This seems dubious at multiple levels.

Solar panels: The roof of a trailer is about 450 square feet. In the northeastern U.S., you would average only 3.5 hours of full sun, so you'd get only a little over 13 kW per day.

Tesla semis are pretty efficient, and they use about 1.7 kWh per mile. So in an entire day, covering the entire roof of a trailer with solar panels would add a whopping 7 miles of range, or 15 minutes of extra driving — the equivalent of plugging into a Tesla Megacharger for maybe 30 seconds or so.

Let's optimistically assume that the vehicle can carry 48,000 pounds. If those panels occupy the full roof area, then at about 3 pounds of weight per square foot, those solar panels would weigh 1500 pounds, or about 3% of your cargo, all to reduce your fuel usage by as little as 1% if you're doing long haul at 65 MPH. And that weight number may be wildly optimistic. Trailers like that aren't designed to have weight on the roof, and would require additional structure to hold that extra weight. The real losses could be significantly higher. Unless you're driving less than a couple of hundred miles in a day, the solar panels won't break even. And if you're driving less than a couple of hundred miles per day, there's no reason you can't go electric.

Battery and motor on the trailer: I would expect most trucks to be used primarily for either short-haul or long-haul purposes, not both. If you're doing long-haul, you'd probably be better off with an actual hybrid tractor so that you get the benefit no matter whose trailer you're hauling. If you're doing short-haul, there's likely no reason not to go full electric.

I just don't get it.

Facebook doesn't have a separate C-suite (CEO, CFO, etc.) from its parent company. Waymo does. So while Waymo is considered part of Alphabet because it is a majority shareholder, you're kidding yourself if you think it is at all like Meta and Facebook. There may not be a hard line between them, but there's a definite line.

Tell me you don't know how model training works without telling me you don't know how model training works.

Autonomous vehicles (probably not including Tesla) already handle first responders correctly probably 99.99% of the time. They already handle school buses correctly probably 99.99% of the time. So what remains are, by definition, edge cases that for whatever reason require additional handling beyond the basic "Is this an emergency vehicle/school bus? If so, pull over and stop" rule.

For example, one edge case is figuring out how to clear a path for an emergency vehicle when there is no obvious place to pull over because of other cars stopped nearby. Sometimes the correct answer is to actually drive in the direction the emergency vehicle is going until you find a spot to pull over and get out of its way. This isn't intuitively obvious, and a lot of human drivers will struggle with it as well.

For another example, at least one case of Waymo vehicles illegally passing a school bus was caused by a remote operator not noticing that the vehicle had flagged the presence of a school bus and telling the car to proceed anyway. Sometimes, having a human in the loop actually ends up making things worse. :-)

At that point, what's the point of them being autonomous? At some point, you have to cut them loose and see what mistakes they make, because it is precisely through detecting those mistakes that you figure out what edge cases remain inadequately handled in the model. And understanding how the vehicle attempts to extricate itself from problem situations is critically important in figuring out what additional training needs to be added to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

So basically, your approach likely leads to a future where the models never learn to handle emergency vehicles, because safety drivers keep having to intervene before they can gather adequate data. That approach just doesn't work.

I don't recall the actual driving part of the driver test having a part where you drive onto a street that's barely wide enough for one vehicle to pass, let out a passenger, and then have an ambulance suddenly approach from the other direction while you're trying to turn around.

To get to the point of having a license, you have to answer a written question that proves you know to yield to emergency vehicles, prove that you can stay in lanes, stop for stop signs and maybe pedestrians, handle traffic lights correctly, and possibly parallel park, depending on where you took the exam. Autonomous vehicles could do those things reliably 15+ years ago.

In other words, you're greatly overestimating the competence of the average human driver.

Boosters are risking their freedom and even their lives. If it was easier for them to find work then they'd do legitimate work instead of boosting. Selling at flea markets is a job itself, so they're clearly willing to work.

That should read "for think tanks, nonprofits or street protest groups". The Venn diagram of people smart enough to work for think tanks and those who engage in street protests is the empty set.

Our old PCs are too outdated to utilize these fancy AI services. And we can no longer upgrade.

Because the website helpfully provides structured data with tags which make it clear what it is, it's very easy to just use old fashioned and cheap filters to exclude content like that from the training set without losing anything else.

Protesting something that doesn't happen is better PR for you than protesting something that does...

Beyond LEO requires more fuel and a bigger rocket to launch, meaning more cost. It creates greater latency due to the greater distance. Also, they want these satellites to have a 5 year lifespan because terrestrial ISPs and cellular providers and datacentre operators are continually upgrading their hardware. So they will probably want to de-orbit and replace them anyway, because moving them to a graveyard orbit will result in the graveyard getting very full very quickly.

It also causes issues when satellites malfunction, because they won't naturally de-orbit in a practical amount of time. Failure to reach the intended orbit, resulting in an uncontrollable satellite, is one of the most common modes.

My browser shreds cookies as soon as I leave a site in most cases, as well as all other site date. These days the tracking works based on multiple signals, so even if you delete the cookies, if the IP address and browser signals like user agent and screen resolution match, they will re-associate that identity with you. You need to screw with a lot of metrics to throw them off.

In my country a spam lawsuit against 50 people where only one of them is possibly "guilty" of a civil offence with a relatively small financial loss isn't going to fly. They have largely given up suing people here because such speculative invoicing scams tend not to stand up to judicial scrutiny. At best an IP address identifies a subscriber, who may not be the person who downloaded the file, and who isn't under any legal obligation to help determine who it was, and who can't be held liable as there are no reasonable means for them to prevent such "abuse".

Perhaps by design. There's nothing beter than a word of mouth campaign to promote a coming product.

I didn't say no rocket launches. We just need to evaluate the impact, and take steps to prevent damage. We need to know what is in the satellites and what the effect of them burning up is.

Only to a limited degree and duration. If I walk up to the counter and point to a candy bar, the only ID required is the dollar bill I'm prepared to hand over in exchange for it.

Imagine a society where the terms of the exchange depend on prior establishment of your identity and social credit score.

Define "working society". Are you including the people who shoplift/steal items and make their living selling them at popup flea markets? If you do, then please let us know the next time you leave your garage door open or car unlocked. So we can restock our street corner market.