Yes?

As for the one in New York, I'll give you three guesses where La Liberté éclairant le monde was made.

Damn science believers, always messing up people's fantasies.

Have you ever seen a shiny new penny versus an old tarnished one? Or the Statue of Liberty? Or an old building with one of those weird green roofs?

They're all copper, with varying amounts of oxygen. Oxygen free copper is expensive copper that's specially made to get rid of as much of the oxygen as possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If the article got something so simple as THIS completely wrong, one can easily presume that the REST of the article is incorrect gibberish.

"oXyGEn-fREE cOppER", lmao

Indeed.

You can of course have it delivered to your door as well. If you can't receive it at home, as is the case being discussed in this thread, then you can have something delivered to a locker. When you go to pick it up you tell Amazon you're there and they pop open the correct door.

It's interesting how practically everything is "the most convincing proof we have."

I saw two robots. :-)

Two words: Robot packages. :-)

(Not package robots, which Amazon already has.)

Are you crying? There's certainly some starting, but probably a ways to go yet.

Do you not already have this? Amazon has local lockers here in drug stores, gas stations and convenience stores, most of which are open 24 hours. Most of the postal locations are also in drug stores.

100%. The point of learning-based AI is that it's faster and cheaper to develop than conventional engineered algorithms. It also tends to execute faster with fewer resources than conventional algorithms. Apple, Nvidia and other companies already do this locally pretty extensively: DLSS, background segmentation and other processing in videoconferencing, audio processing, photo processing including object and person recognition, text to speech and speech recognition, information extraction from e-mails, etc.

You probably actually mean large language models. Those too. Language models are so compelling because they seem to have personalities and the can interact with us like people. People are going to want theirs personalized. The current approach is to shove context into hidden background for every prompt but that's expensive and very limited. In future you'll have a local version that learns and adapts to you: what you like for breakfast, what time you get up, what kind of jokes you like, if you're a furry. These things are all over sci fi, from Niven and Heinlein to Star Wars, Star Trek and Marvel.

No reason why it can't be open either. The ridiculous amounts of power put into training language models today is because it's an arms race. Six months behind the behemoths it's all enthusiasts reenacting the early days of PCs in their basements.

I don't mind an optional fob to open the door, though I rarely use mine. I don't like it being required (no door key) and I don't like keyless ignition.

Both yours and the OPs numbers have a certain... fragrance.

They did. If you don't think military contractors build things as cheaply as they can, or that there's something magical about "military-grade" you're dreaming. They charge as much as they can because they don't have any proper competition.

Iron Dome interceptors, the Tamir missile, cost about $40-50k. Patriots are around $4 million, SM3s $10-30 million. The Tamir works fine and is that cheap because Israel is a small country with limited resources and lots of demands on those resources. Patriots and SM3s are that expensive because the US is a big country with lots of resources, not nearly as many demands on them, and you guys didn't listen to Eisenhower.

Agreed, but, unfortunately, that kind of quaint thinking will only really matter (again) in about 2.5 years -- maybe starting in 8 months, if we're lucky. /cynical

Nice and a good father/son activity.

I have always been mechanically inclined and started with a used Kawasaki G5 100, with its engine in pieces, that my mom said I could have because she didn't think I could get it back together. Silly mom didn't know about official service manuals. Then it was my first car, a used '69 VW Beetle - basically one wrench, four 17mm (I think) bolts behind the fan housing (that are almost impossible to reach, designers should be forced to work on their creations), a tug on the exhaust pipes and the engine drops out. Then a Suzuki 380GT, a 3-cylinder, 3-coil, 2-stroke with an oil injector - which was very fast (like 110+ MPH fast, which is "yikes!" on a bike). But I settled down when I met Sue. It's been three Hondas since then: a 1-year used '87 Prelude Si, sold for my '01 Civic Ex (more safety features and better gas mileage), then a '02 CR-V Ex for Sue. I have Honda Service Manuals for the latter two (Civic: printed, CR-V: PDF). That said, I stay away from the heavy work or things that need special tools.