Suddenly doesn't work? What are you talking about? Google search hasn't really worked very well for years now even before LLMs.

Google search has been really poor for quite some time. Between SEO rubbish and just the general lack of context in conventional searches, at least half the time search fails to give me relevant results. Also conventional search lacks the ability to fine tune the search with added context. AI Mode may not succeed the first time, but I can add context to my search query, and steer the AI towards the relevant content (including telling it that it hallucinated). It works for me better than the old search. It's not perfect and can fall down spectacularly. For example you asked AI about configuring something specific on your WiFi router of a particular make and model, it assumes that any and all WiFi router information applies when it clearly does not.

TLDR: conventional search is dead and has been for a long time. AI search actually does work, at least for me.

Toyota pioneered the power-split cvt. You've got the most fuel-efficient ICE/transmission combination on the planet. See Technology Connections video on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Well let's see, you get up, drive to work. Then you drive home. Then maybe drive to the store, go to the movies, etc. Yes an EV can do all of that in one day and then charge at night and do it all again the next day.

Double the complexity and a rolling compromise.

No it's not. Definitely not. This is a common misconception, especially about Toyota hybrids, and probably hybrids in general. I myself used to think that. But I, like you, was completely ignorant about how it actually worked and why it's absolutely not a rolling compromise. It's a combination of a highly-efficient atkinson cycle engine with a incredibly tiny, electrically-operated CVT. Far from a compromise the engine, batteries, and electric motors allow the car to get incredibly high mileage both in highway driving and city driving, all while maintaining the perceived performance of a much-less-efficient traditional Otto cycle engine.

YouTuber Technology Connections did an in-depth explanation recently, and also WeberAuto has a fanstastic demonstration of how simple and effective the system is.

Parts of Norway definitely get that cold.

I've long thought that EVs for cold climates should have integrated diesel heaters to keep the batteries and cabin warm in the winter. Wouldn't take much diesel at all and it would give the batteries the same range in winter as summer. Seems like a no-brainer to me. I know in Canada people do install diesel heaters for cabin heat on EVs sometimes.

Correct. American consumers care about cheap goods more than anything else. That's exactly what I said and what is driving everything! Manufacturers off shored their goods because they know that cheaper goods sell and that was the easiest way to lower their costs and jack up their profits. Again, though, it's all driven by the consumer. Consumers could (and sometimes do) punish American companies who offshore their production, but generally do not.

Chinese products are in the American market because American consumers demanded it! Quality is low because American consumers demand it. Given the choice between one decent-quality good at a high price and low-cost, low-quality goods, American consumers will pick the low-cost ones every time. If you want to change that you need to persuade them to your point of view, rather than ramming taxes down their throats. But the problem is deeper than that. American companies produce low-quality goods too. Anything to boost profit. The Harvard Business school has destroyed American industry and ethics. I recently installed a brand new Eaton home electrical panel. It is the most cheaply made thing I have seen in a while---thin metal that cuts you and the whole thing bends when you install breakers. Built to the lowest possible cost they could. Every possible shortcut was taken, profit was boosted to maximum.

As for toxic influence, I'm outside looking in and I see a tremendous amount of toxicity and immorality coming from your country's leadership that I desperately want to keep out of mine, although my hope is in vain as MAGA toxicity is flooding across the border and infecting the minds of many of my friends and neighbors. It's really sad to watch the moral destruction.

American soybean acres are way up this year exactly because of the high cost of fertilizer. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine why that is.

Gemini tells me that as long as the guy doesn't spend any of the bitcoins since this was a transfer only at this time, there's nothing to report to the IRS. He didn't buy any bitcoins or sell any bitcoins. wallet transfers are not counted by the IRS as a transaction. No past taxes or back reporting is necessary. When he does finally sell these bitcoins, he'll have to pay capital gains on 100% of their current value since his starting value ("purchase" if you will) was zero presumably. He'll want to make sure he has established a virtual paper trail now for any future time that he finds himself needing to pay taxes on this.

Interesting stuff. Wish I had some bitcoins to find on my hard drive.

Wonder how the IRS treats something like this. They were worthless files on a backup disk for all these years until Claude unlocked them and now they are worth something. So while he always had them, no reasonable person would ever claim you should have to file a 709 form over them.

Grading on a curve was meant to hide the fact that some teachers couldn't teach, some could, some wouldn't, and others would. It protected the professor at the expense of the students' education.

And it ruins grades as a marker of achievement or ability. From a student's perspective, if I pay for a course, the result should be that my grade reflects the degree to which I've mastered the material, not the variations between the quality of the students and the quality of the instruction. Grading on a curve allows a deadbeat professor and a deadbeat class to essentially turn the class into a credential mill without the necessity of education.

Students can safely assume that courses graded on a curve are staffed by incompetent or lazy professors, taken by lazy or incompetent students, or quite possibly both. When I was in university, this type of grading was used most often in the general education electives, where the professors didn't really care about the students, and the students didn't care about the subject. To adopt the same approach for mainline courses is to transform the entire university from a place of learning into a credentials broker or diploma mill.

With respect to being a "lying snake," this is the C-Suite, not rank and file employees. When it comes to the C-Suite, such behavior is generally accepted, if not expected, and hardly a reason for firing.

I mean, can you even name the last time a CEO was fired for lying?

The biggest problem with replicating CUDA is not the technical aspects, but finding VC with enough brains to know whom to hire. Most CS grads have the knowledge, but not the drive. Most liberal arts grads have the drive, the creativity, but not the knowledge. You need to find one with both, because creating the next Nvidia killer will require someone who is boring enough to reinvent the wheel, but has enough creativity to find novel solutions to performance problems.

The computer science and hardware engineering behind the hardware and software (Nvidia/CUDA) have been known for decades. The Nvidia hardware could be replicated with FPGAs - notwithstanding any patents Nvidia might have. The software API could be replicated rather easily; parallelism has been known and studied in computer engineering (again) for decades now. What Nvidia did was political - they provided both the hardware and the API to easily use it in one package which could be understood by the C-Suite class. The challenge was never technical, but marketing.

More specifically, you'd need to understand how compilers work, and how to use YACC or bison, or something similar to generate the compiler code for you. You'd have to understand digital logic and how to create logic functions with NAND gates. If you see an FPGA development kit, know what it is, and think to yourself, "What I could do with that..." you're probably a good fit for the job. And you'd need someone willing to bankroll your project until you could demonstrate that you beat Nvidia on something marketable - like floating point performance. Or power consumption.

From an engineering standpoint, what Nvidia has done is trivial - because the solution could be reproduced by an engineer using already known techniques. But what Nvidia did was to combine technical knowledge with an understanding of their market to produce the dominant position they have today. Any computer engineer worth his diploma could produce a design with FPGAs that would beat Nvidia GPUs, but Nvidia did it first.

So even hackers can be replaced by AI now? What is this world coming to?!