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Comment Re:I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids but .. (Score 1) 135

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Comment cobalt chemistry, not so nice. (Score 1) 115

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

Comment I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids but ... (Score 1) 135

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

Comment This is legally actionable negligence IMO (Score 3, Interesting) 44

Very first, where's MFA in this? It's MFA or talk to human to change passwords (always in my opinion, if the account is of any importance).

Here are my rules and approach to AI decision making.

Anything less WILL result in trouble, 100% of the time. That's why what I'm seeing here is pure-negligence (and a really shitty red-team if they even bothered).

Rule Zero: Be very hesitant to expose AI functionality publicly, it will be pummeled and likely broken as much as possible. All further rules apply to internal (well, both, but external has more restrictions).

First rule of decisions: A decision of any consequence is human gated.

Rule 2 - Collect feedback on AI decision skills (adjust prompts to improve).Integrate this where the results are used/reviewed, otherwise it will be ignored.

Rule 3 - If feedback and results allow, permit AI to make lower level decisions with almost excessive review.

Sub-Rule 1.1 - Information seeking decisions (such as RAG integration search) are generally allowed but you capture the inputs and outputs in "digestible" data formats for analysis. Searching RAG solution is a decision.

In General: GPTG-5.3+ and Claude Opus 4.6 are good for decision level prompts. use a code layer to verify output structure to prevent a LOT of headaches downstream.

People are rushing to do whatever they can with AI, so a lot of crap like this will happen, especially in the edge of the tech (which means big players screwing it up just like this).

Comment Claude Cowork and Code Do This (Score 1) 26

Claude Cowork does exactly this (accessing the internet is inherent, it can install and then use Stable Diffusion and other open source LLMs).

Yesterday I used Claude Code to incorporate changes to a working document (Word/DOCX) based on a meeting transcript. It added new sections and reorganized the DOCX document, creating a new copy, retaining formatting.

Claude Cowork has direct integrations into PowerPoint and Excel (specific installers), but it doesn't have such for Word documents.

So instead, it uses tools. I just asked it to make the changes, which it did (4 times perfectly, I recorded it for internal purposes and messed up the recording a few times).

Here are the tools it used along with the explanations:

Here's what I used to complete the work:

Document manipulation followed the DOCX skill's unpack/edit/repack workflow. I unpacked the .docx file (which is really a ZIP archive) into its raw XML components, directly edited the word/document.xml file, then repacked everything back into a valid .docx. This preserves all original formatting â" styles, fonts, table layouts, numbering, bookmarks â" because you're working with the same XML the document was built from.

Key tools and techniques:

The Read tool let me examine the source files (transcript, XXXX, process use cases) and read the DOCX skill instructions. Since document.xml was too large to read in one pass, I used offset/limit parameters to read it in sections.

Pandoc converted the .docx to markdown so I could get a readable overview of the full document structure without wrestling with raw XML. I used this both before editing (to understand the layout) and after (to verify the result).

Grep helped me find specific line numbers in the XML â" locating exact insertion points for each edit by searching for heading text, table boundaries, and style markers.

The Edit tool made targeted changes to the XML, inserting new paragraphs, table rows, and sections while matching the surrounding style patterns (w:pStyle, w:rPr, w:numPr, w:cnfStyle attributes) copied from adjacent elements.

Bash handled the unpack/repack scripts (Python-based, provided by the DOCX skill), directory navigation, and the pandoc conversions.

The repack script ran its own validation â" checking paragraph counts and XML well-formedness â" which confirmed everything passed before producing the final .docx.

Comment Look up "human shields" (Score 1) 255

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

Comment Comparing your accent to claimed residence history (Score 1) 255

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

Comment Don't allow bets on an individuals decisions (Score 1) 30

This does sound like a breach of a contract for profit. And that's outside of my comment below, but related.

If an organization creates bets on single individual's decision (this wasn't the case in this case, but it is in many cases...), they should EXPECT that individual to mess with the situation. And that is not insider trading, even if it is wagering with a guarantee to win (it's an investment at that point, not a wager, an investment in one's self through action).

Related question to that.

Should a boxer be able to wager the he/she wins a fight? I would think so, they are wagering on their skill, putting it on the line.

Comment Add a $500 non-occupied commercial vehicle fee (Score 1) 72

Or make it $1,000. Or higher (I'd say higher, $2.5k, it's commercial, make it hurt and pay).

If a company a "abandoning" 30k+ assets in public areas, it should be retrieving them. It is THEIR problem.

If a tow action is needed, but a human is not there to manage the transaction, the fee hits.

Any commercial vehicle, doesn't have to be autonomous.

Done.

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