We don't need bigger models, at this point. What we need is multi-dimensional decomposition, problem space transforms, and the ability for AI to use external tools (such as SQLite, memcached, etc) so that it can externalise static data that it needs to not corrupt accidentally but still keep in easy access.

If we had that, most of the things "bigger models" will do will actually end up being done better, quicker, with fewer compute resources.

"Flock and its implementation is a system of people who count convictions as talking points for the next election cycle"

Close, it can easily be used to decide who gets to vote in the next election cycle. Does anyone, aside from some knuckle dragging Maggots, trust the current regime with that data?

The 4 GWh per year makes sense. The factory will produce 4 GWh of batteries every year. So if each battery is (pulling a number out of my butt) 10 KWh, the factory will build four million of them per year, or about 11,000 per day (assuming 365 days per year operation).

As for the translation to households... I can't make anything sensible out of that number. I'll note that you (inadvertently, I'm sure) multiplied the number of claimed households by a million, but if we drop that down to the claimed 4M households, that means each household gets 1 kWh of the capacity, which is enough to run the average house for about 45 minutes of average consumption... so that's not "overnight" storage for solar generation, but it's more than you need for grid stabilization. Dunno. My best guess is that they were going for how many houses you could run for a month on that much storage and just screwed up the arithmetic by three orders of magnitude (one SI scaling factor).

The $71M figure is to build a factory that manufactures sodium-ion batteries, 4 GWh of them per year.

Nah. It's just like every previous innovation-driven boom (railroads, oil, telecoms...) the growth and buildout phase generates incredible new wealth, highly concentrated (Vanderbilt, Stanford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.), . Then there are several decades of adaptation and adoption, during which the benefits accrue to the population broadly. This doesn't decrease the wealth of those who got crazy rich during the boom, but their wealth stops growing rapidly and they just become the new "old money". Then the next innovation creates a new crop of winners and the cycle repeats.

We're really just completing the adoption and adaptation phase of the personal computer revolution, and maybe a third of the way through the adoption and adaptation of the Internet revolution (the dot-com boom).

This claim ignores the fact that each new boom creates an entirely new set of winners, nearly all of whom actually came from humble-to-moderate beginnings. The wealth isn't staying in one "ossified" caste, indeed it's the exact opposite of ossification. Of course, as I said above, the wealth of those winners doesn't decline during the adaptation phase, but the the wealth generated by the newly-realized productivity gains does accrue broadly -- and in fact those "winners" never actually had as much wealth as they appeared to, because their paper wealth was primarily composed of the market's projection of their slice of their company's slice of the broad future gains.

In the end, the tide does raise all boats. The US has been getting steadily wealthier -- at every quintile -- for decades. There have been some dips at each recession, but the trend line is clear. Look at the real median household income and the net worth of by the bottom 50%. Granted that inequality has risen... that's to be expected during and for the first decade or two after an innovation-driven economic boom, and we've had multiple, in quick succession. But the actual numbers show that the tide is lifting all boats -- though the boats of the big winners have rocket engines attached.

There is one very large caveat that we're dealing with right now, which is housing prices. Due to a combination of factors -- mostly dominated by increases in square footage per person and quality of amenities that we've become accustomed to accepting as the baseline, but also including excessive building restrictions and a minor real estate bubble caused by the pandemic and low interest rates, then compounded by rising interest rates needed to combat the post-pandemic inflation -- right now that increased income and wealth isn't enough for many to buy the homes they'd like. Wages continue rising and housing prices in much of the country are actually falling a little, so over the next few years that will likely equalize out, but right now it's painful for many. But that pain is generating a pessimistic view of the state of the economy and individual incomes that simply doesn't match reality.

There definitely is a risk right now that this could all go badly if the new winners are allowed to engage in extensive regulatory capture. That's how market-proof monopolies are built, by capturing and directing government power. If we can avoid that, though, and just let the market continue to work, the general wealth increase will continue.

Well, unless the AI singularity hits. It's impossible to know what things will look like on the other side of that.

Oh, you're a conspiracy theorist. Okay, have a nice day, I'm out.

Oracle may not, they are way over leveraged. Ellison caught FOMO disease. The Fed. Gov. cutting them a deal with the Department of DEFENSE was throwing them a fish to help them get by a disaster, but it's still peanuts compared to what Ellison sunk into the craze. And their reputed expected winnings are from AI companies, just the companies that will take it in the neck if China AI steals their markets.

Also, low-water-use plants tend to also be slow-growing. That's why they use so little water.

Hesperaloe produces 1.5 kg per cubic meter of water. This is comparable to the water use efficiency of forests used for paper, which is between 1.5 and 4 or so. So this actually requires as much water as trees, if not more. The only advantage, if you can call it that, is being able to plant it in places were trees won't grow.

But the problem is that this also means you'll be cultivating plants grown far apart, none of which produce very much mass per plant without taking so much that you kill the plant (whose roots are likely the only thing keeping the topsoil from eroding). That means you need an order of magnitude more land per unit of crop mass, and probably closer to two orders of magnitude. (Trees get tens of feet tall. Hesperaloe is a pile of long leaves that gets maybe a foot tall.) So the energy consumption involved in harvesting it is likely to also be one to two orders of magnitude greater because you might have to harvest an entire acre worth of red false yucca to get as much biomass as you'd get from cutting down one fully grown coniferous tree in a few minutes.

