> How can it be abused? I don't get it.

Really? You can't imagine a single way that a corporation or the government could abuse the ability to identify, track, and instantly locate any person at any time for any reason? Nothing at all, huh?

> yet I never heard of one case of a street camera being used to hurt someone let alone end lives

https://www.businessinsider.co...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cou...

https://coloradosun.com/2025/1...

https://www.dailyjournal.com/a...

https://www.americanpartisan.o...

Those examples took basically no effort to find; now imagine if they want to target someone ON PURPOSE, like a civil rights leader, or to harass/round up people who participated in a protest.

Or just be a creep and stalk their ex or random women;

https://www.theguardian.com/co...

Oh, also the system is hilariously insecure, so it's not just cops, corps, and spooks who can use it.

https://stateofsurveillance.or...

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OpenLibre already had grammar checking. It was free, didn't require a lot of hard drive space (a few MB at most?), and ran locally and almost instantly without needing a high price graphics card.

In fact we've had that ability for over a decade now.

> Let's make LibreOffice and the free desktop AI-native!

Fuck you, Keith.

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/TexMaths is also an existing LibreOffice extension

Okay so, thanks for tacitly admitting half your argument was bullshit by pretending it didn't exist when directly challenged. I'll take what I can get,

Most of Norway sees an annual high in the 10C/50F range. The highest seasonal temps in late summer is in the low 20C/70F range. Most of the country is at or below freezing most of the year.

Yes, they are driving them in the cold. You are doing a lie.
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Continental Norway is comparable to driving the entire coast of the continental US. Or from Orlando to Oklahoma City if you prefer.

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"EREVs" also have a "full on engine" that needs just as much maintenance. They're also very inefficient because the conversion chain of fuel > mechanical > electrical > battery > electrical > mechanical is much worse than fuel > mechanical.

There are reasons to have that kind of system but efficiency ain't one of them, and if you aren't aiming for efficiency in a personal vehicle what the fuck are you even doing.
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You install software X, but without asking you software X silently installs additional software Y that is not necessary for software X to function, and if you try to remove software Y it gets re-installed without asking or alerting you.

We'd call that a trojan malware in any other context.
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> The batteries bite into freight capacity and completely fuck up the economics of trucking in America.

They kinda don't because weight limits are higher for battery electric trucks for exactly this reason, and by the time you eliminate the fuel (200lbs), engine with accessories (3000lbs) and transmission (1000lbs) and add the batteries back in (up to 10000 lbs) minus the 2000lb additional weight allowance for EVs and you're not losing much if anything.

> So the relatively small reduction in capacity from adding a battery completely blows all of the calculations out of the water and breaks the system.

It absolutely does not. While it would be ideal to do so, not that many trucks routinely operate right at their max GVW. Again, electric long distance hauling is already a thing and has been for a few years now. Clearly the industry/reality knows something you don't.

> To be honest I don't follow things closely enough

Or at all, seemingly.

You still didn't touch upon the "specialized applications" comment though. What were you referring to when you said that?
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> So besides a handful of extremely specialist scenarios electric semis or a no-go.

Define "specialist scenarios"

The majority of freight moves under 250 miles per trip. About 73% by weight according to the BTS. So longer trips by truck - over 250 miles - are the exception not the rule. So what "specialist scenarios" are you referring to, since it obviously isn't relatively short trips that are the majority of use cases?

And before you answer, be aware that all-electric long-haul semi trucks have been successfully operating in Europe for years, so any reasons you might come up with why it can't or won't work are immediately scuttled by the fact that it's already being done.
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You realize that the refrigerator unit on those trucks are entirely separate units, right? Whether the truck itself is electric or not, the refrigeration module is going to be an diesel powered unit fitted by a secondary company.

That's true whether a semi-trailer or box truck.
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> Adding more battery always adds more weight which reduces range

Adding more battery increases range, not reduces. Adding more battery increases weight, which reduces cargo capacity. That's the problem for trucks, which have a total weight limit and you want as much of that weight to be stuff you're getting paid to move.

> At some point, you are at a flat stage where more battery adds the same amount of range as it reduces.

This is literally never true in practice. To get to a point where more battery = less range, you would need to have a vehicle that is barely able to move its own weight. Even then it's questionable if you'll actually reach an inflection point.

The practical limits on battery size is cost first and foremost, and physical space after that.
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> After they practiced doing it wrong for an hour at home as their first exposure to the idea? Great plan with no drawbacks!

No, they would not be practicing anything for the first time at home. The whole point is they review the lecture/reading materials/youtube videos or whatever on their own in a way that suits them and the application of that knowledge happens in class.

> There's not one right way for students to learn, because different people learn best in different ways

Which is exactly why you let them do that, at home, and monitor their progress in the classroom and make corrections as needed.
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There's long been a school of thought that the homework should be the learning portion of the curriculum, and the classwork should be the practice portion. The exact opposite of how it's currently done. Students can read the assignments or learn at their own pace using whatever methods they find suits them, and then can demonstrate their understanding and practice their new knowledge under supervision of a teacher who can help them with any difficult spots and recommend tools/methods that might work better.

This also solves the "cheating" problem because you can't copy someone else's knowledge without actually learning it and an LLM can't learn it for you either.
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Couple things here.

First; The amount of heat rejected to the atmosphere for all of human production would be a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what is already reaching the Earth from the sun; over 170,000 Tera-watt hours of energy in the form of sunlight per hour, which is roughly how much energy all of humanity consumes per year. All of human energy use is ~0.01% of the energy the Earth receives from the sun.

Second, we're already adding that energy to the atmosphere. How do yo think coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power work? Even solar and wind capture energy and turn it into heat. The point is to not produce CO2 in the process, because;

Third, the heat gain is more than offset by the reduction in greenhouse gasses that keep that heat from radiating back out into space, which is what causes the warming in the first place.
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> Not sure about the geothermal(does it scale outside of special cases?)

Depends on what you mean by "scale." It's geologically limited, as in you need to find the right spot to build them, so in that sense they do not scale well... but otherwise the Earth has a functionally unlimited amount of heat energy to tap, so in that sense they scale better than nuclear since we have a definitely finite (if large) amount of nuclear fuel on this planet.

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Yeah but if you drive into a lake, even without the panic and well practiced motions, untangling yourself from a seatbelt could delay your escape by 5 to 10 seconds; a significant portion of the estimated 30-45 seconds you'll have to escape a sinking vehicle. You'll probably say something like "It doesn't take me even 5 seconds to undo my seatbelt" so I'll just point out that every time you've done so to date, your car was not nose-down like an amusement park ride.

> Its air bags I object to having to pay for. Have never been in a situation where they would have been an advantage, and that includes 62 years of driving.

Good for you. Unfortunately for your argument, the entire point of a safety device is that you hope to never need it. Have you ever been in a collision bad enough that the seat belt broke a rib or at least left bruise marks across your chest? If not, you have also never been in a situation where a seatbelt would have been an advantage... but you seem to at least understand their efficacy, because you wear them. Meanwhile, airbags save an order of magnitude more lives than the number of people who drive into bodies of water, let alone die as a result.

The fact that drowning in a sinking car is so rare is what makes the national news almost every time it happens. Someone gets into a severe collision and the airbags and seatbelts keep them alive is so common it hardly gets mentioned as part of a local traffic report.

Yet here you are arguing against airbags, yet for rear windows based on some hypothetical advantage they might offer in an already rare occurrence... despite protocol for rescuing people from sinking vehicles not involving rear windows because dragging someone over/between the front seats in near zero visibility in a moment where every second counts is far worse an option than busting out the side window and opening the door. It is the definition of irrational.
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