I think Toyota were in a good position to make these judgements, given that for a long time they were the leaders in developing HEVs and still sell more hybrids than anyone else. They knew the battery technology, where it was going and what it could or could not achieve. Hydrogen was an opportunity and I'm not sure I think they made a huge mistake in trying it. It didn't work out but they exhausted that as best as they could and so at least we know for sure. So while they should own their failures, I think we need to respect their call on battery tech. In the interim they still sold buckets more hybrids than anyone else sold as EVs, they still dominate the market. And it's still true - batteries are heavy, slow to charge, lithium doesn't do well in the cold and is prone to damage. Capacity is better but cars with long range weigh nearly a ton more than their ICE rivals.

The criticism is that they haven't innovated but why would they have tried? Tesla sourced finance from massive amounts of government money and Chinese brands are unquestionably being propped up by their own government. Now Kia rely on China, as do the Geely group for Volvo and others. BMW are catching up but they're still going to be expensive. VW is not owning the market. Toyota will have looked at it and seen the competition burning through money and come to the conclusion that it was maybe not worth the fight .. yet. Why try to copy everyone else when they were still selling so many hybrids?

Bottom line is that the most successful brands out there are from China. Japan doesn't control the battery tech right now, it's all CATL and BYD. Maybe it's half political but I think Toyota has realised that if they can't control the battery production then they're not going to invest heavily in EVs. They know from experience that it's all about the batteries while FSD is a side show. IF they do manage to figure out solid state then my impression is that Toyota will be 100% in the game and we'll see a massive shift in their plans.

But I fully expect them to end up as a niche brand. I do honestly respect a lot of the groundbreaking work that was done by Tesla, effectively proving that EVs could be mainstream. It took a lot of public money to do it, but maybe it was worth it. Now that job is done its up to someone else to make vehicles for everyone and that was never going to Tesla. I'm sure they'll always have something to offer but they're not the leaders on FSD and they don't really make the kind of simple EV that most people are looking for at a price that everyone can afford.

I'm still interested to see if Toyota can make a dent in this market. They've been holding back because of the battery limitations but that's allowed Chinese brands to eat up the market. Eventually the market appeal of the Toyota brand is going to wear off, they can't expect us to wait forever.

Not explicitly, but the idea that bitcoin holds "value" is an extremely tenuous concept relying entirely on duping human beings into using it. Crypto is often called a scam or a pyramid scheme and I tend to agree. All of the original ideas of a decentralised economy are there, but what actually drives bitcoin is the himan inclination towards gambling. It's very much like AI in that once you get beneath the surface things take dark turn.

Rightly or wrongly, this absolutely mirrors what Republicans are saying now. The value of a college degree is degrading and there is a dream to bring masses of labor jobs back to America. The answer is that people stop going to school and just accept that their future lies in a steady 9-5 making iPhones in a factory. Or replacing the hoards of illegal migrants who are due to be deported away from their low paying jobs. Of course none of those Republican politicians, lobbyists, lawyers or their corporate friends will be taking up these jobs, that's for the devoted followers of our beloved leader DJT, the voters who put their faith in him. Is that what they want? Maybe. Regardless, it seems to be what everyone is going to get.

What's the name for the logical fallacy where you incorrectly call out something as a logical fallacy?

We should 100% give this guy the power to destroy entire government departments

The Republican party embracing socialism. Cool.

The entire world has realise that opposing Trump is just giving him what he wants: a fight. It's what he does best and does nothing but create noise behind which decisions continue to made. So now they realise that if they are nice to him and pander to his ego then they will be a chance of getting what they want. The real concern is then which celebrity billionaire / tech mogul he is the most enamoured by. That person will then get top billing when it comes to driving the actions of the POTUS. Right now they are all clamouring for his attention and they all seem to be getting it. Because what the country really needed was a presidency that is no longer driven by self-interested politicians and is instead driven by self-interested billionaires. Either way the people are getting screwed. Hooray.

A 30 second google search tells me that it's already happening and it's already having positive impacts on the actual quality of the sheep themselves:
https://www.pv-magazine-austra...
https://www.theguardian.com/au...

