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Comment Re:Tooling exceeds Machinist Cost (Score 1) 83

The most important difference in all your examples is things like tooling and equipment are either strictly necessary to complete the job, or produce so much value in terms of productivity that they are worth the cost. Also, most tooling and equipment lasts longer than an AI token so the cost tends to get spread our over several jobs...

Using AI coding agents has not proven to increase quality or productivity in any meaningful way - increased volume of code does not mean productivity unless you're a middle manager. It's known that it is not strictly needed for the software engineer to do their job. You are not improving the engineer's workflow by mandating AI use, you're just making it more expensive.
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Comment Papers (Score 4, Informative) 29

They're calling it Focused Ultra Sound which means using an MRI to guide stimulation of millimeter-scale areas of the brain to disrupt electrical activity there.

So many ads and press releases on a web search but I did find this bibliography:

https://www.zotero.org/groups/...

It's weird how these hospitals don't link papers in the news releases as is common in the West.

Curiously there was an article yesterday about Ultrasound brain imaging so it might be possible to combine the two modalities. This seems like an "obvious to a practitioner" approach though noise cancelation will be needed.

https://alephneuro.com/blog/ul...

We might actually be capable of realizing that headband where you walk into Sick Bay and tell Dr. Crusher you have Holodeck addiction and she slaps it on your forehead for twenty minutes and tells you to lay down and then come back if it recurs.

Comment Re:Would a Spar be Repairable? (Score -1, Flamebait) 60

> Emirates operates these with over 500 passengers

Well they did until the value proposition of Dubai and Abu Dhabi suddenly came into question with three days' food and no way to restock and no sewer system, relying on petroleum-powered sewage trucks to keep people alive.

It sure seems 'convenient' that they suddenly have an insurable loss on very expensive and unprofitable airframes at just the right time.

Let's see what kind of cars the regulators purchase in a few months, or maybe it's just a coincidence.

Comment Re:I'm surprised this wasn't already required (Score 2) 107

I have seen satellite dishes at the base of isolated cell towers, though I have no idea what they were being used for.

One big drawback for satellite networking is the delay it adds to the transmissions, to travel up to the satellite and get sent back down to a ground station. This delay probably wouldn't be tolerated by a cell phone user, especially if they were talking to another cell phone which would double the delay a second time.

There's also a bandwidth issue at the satellite, if you want to do that with hundreds of thousands of towers there's just no way to have that amount of bandwidth even from a cluster of satellites. The bandwidth problem isn't one of data rate, its one of needing to be able to communicate with the ground on so many different channels because of all the towers, and having satellites at many different geostationary locations. (that's what Musk is trying to do with launching this absurd number of starlink satellites)

Comment Meshcore (Score 1) 107

I'm familiar with the backup power design of some of the cell towers where I live.

Let's just say I'm also learning how to build solar Meshcore repeaters and placing them on appropriate hilltops where I can.

You can Royal Decree anything but don't bet your life on it.

Also nobody likes to mention that the big Spanish overvolt grid crash coincided with the arrival of a very large CME. We mustn't rile the natives.

Comment Re:I'm surprised this wasn't already required (Score 2) 107

High data rate meshing requires directional antennas pointed at other nodes, unlike the more broad-beamed bay antennas the towers use for cellular access. Adding several dishes and a bunch of expensive hardware to each tower would dramatically increase tower cost and maintenance.

It's much cheaper to just run a network drop off a nearby pole or trench a line to the nearest fiber vault. Even the towers out along the open highways tend to get fiber trenched to them rather than dishes networking them together over the air.

Comment I'm surprised this wasn't already required (Score 4, Insightful) 107

Here in the USA anyway, cellular service has been considered "critical infrastructure" for quite some time now, mostly due to the decline of landlines. 9-1-1 having high availability has been legally required for a long time, and those requirements shifted to the cellular network as people ditched their land-lines for cell phones at home. So all the towers have short-term (15+ minute) UPS's and a gas generator that auto starts, with requirements to run periodic tests.

The other part of it though is the towers nowadays require internet access to function. We had a massive storm system move through the area a few years ago with close to tornado-speed "straight-line winds" that took out a huge amount of above-ground internet infrastructure, rendering cell towers functionally disabled despite giving out full bars. There were a few lines still up but everyone's home internet was either down or spotty, and it was hard to get a cell call to connect. Was llke that for 2-3 weeks, really annoying.

So, power's not the only thing that needs to be protected to keep cellular service working.

Comment Kumar Galhotra, chief operating officer (Score 1) 95

Who made the call to fire these guys?

Were they Americans who did the firing? Were they Americans who got fired?

It's important to understand the sociology potentially putting huge American enterprises risk

And why would we believe the claim that a 1-year reliability rating had anything to do with this?

Anybody who vaguely understands automotive manufacturing knows that cars that were sold over one year ago were designed several years ago and tooling takes months to years for a new model.

This article seems designed to obfuscate rather than clarify.

This makes me feel like buying a BYD would be less risky.

Comment Re:And water (Score 1) 317

> Meanwhile, that CAFE standards put in place by Bush and Obama mandated ever larger trucks and SUV

It absolutely did not.

The regulations had an exception for trucks and work vehicles. The auto industry then conspired to sell more trucks as high end personal vehicles in order to keep building vehicles without having to meet the regulatory requirements.

The lack of a small vehicle segment is entirely, 100% on the shoulders of auto manufacturers who desperately do not want to build them.
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