So you've gotten a little bit more crop land that nobody asked for, and/or saved a bunch of trees that were planted specifically to turn into paper, and in exchange, you've introduced a massively energy-intensive harvesting process followed by some other probably massively energy-intensive conversion process. This doesn't seem like a net improvement to me.

Either that or you harvest it including the root system, and yeah, you've gotten a lot of raw material, but now your topsoil erodes, and you can't plant anything there for a thousand years.

The process itself might be useful in some other context, of course, but it seems like a solution in search of a problem.

What you say is true... but basically all of the other president have actually been pretty smart people. There are some who clearly aren't as smart as others, but I can't think of any who were as dumb as Trump.

Selection, not coincidence. He's the right kind of grifter, with the right kind of personality. He's really not very smart, though. If he were actually smart he wouldn't shoot himself in the foot with such regularity.

To be useful in deep space, you're going to have to deal with very harsh radiation, far harder than the Vikings dealt with. You really want to have some large number of computers, where the number has to be odd and exceed 5. The reason it has to exceed 5 is that you need 5 in order to be able to use the Byzantine General's Problem to discern which computers are working correctly and which are radiation damaged. Since some will be damaged over time and you want 5 computers still operating around the time the power runs out, you have to start with more than that.

Massively radiation-hardened highly-robust low-power chips could be done. If you were clever enough, you could do this as a wafer-scale system where you marked parts as bad and networked around them. Free space optical communication across the wafer might be doable.

They might well still end up being low-density CMOS discrete logic.

Lead-lining the electronics isn't as much of a problem if you've launchers capable of handling heavy objects and don't mind burning through a lot of ion drive propellant for course corrections. This would improve the hardening beyond what can be done through the usual operations.

But, yeah, you'd need defect-free microelectronics. You really can't handle F00F bugs or defective instructions once you pass Earth orbit. And I can't think of anyone who knows how to do that.

Well, not just the solar system but the heliopause as well, and the near-Sol galactic winds. We can estimate the effects of space from just about any ancient near-Earth space junk, but I'm not sure how we'd go about calculating the impact of the galactic winds on something. The Voyager sensors won't be sending back nearly enough high-quality data to establish that.

It's actually a lot harder. The fly-bys invovled gravitational slingshots, which not just steered the probes but vastly accelerated them. Without the slingshots, human rocketry of the time would not have had the capacity to get probes to solar system escape velocity.

Our understanding of asteroids is now reasonably good. We know they come in solid and rubble-pile formats. We know that several show signs of lava flows, suggesting they come from disintegrated planetoids with a liquid core. We've managed to land on some and even retrieve samples from one.

Our understanding of comets is much weaker. We know that several appear to be multiple bodies fused together with ice (the one we tried sending a lander to was of this type) and the break-up pattern for Shoemaker-Levy 9 is suggestive (but not proof) of it having been a composite structure too. The one icy body we've seen in the Kuipier belt was also two bodies frozen together. Photographs of the core of Halley's Comet also suggests two bodies fused together with ices. This leads to some interesting questions. Obviously the probability of this configuration is very high, but what is the probability of other configurations? Is it so incredibly low that the odds of finding single-body or triple-body configurations is practically non-existent?

(This is kinda important if NASA is serious about a DART-type project to redirect one.)

Our understanding of solar system captures is non-existent. If there are extra-solar objects flying through every few years, then there is a definite non-zero probability that there are significant extra-solar objects that have been captured by the solar system in the last 5.5 billion years. That would be kinda very useful to know.

Current solar system formation models don't work well, but planets have sorted their composition by mass. Studying them only tells us so much. Asteroids are more useful but hit each other too often, so we don't know how much mixing and reconstitutuing has occurred there. The Kuipier Belt is much better, from that point of view. The density is far too low and most of the objects far too small. A lander could obtain a lot of extremely useful data about how the solar system formed that we can't obtain closer.

The Oort cloud is theoretical only, at this point. The only way to find if it is real is to send something out there.

If we're to get any probes in the future to go between solar systems (and such missions are entirely possible), we need to know a great deal more about the heliopause and the galactic winds.

Yes, Donald Trump is stupid, and yes he knows exactly how to play to his base. These things are only incompatible if you think it requires intelligence and strategy to play to his base. It doesn't. He just does what he does and it happens to resonate with them, most of the time at least.

Well, viruses and bacteria. And that last one is critical.

We know that the microbiome alters blood chemistry and we know that this alters brain function.

I do NOT postulate bacteria cause mental illness, but I do postulate that there is a non-zero probability that bacteria can aggravate mental illness. And that is all that we need here. If we can develop a vaccine that triggers the immune system to either attack the bacteria directly OR to produce antitoxins which attack those changes in the chemistry which are harmful, then the vaccine would lessen the impact of this particular vector.

That would not prevent mental illness, but that's fine. Reducing it is perfectly acceptable.