33% is more than enough to power the world without blanketing every inch in solar panels.

Love new technology, always have, but these kinds of advances pale in comparison to JUST PUTTING PANELS ON.

My house is a tiny, tiny (60sq m.... yes 60) house. My smart meter tells me - I pull at absolute max 10KW at any one time (and that rarely and briefly). I pull 8.5KWh / day, on average, over the last 4 years. My house is entirely electric so that's everything - that's heating, lighting, my computers, cooking, appliances, etc. etc. etc.

My roof space is ~30sq m (I have some extra panels on an outdoor shed, my front is NOT covered entirely in panels, I have about 8-10KW of panels). I can satisfy the above by covering my roof space at a less-than-ideal facing, tilted at a less-than-ideal angle, at a less-than-ideal latitude (the UK), and with less-than-ideal panels, having a battery pack consisting of less-than-ideal batteries.

In the summer, I'm constantly in excess (hell, I'm still in excess now and it's nearly October). In winter *sometimes* I have to fall back to grid (but my heating is entirely heatpumps, and they pull a maximum of 800W each, but more like 250W once the temperature is where it should be).

Oh and the above - is an entirely homemade system. I cut and crimped every cable, I lifted, railed and fixed every panel, I joined all the batteries together myself, I fused and RCD'd and MCB'd the entire thing. I operate them as entirely separate to my grid power system (though the new micro-inverters are about to change that as they've been approved in my country now).

If I can do that, so can much of the world, especially with professional deployment, and so SHOULD those portions of the world where it's viable be made to do this.

Correct on both, in fact heat decreases efficiency of PV cells (thermal dark current is opposite to photovoltaic current). However, keep in mind that "hot electrons" aren't exactly hot in the sensible-heat sense-- it means that the electrons are in a high-energy state well above the bandgap of the semiconductor. The solar photons come in at an equivalent temperature of 6000K, and all of that energy gets transferred to the minority-carrier electrons, but they quickly shed their excess energy (by transferring energy to the lattice and to other electrons or holes) and relax to the edge of the conduction band (or, ~kT above it). So, using "hot electrons" means somehow finding a way to transfer energy out of the highly-excited initial state immediately after photon absorption, rather than the relaxed quasi-equilibrium state of the conduction band.

So, there's energy there, and in principle it could be used. It's just going to take a new approach to use it. I can't think of a way to do that without adding junctions, and then you end up essentially just re-inventing the multi-junction solar cell.

Yes, but of course now you're harvesting the sensible heat, not the hot electrons. This can be useful, if you need low-grade heat.

The perovskite semiconductors here are a very different technology than the old thin photovoltaics. They have the potential to be much more efficient, and the deposition techniques are cheap and comparatively low-tech

Whether they can succeed in simultaneously be highly-efficient, resistant to degradation in the environment, and still be low cost is the subject of a lot of work. We'll see.

To be more specific, the target back in the '80s and '90s was clearly articulated as being fifty cents per watt (where "per watt" meant, when illuminated at standard conditions of 1 kW/square meter.) Silicon photovoltaics can now be purchased at 12 cents per watt. In today's dollars. They not only hit the target, they blew it away.

The reason the thin films of the '80s and '90s lost was not that they were bad, but that silicon simply outcompeted them.

I have some amount of skepticism too. Nanosecond lifetimes of hot electrons are amazing, but to date there's no way for turning hot electrons into electrical energy*. So they'd essentially have to invent a technology from scratch.

--
  *(thermoelectrics convert hot electrons into usable energy, of course, but there not just the electrons, but the whole lattice is hot. And the efficiency is worse than a solar cell).

Save that a single human putting in actual effort can't turn out several dozen PRs a day, every day. That throttles the PR volume to a manageable level for the maintainers.

The answer is a simple "No.". Don't allow them. The vast majority will fail to meet reasonable criteria for acceptance, which is enough of a reason to reject them. For the rest, even if they're acceptable in terms of quality, the sheer cost of reviewing every pull request in detail and sorting the minority of acceptable requests from the swamp of slop will itself damage the project, diverting maintainer time away from feature work and fixing bugs, badly enough that it's not worth it. I think this sums it up nicely:

Why should I spend my time reading something you didn't care enough about to spend time writing?

Except it wasn't the unwashed masses who labeled large language models "AI". It was the AI corporations (maybe "AI" should be in quotes here), who wanted it to sound sexier.

The more fundamental problem is distributed responsibility and lack of transparency.

Until recently, drone strikes required a long sequence of command decisions, starting with intel gathering, analysis, decision, orders, and remote command of the device. No one is directly responsible when something goes wrong, the failure is distributed among many players with the result that no one has to bear the consequences.

For example, the "collateral murder" incident, where apache helicopters gunned down civilians and journalists.

In normal situations, we have Derek Chauvin, who was an individual who caused the death of one man. He went to trial, the evidence was examined, and guilt was assigned. Trials are more-or-less held in the public light, and journalists and interested parties can examine court records and in some cases reanalyze evidence (not all physical evidence is kept or available, but for example, DNA evidence can sometimes be reexamined).

That's how it's supposed to happen.

Contrast that with erroneously ordered drone strikes that hit civilians instead of legitimate targets.

I suppose the biggest, most egregious example would be George Bush taking the country to war because Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction", and of course one were found, and the security services swore up and down that they told him there were none, but he stated "well, the message didn't get through".

And skated responsibility. Completely.

To bring this closer to home, software engineers implement all sorts of insecure, inconvenient, and privacy violating features with no moral pushback. Even if it's completely obvious that something is an anti-feature, people do it because a) their job depends on it, and b) it's someone else's decision. And if there's a breech and ten million social security numbers get made public, the company simply fixes the problem and continues. No responsibility is assigned.

