As someone who daily drives an EV and has done so for years, I'm obviously not overly paranoid about the battery fire issues out there. But the faster you charge a battery pack, the more heat gets generated. And the higher the battery pack's capacity, the more potential energy is contained inside it to cause a problem if it has a sudden failure.

While the same could be said about the potential energy in tanks of gasoline or diesel fuel? The challenge for EVs is that extinguishing battery fires is FAR more difficult to do. A number of race tracks have established a burn area to tow an EV with a battery fire to, so it can sit there as long as it needs to burn itself out. They don't even try to extinguish the fire. Clearly, that's not such a viable plan for a crowded interstate during rush hour.

I know there are a few experimental technologies out there, like the device a fire department can attach to the end of a hose, so it rolls under an EV and sprays water directly upwards, to cool a battery pack right above it. That's good stuff, but I'm not sure it's being adopted in the mainstream as quickly as battery pack capacities are increasing.

Spoken like a true frequentist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... I'm a Bayesian, you insensitive clod! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Joking aside, there are circumstances where it's reasonable to talk about the probability of a single event, even if it never repeats. It is possible to be rigorous about it, but you can't use the frequentist conception of probability that you probably learned in Statistics 101.

Last I heard, 3D printer and filament manufacturer AnyCubic was including some of these restrictions for printers like their Kobra 3 Max?
They were enabling it via their cloud printing functionality though. so setting the printer to LAN mode circumvented it for now. It may even be a feature they coded but left disabled while they wait to see how legislation pans out? But I recall some people in Facebook 3D printing groups being really angry about it when it was first discovered.

IMO, it amounts to more "feel good" legislation where some politicians want credit for making the nation safer. But in reality, it'll be ineffective because it can only work based on matching CRC hash values of known prints they want to restrict/ban. If people have such a print file in their possession and modify the dimensions a bit, it won't match any longer. And eventually, if they try to restrict too many items (say with AI trying to determine what is or is not a gun part?), they're going to start creating false positives that stop people from printing things they need to print.

On one hand? I think there's considerable evidence this AI bubble is going to pop; maybe in 1-2 years from now? If that's the case, the tech workers who manage to get paid training AI models still walk away with that money when it gets shuttered due to lack of funds.

On the other? I also get how distasteful it is to "train your replacement", especially when the replacement is just computer software.

I think much of this depends on how things *really* pan out. I'm not seeing big I.T. job losses due to AI implementations, so much as the regular economic pressures that drive companies to work with less staff. There's a lot of high-level/upper management talk about AI replacing workers. But it's more hypothetical than reality right now. People are still needed to put the right queries into the AI engines to get the desired results back out -- and that's often kind of an art or skill in and of itself.

On top of all of this, there really needs to be more of a realization that for many people? They're pretty ok with being "fat". The medical field wants to keep pushing obesity as a disorder or a disease. But a lot of people have no interest in going to the gym/working out or making a special effort to eat only "health foods". Many even prefer the look of an overweight person to an "ideal weight" person of similar height.

Like anything out there, you can go to extremes and then you're liable to suffer consequences.

But the medical field created a whole lot of peer-pressure to conform to a certain norm for weight - when without anyone labeling it all a "health problem", you'd have far more people out there who weren't so depressed about their body/looks. Also a lot less money wasted on diet fads and scam exercise equipment that doesn't really do much.

When a society has easy availability to food, it makes sense they'd collectively be bigger/heavier than people functioning in the hunter/gatherer situation our ancestors were stuck in. And again, you're going to have people who choose to risk shortening their lifespan if it means they get more enjoyment out of the time they're around. Enjoying tasty food and drink is a big part of that for many people. (The ones who only "eat to live" and don't care much about it are an exception here, but I'd say they're also a minority.)

I've run NextCloud for quite some time, and my frustration with it has more to do with the project not seeming interested in pursuing some of the things that could really increase its adoption and usefulness.

I'm not denying they need to find a workable solution for an open-source Office suite that integrates with it. Don't really care if they move to LibreOffice or they settle this dispute w/OpenOffice instead.

But why can't they support message boards? If you think about it, NextCloud has all the other pieces to work like a computer bulletin board system for the Internet era (as opposed to the modem dial-up days). But with no public message forums integrated, where you could control people's access by security level? It's just a non-starter.

