is also Nio that do battery swaps. Just roll up to the station, the car parks itself and 4 minutes later your have a fresh battery swapped in at 90% SoC. It's actually faster than pumping fossil fuels into an ICE vehicle, and you don't even have to get out of the car or pull out your credit card.

Comment Re:Not a glowing recommendation (Score 2) 104

No, that's not how it works.

Norway is a good source of data for your use case. Very cold for much of the year, months of sub zero temperatures, partly in the Arctic Circle. Large country too, plenty of long distance travel to be done.

You would typically be looking at over 90% capacity left at 5 years. It depends on how the manufacturer measures it, e.g. Kia and Hyundai state the usable capacity so often are still at 100% after 5 years because any degradation was within the extra "buffer" they give you and doesn't have any effect on usable range.

Also you will never have to wait an hour to charge. Even a decade back that was unrealistic, but these days it's more like 15-20 minutes maximum and some cars are under 4 minutes now. Older used EVs like those aforementioned Kia and Hyundai ones might be half an hour as they charge more slowly, but also keep in mind this will be after 4-5 hours of driving so you will need that time for a comfort break anyway.

Comment Re:Video editor? (Score 1) 230

Resolve only officially supports a couple of Linux distros, but there are ways to make it work on others, e.g. https://github.com/zelikos/dav...

Beyond that some codecs are missing for opening and exporting to some common video formats. Again, you can work around it.

I use Resolve myself and it's good once you learn how to use it a little.

Comment Re: Vote with your feet (Score 1) 230

AI has really helped people switch to Linux. Instead of dismissive or outright rude responses to Linux questions from the "community", people can ask an LLM and get an actually helpful answer that is applicable to the current version of their distro.

This was mentioned at the wrap-up for the most recent Linus Tech Tips Linux Challenge. One guy said that if he googled some issue and the first few results were Reddit, he just asked an LLM instead and it usually fixed his problem with minimal hassle.

Although I'm not a beginner I've found this to be true with Raspberry Pi OS too. As an example, try googling for how to do something that should be extremely simple in C: control some GPIOs. There are at least three different APIs, and all but one are deprecated, and most of the forum/blog posts are out of date. The RPi forum responses are often deeply unhelpful too.

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