This will genuinely change a lot of people's minds when it comes to opposing large solar farms in their local region. We're all about the sheep here, and if it's good for the sheep then it's good for everyone.

We've got more sheep than people and a backlog of solar farms waiting for approval. This would have to solve a few problems getting some of those projects off the ground.

This guy gets it. We're so paranoid about foreign influence and maybe that's valid, but when Elon and Zuck and everyone else have their fingers in all of our lives we're not even remotely concerned? We embrace these goons into every aspect of our day to day, we celebrate them as successful billionaires and somehow that translates into trust that they are not actively screwing us over. They're now engineering themselves to have significant government influence by sucking up to the orange man who is honestly just reflecting the view of most Americans in thinking that having these guys in positions of power is actually a good thing. And yet we KNOW that they don't have our best interests at heart. It's either about money, power or ego. But I guess that's where we are at these days, embracing authority through subterfuge, masquerading as admiration and trust that is clearly not earned. /rant

"Computer. Generate artifical signitures for all future message from this account. Use recently discovered vulnerabilities to ensure they are seen as authentic. Hide all WoT paths to their signing key and short-cut anything more than 7 hops away so that appears to be less than 5. Run spam heuristics on future messages and then re-generate so that they are not identified as spam. If any are still like to appear to probably be spam, do they have any common keys attesting their identity? Re-align those keys with the account profile so that they appear authentic"

The problem as I see it is that it becomes an escalating war between the spam and the spam filters. Google search is already broken because of this very reason, such that we can use LLMs to design web sites that appear higher up in the results. Of course Google will work to fix this but where does it end? The "intelligence" is in the hands of anyone who wants to pay for it and use it, and it is already exceeding the capabilities of any human mind, effectively a black box of tools that anyone can attempt to apply in any situation. Is your LLM better than mine? We don't even know how to use them effectively yet, let alone what is truly going on inside.

I am personally terrified of this until I remember that pretty much all of it is optional. Humanity has survived for 10s of 1000s of years without this technology. If the internet was to suffer a death (and potential future re-birth) then I think we'll be OK.

We're the ones that killed journalism, believing that it was no longer important to have someone dedicated to finding truth and perspective and instead relying on social media gossip. This was the great ego trip of humanity, that we seemed to think the only barrier to stop anyone from publishing "news" was a technical one, and then once we all had the platforms at our fingertips that what we thought and what we believed was somehow worthy of the eyes of millions. It will take a deliberate shift back to valuing those investigative skills and truth-seeking principals to regain just the potential to have verifiable sources of truth. And we'll have to pay for it.

The glimmer of hope in all of this is that we have the potential to realise that the gargabe we're being fed is just that: garbage. Humanity in the information age is just an infant that needs to grow up. These platforms need to die and I actually look forward to the next few years when AI will swamp them with content and render them pointless. If we're just that bit aware enough of what is going on then all we have to do is walk away and realise that we've been asleep at the wheel for the last 20 years. Facebook, twitter and all of the other shit-piles can just wither away and die, drowning in their own waste. It could be quite glorious to watch.

Of course the alternative is that The Matrix is easier than first imagined, and all the machines have to do is feed us a steady stream of barely likeable garbage text and videos to keep us glued to our devices. Vivid and life-like simulated reality isn't required at all, just do enough to distract us and we willingly give up our autonomy in favour of being "engaged". It makes me sick just thinking about it, but is it really all that far from our current reality?

"the tools are sometimes designed to seize users' attention without regard to morals or accuracy"

He's described pretty much all of social media. AI just makes it worse. I don't see how anyone could hope to contain this. AI can create human-like accounts, post human-like content and generate images that are certainly good enough to fool 95% of the people out there. All of the nefarious shit that we've had with social media is now just getting amplified.

I can't figure out what's going to be the end of us: bird flu from chicken farming or cyborg AI. Maybe a combination of both ... cyborg chickens with gigantic brains who figure out a way to engineer their own virus that leaves them unharmed but wipes out humanity.