The thing is though? The money going into any retirement plans of theirs is still money they had to earn first. The ones who "lose everything and have nothing left to retire on" aren't going to just vanish because you prevented them from investing in crypto or in some private equity firm.

These are, by and large, going to be the people who never put much into a retirement fund to begin with because they felt they needed all they could get from each paycheck for their current expenses. They opted out of the 401K plan they were offered, etc.

I don't see why I care about government trying to protect people from themselves with this one? I would never invest in crypto and very likely not private equity funds as part of a retirement plan. But that doesn't mean other people wouldn't want to. If you've got enough money already saved up in retirement funds and you believe you've found a window where it makes sense to risk, say, 20% of what you've got on something like crypto? It might double that money for you practically overnight. It also might just cause you to lose it all. But maybe 80% of your total was all you really needed to save in the first place?

ClipChump is the worst.... Many corporations stick people with that as the only (free and included w/Win 11) tool they've got to work with the occasional need to edit video. It feels like it's cloud-enabled for no reason except to say it "uses the cloud"!

It feels like a poor attempt to imitate Apple's iMovie except crippled with less functionality and a huge performance hit because some of the features only work via the cloud, plus it insists of storing files/folders in a personal OneDrive that syncs to the cloud. It acts like the audio portion of a clip is an afterthought, too. You can mute the existing audio or remove it from a clip, but it has zero for EQ'ing it. It doesn't even allow grabbing a still frame and putting it in the video for X number of seconds!

People keep asking why bother submitting apps for iOS if Apple can just de-list or reject anything they like, at any time.

The obvious answer is that you stand to make a lot of profit and considerable brand recognition if your app is listed there and becomes popular.

The reality is, Apple isn't just going around, randomly kicking apps or app developers out of their store, though. They have actual reasons. People usually just happen to disagree with them.

I'm not familiar with this Musi app, but from the Slashdot description at least? It sounds like another useless "front end" app that just pulled from YouTube and regurgitated their audio content to users. I'd put it under "apps nobody needed". Their own web site says. "Discover Musi, the free app that allows you to stream and organize the music that you want. With unlimited playlists, crossfade, equalizer and more".

Honestly, that's nonsense. You can organize your YouTube streams using their own app. I know people who paid for YouTube Red (ad free) who listen to custom playlists all the time from it. Maybe there's no built-in cross-fade option but would you *really* install another app just to hear your tracks cross-fade between each one when you stream them? You can set a global EQ for what you listen to from your iOS device too. If you feel a need to keep messing with it for various songs you're streaming? You probably just need to find better sources for those streams! Low resolution digital sampling of the original content is your likely culprit.

EVs require a different paradigm for charging than filling a tank with gas for a traditional vehicle.

The main advantage with an EV is that an owner gets to charge it overnight while they sleep, so it has a "full tank of energy" each day, ready to use.

Nobody is interested in having to stop and charge one all the time at a service station or other charging station around town. That would take a good 20-60 minutes (depending on the vehicle and charge level). That's tolerable but not ideal for long road trips, but not for daily driving/commutes.

It's about 8 light-minutes away.

In all seriousness, the combination of (solar + wind + hydro), battery storage, and long-distance grid connections is all we will need. It's cost-competitive with fossil fuels today and it's only getting more attractive as tech improves.

The best place for fusion is in the Sun's core, where any stray neutrons it generates are intercepted before reaching anything we humans care about. This fusion powers solar, wind, and hydro energy Earth-wide.

The cost of renewably generating power is attractively low today and will be even lower in the next few years. The only real challenge left is to find a way to store and distribute the energy widely, robustly, and flexibly enough.

I'm betting on high-voltage DC cables, which can link unsynchronized grids and don't dissipate RF radiation if they go through salt water. Their range also scales with the square of their voltage*. Intercontinental, multi-1000s-of-km power cables are science fiction today, but there's a smooth path to their adoption (e.g. linking Great Brittan to the Sahara before a trans-Atlantic cable).

I also think it's high time to let the price of electricity float. Electric car chargers (and many industrial and HVAC applications) can be set to gorge on power when it's cheap and plentiful and turn off when it's scarce. Storing money is much easier than storing energy. Free markets work well for sending price signals. We shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel and make a planned economy when it comes to power**.

