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Comment Re:Should all gas stations have an array of these? (Score 1) 32

No, unless and until they can produce a gallon of gasoline chaper than pumping oil out of the ground, refininging it, and shipping it to the gas station -- an economic miracle if you think about it

This makes sense for remote, off-the-grid locations where you have access to renewable power like solar that you don't pay for by the kilowatt hour. You could make enough gas from a modest setup to meet an inidvidual's needs.

Comment Re:This is rocket science (Score 1) 35

It's one thing to man-rate a *technology*; but the *production processes* and supply chain need to be equally robust. The Apollo Command Module was flown a half dozen times before any manned mission.

Apollo was a project that had economic scale. Many test objects were created and many beta units produced of critical components like the Command Module. While managing larger scale processes has its own challenges, the fact that the processes are *repeated* make them easier to debug.

The low pace of manned missions in the current era adds to their risk. You can man-rate the *technology*, but (a) it's minimally tested and (b) produced artisinally instead of industrially. There were, perhaps, 180 space suits of various types produced for Apollo (not all of which flew), which while below "industrial" production quantities was a lot of repeittion of the operations needed to make them. The astronauts on Artemis missions will be wearing suits produced at a rate of a handful over a decade.

While the hindsight and experience from sixty years of manned space flight reduce the technological risk, that is offset by the production quality risk from low cadence production. Assembly personnel and even vendors can turn over between production orders.

Comment Re:At least some of the actors are honest ... (Score 1) 96

I see this as a rich-get-richer scenario. Smart people, the ones who can outthink statistical parrot, will be able to use its speed at processing and digesting massive quantities of data to improve their productivity. People who can't outthink the things will have to use them *credulously*, and thus become functionally dumber than ever.

Comment Re:The Dark Ages (Score 1) 192

For a private company, making a profit is necessary for continued existence. Companies that don't make a profit get bought out and liquidated for the value of their assets.

The alternative would be to nationalize drug development -- socialized medical research. Or there's just waiting and hoping for the best, which is what we're headed toward.

Comment Is the AI going to go to jail for you? (Score 1) 40

Tax software is one of the last places I'd expect AI to take over. Tax software is implementing a whole lot of very detailed rules and regulations to produce forms. Any sort of AI approximation, hallucination, or other slop is entirely unacceptable if you don't want to have the IRS auditing you and threatening to send you to pound-me-in-the-ass Federal prison. So no one in their right mind is going to say "ChatGPT, here's my W2s, 1099s, etc, produce a 1040 for me".

Comment Thanks, Exxon (Score 1) 104

Thanks for making our standard of living the highest in human history. Thanks for keeping my house warm and lit. Thank you for helping cook my food. Thank you for helping me to get from point A to point B. Thank you for natural gas derived fertilizer, which helps provide the food I eat. Thank you for lubricating oils (the whales thank you for this one too). Thank you for plastics, in all their various and sundry uses. And thank you for combating the hair-shirting environmentalists who would have me freeze in the dark in the name of the climate.

Comment Re:Roadside repairs? (Score 1) 107

Had one last year -- a 12 v battery died and needed roadside replacement. Jump starts are still pretty common. So is overheating in the summer -- requiring coolant top-ups, even hose replacement can be done roadside. Some modern cars can go into "limp" mode because of faulty gas caps and you might have to reset the ECU in some cases to get home or to a shop. Those are just the ICE specific problems.

But yeah; ICE cars since 2000 have reached a level of reliability that would be unheard of when I started driving 40 years ago.

Comment Sure, we should classify AI programs as people. (Score 4, Insightful) 80

...if we're hyping our company's Ai snake oil. We should absolutely *not* classify them as people for other purposes, e.g., legally: it wasn't my company your honor that did that bad thing, it was the AI.

Sixty years ago it would have been "solid state". Ten years ago it would have been "block chain". Ten years from now it will be something else.

Comment Re:bro (Score 1) 62

It's the usual issues. If you acknowledge that homeless people are actual people who have problems which can be partially or fully solved, then you need to work on the problems.

You seemed to be confused. The goal is not to solve the problems of the homeless. The goal is to solve the problems caused by the homeless.

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