I was satisfied to see videos of the "narco terrorist" boats get destroyed, and then the survivors killed. Not the actual killing, but just knowing that the event was recorded and analyzed in the public sphere, and there was a conversation about it, and it was investigated. That seems like it was handled the right way.

Death is permanent, it can't be undone. If we're going to kill people, regardless of whether it's AI or anything else, it should be transparent and put into the public discourse.

No one is assigned blame for screwing up, that's the more fundamental problem.

On: "A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company "is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies" and that there is no evidence its software was at fault."

Is AI now an aspect of Mother Nature? Reminds me of:
https://2001.fandom.com/wiki/F...
  ""Let me put it this way, Mr. Amer. The [Palantir] 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake, or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the word, foolproof and incapable of error." -- [Palantir's] HAL 9000 to BBC reporter Martin Amer"

https://humanisticsystems.com/...
        "Dave: How would you account for this discrepancy between you and the twin [Palantir] 9000 [that did not kill lots of school girls]?
        HAL: Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
        Frank: Listen HAL. There has never been any instance at all of a computer error occurring in the [Palantir] 9000 series, has there?
        HAL: None whatsoever, Frank. The [Palantir] 9000 series has a perfect operational record.
        Frank: Well of course I know all the wonderful achievements of the [Palantir] 9000 series, but, uh, are you certain there has never been any case of even the most insignificant computer error?
        HAL: None whatsoever, Frank. Quite honestly, I wouldn't worry myself about that."

What do you call an AI (or human) that never asks questions, never seeks confirmatory evidence, never asks for clarification, never points out conflicting priorities, and/or never refuses illegal orders?

Onec again, the deeper issue is "the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
====
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?

Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?

Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?

These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ....

Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ....

There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...

The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance [otherwise they would not be so powerful or capable of so much rapid destruction as well as rapid creation]. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.

We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ...
====

except for the hours in which the F16 crashes. Those hours cost $80 million/hour.

Fascinating; three completely disparate things, none of which have any relation to teleology, the nominal subject of the sentence.

"Wigner's Friend" is a thought experment, pointing out that in a strict interpretation of quantum mechanics, even conscious observers must be in an indeterminate quantum state until observed by an external observer. The least action principle states that the path of an object moving through a potential field is the one in which the action, the time integral of the kinetic energy minus the potential energy, is minimized. The second law of thermodynamics says that in any closed system the change in entropy, defined as the change in heat divided by the temperature, must be greater than or equal to zero; for a not-closed system, in order to decrease the entropy in one place, energy is needed (typically to be radiated as waste heat; i.e., life takes energy from the sun, and rejects waste heat to the envionment (which ultimately radiates it to space).) None of these have any relation to teleology, the philosophical concept that causality is driven by purpose.

It isn't supposed to take it over, you think it is because your brain is entirely made of brown matter. These languages are not even trying to do the same thing. C# is not a systems language, by design. C++ is, by design. C# is garbage collected, C++ is not. C# needs a very large runtime just to do anything at all, C++ does not. Games written in C# will inevitably require more RAM and will be subject to GC pausing. Lower performance games can tolerate that, but games that push the hardware to its limit will be noticeably impacted by it.

This is like that stupid argument you keep trying to make about DRAM being closer to the CPU makes it faster. The only reason you think that is because not only do you think with your brown matter, you also have no idea how DRAM works, so you have no concept as to why that distance is a moot point.

Your domain of expertise is feces, not computers, and it shows.

Talk about a "whoops", your brain is 100% brown matter if you think C# was ever intended to replace C++. Those two serve a very different purpose. C# is much more closely related to java and tries to serve the same niche. You're obviously not even aware of what the CLR is for.

I didn't start using C# until dotnet core, and I started using java soon after. C# feels like somebody put some actual thought into it. Java feels like an early alpha release of C#. Neither language is my daily driver -- that would be Rust. When I have to write something in C#, I think "well that sucks, but at least it's not java."

Unlike you, I have actual experience with all of these languages. I've been writing production code with all of them (except C++) for the last 6 years.

I don't really care for MS, but they've contributed a great deal to open source. Unlike you, I believe in giving credit where it's due, even if I don't care for the person or people behind it. Art and artist are not the same. That's why only you would get pleasure from nueralink failing its patients. Fortunately for them, it seems to be working well.

In any case, stay in your lane. If the topic is feces, then I'll defer to your decades of expertise in that.

Hmm...Have you looked at the ohno crate? That, and a bunch of other crates in oxidizer look really useful, and none of them are specific to windows. There are a few obviously designed for MS products like azure, but most that I've looked at aren't.

They mostly seem geared at making rust even more ergonomic.

/facepalm

By this reasoning, Microsoft should have taken over C++ a long, long time ago. Hell, C# should be even more proprietary right now, instead it has become open, whereas the language it was built to compete with, namely Java, went from being open to being an excuse for Oracle to sue anybody who uses it. Actually come to think of it, Microsoft is funding eclipse adoptium.

Just because your favorite drink is the same color as rust doesn't mean you understand it, let alone any other programming language.

The cynic in me can't help but notice how both of the companies doomsaying here also happen to be the ones with the most to lose:

1) Openai has about a trillion dollars into it, and every product it has produced at this point is either outclassed by competitors (chatgippity) or just plain dogshit/pointless (everything else it has produced, including the donut)
2) Anthropic has a very good product that is also not worth anywhere near what it actually costs to deliver

These are literally the only two major players here that don't already have another profit generating business to fall back to.

Facebook is the only one without an actual business strategy in the AI space while pretending to be a major player. But that's a topic for a CEO from another metaverse.