We're all nerds and love the idea of a fusion reactor as a magic bullet. Me too! However, we shouldn't let a hopeful dream get in the way of seeing that clean power is already within our grasp.

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* For fixed power, if you up the voltage 10x, the current goes down 10x, so the V=IR drop goes down 10x. You then lose 1/10th the voltage out of a 10x baseline, thus a 10x voltage increase cuts Ohmic losses on a fixed power transfer by 99%. Another way to slice it is that increasing the voltage 10x increases the acceptable transmission range (i.e. the range at which you lose a fixed proportion of your power to resistance) by 100x.

** Back when power was largely generated by fossil fuels, a planned power economy made more sense since costs were level and generation in any geographical area was a natural monopoly. Today, true costs vary with the wind and sun, and it would helpful to let the market do its thing whereby the grid acts as the arbiter between power generators and consumers.

A friend of mine is doing a hardware startup with 2 people that he says would have taken at least 3 extra coders pre-AI. He and his partner are doing the valuable EE and mechanical parts of the business. A lot of the software they need is not what's differentiating their startup, and AI is just fine. For them, it sounds like AI is giving a 150% productivity gain, and without it their business idea would only be marginally viable.

I think Toyota and Honda are two auto-makers that have stood out for their excellence in building hybrid vehicles that are truly reliable, at reasonable price-points.

Full EVs don't necessarily seem like they're so relevant for them to build, even if both have dabbled in it a bit.

Right now in America? The reality is, apartment and condo dwellers typically have no good option to charge an EV at home. Some may make do with a workplace that provides EV charging in their parking lot or garage. But even that probably feels like a gamble to someone who has no certainty they'll stay employed with the same company for as long as they own the vehicle.

Another reality is that EVs don't really have a stellar track record of not having issues with early battery failures and charging system issues. I've been driving an EV as my daily driver for 5-6 years now and our family currently owns 2 of them. So I'm far from "anti EV adoption"! But the more you read, the more you learn about the details the manufacturers would prefer you were blissfully unaware of. The Tesla Model Y 2021 model year, for example, has a pretty high rate of battery failures. Quite a few reports out there are of people who got one replaced under the 120,000 mile warranty, but came close to going over it. Those cars are still too new and too costly to be having battery issues around the 100,000 mile mark. A regular gasoline engine vehicle from the likes of Honda or Toyota would easily be expected to go 2x that distance if not more. The Chevy Bolt was a much more well publicized fiasco. I'd say almost ALL of them from the start of production through at least the 2020 model year needed early battery replacements from GM. The early ones were even catching on fire here and there. Volvo had all kinds of electrical issues plaguing their first EV model, too. And Nissan's Leaf is categorically poor with battery range/life - largely because in the interest of cost-cutting, they don't even actively heat/cool the battery pack.

I don't see a need for any auto maker to rush to try to build more EVs just for the sake of change? The market forces will dictate the real demand, and the people with the best quality offerings at fair prices will get the lion's share of those sales.

I'm an early 50's Gen-Xer and one of my big issues with Hollywood is simply that they're not very focused on telling stories my generation wants to hear. By that, I mean, there's a lot of the cheesy horror or sight-gag comedy stuff out there that I'm not very entertained by. And stories about the relationships or struggles of people young enough to be my kids? I'm simply not the target market for that content.

It feels like when they do pay attention to people in my age group, it's just a money-grab with a retro throw-back. Think "Top Gun: Maverick" as a prime example. Everyone I know went because we remember what a big deal Top Gun was in the 80's. But it was such a low effort re-hash of the original. It just didn't really need to be made at all.

And this might be a more minor quibble, but with the popular superhero genre? I've found it a little odd/weird that they almost never seem to have a supposedly physically strong woman who has any real muscles or bulk to her. I mean, quite a few of the women who starred in the old "American Gladiators" campy TV series looked like far better candidates than the actresses they select for these roles. I know the comic books drew the women that way originally (She Hulk or Wonder Woman, for example) ... but Hollywood reinvents other aspects of those stories all the time. Look how much they changed the Spiderman story around. Aunt May isn't at all the same as in the comics, these days! People are always complaining that Hollywood is "too woke" -- but they sure do seem to be selective! The female lead characters are perpetually the cookie-cutter stereotypes of what Hollywood thinks guys want to see.