i'm pretty good at writing ranty complaints... and usually there's at least some level of anger even if i write it over days or "leave it until tomorrow". but i'd surely make more mistakes than that if i were drunk.

on the "flips a field in the JSON" ... that does make sense and it's sort of equivalent to "in the db", but in a micro-services architecture more of the services (like said dispatcher) deal with whatever they got from the "order service" which could be serialized as json or dealt with as such if they run this stuff in Node.js

things that don't ring true to me:

That just seems to wordy / lofty to me... i'd guess... it would be "driver_id" with a foreign key to account.account_id or something. also does anyone find that actually offensive even if true? i mean HR has been HR for decades. and "Resources" is not that much better than "assets". And you know what from an accounting or any other pov i don't think the companies actually look at drivers as "assets" anyway. More like "necessary temporary annoyances until we get the robots up in here".

also:

this claim that the "regulatory fees" line goes straight to some separate fund for lobbying seems highly unlikely:
For one thing, a credit card payment afaik has to go to a single account. It's not like the main amount goes one place and sales tax go to some other account. So at that basic level it's just going to some generic merchant account.

Now from an accounting pov and segregating or transferring money after the fact there's no reason why the company would tie the money they spend on lobbying to these specific fees. what would be the rationale or advantage of doing so?

By this point all (?) the legacy auto companies also have had at least some BEVs for 5+ years and HEVs for longer. As massive corporations they're relatively soul-less and are going to sell whatever sells and they can money on. on BEVs apparently even what they can't make money on...

The Toyota / Ford hybrid (and phev... they're basically the same) power train are really cool and surprisingly simple mechanically.
probably the pinnacle of ice gas engine application. Atkinson cycle engine and eCVT (with no belt and relatively light use of clutches)

https://youtu.be/O61WihMRdjM?s...

i was right there with you... but then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

(and it does sound like him...)

and you have to dig into each one to see how much was spent and where it came from like:

it solves a problem... in a rather expensive way.. but it's better than what FEMA (and HUD) normally does

( https://www.brookings.edu/arti... )

(and i'm somewhat ok with the flood insurance program... even though that too is subsidized... but at least provides some strong market signal of the risk. but the rebuilding grants (e.g from HUD) for people who don't even pay in... less of a fan. )

eh... it definitely leans left, and you see that in various ways, but it's still does decent on basic factual reporting afaict.

did you argue the same when the Obama administration approved Keystone XL pipeline only to then unapprove it. Going so far as to veto a bill on the subject?

(https://web.archive.org/web/20250309133053/https://www.rpc.senate.gov/policy-papers/biden-resurrects-failed-obama-energy-strategy )

You may well have. But after reading about these kinds of things for decades and green tech and loggers vs owls (remember those?)
  overall no particular project is a hill worth dying on. Just try to position yourself to profit, or at least not lose too much money, on whatever it is and then ride the waves... it's not going to save/destroy the world one way or the other. And w/ your political speech cash support your PAC of choice.

btw, re owls... here's where we are now:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/n...

i challenge you to cast this one in a "moral environmentalists" vs "evil corporates" or any such easy frame.

Do you actually believe this ? or, what chance do you think that this statement is true: "Pres. Trump banned off shore wind at Putin's behest in order to damage the United States" or maybe differentially w/ and w/o the "to damage the United States" part.

right so the capability is nearly fluff...
like flex fuel vehicles, remember those?

burning green hydrogen is even less cost effective than our seldom mentioned E85 push from like 20 years ago.
I'm still eagerly awaiting that enzymatic ethanol from grass that was right around the corner. instead of distilling corn.
(and of course holographic solid state memory with thousands year stability).

the issue with these power guys is that they're committing to pay for this hydrogen starting next year. not "when it's cost effective" or even "when it's less than 2x the cost of gas" or whatever.

Before WASM there was asm.js (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js) which is an efficient subset of js used as a target for "transpilers". Yes it's "code" is legal javascript, but it's not something people would actually write to.

as to TeaVM it describes itself well as:

As to why you'd want to use one... well maybe you want to package existing logic. Or you just want to write some complex stuff but not deal w/ the hell that is maintenance of a large JS project. and by "some complex stuff" i mean idk... like a game engine or a simulator or fancy graphics / video processing; not just a DHTML type app. And then you use the browser as a convenient distribution method / "zero footprint" scheme.

isn't all that revolutionary now that ng is relatively cheap.

and green hydrogen is still something of a mythical beast... where they're going to get it and how much it'll cost...
https://www.nature.com/article...

And that's on top of how inefficient it is to generate electricity by burning any type of hydrogen. CA people will cry even more about our electricity bills.

TI, Intel and AMD have zero interest in selling their chips for this purpose. the number of chips used for this is a tiny fraction of their production.

Not even a rounding error.

And these are commodity chips sold all over the world which people can resell.

This is roughly like suing Toyota because various warlords around the world use Toyota trucks for their technicals.

uncalled for

The retraction note is all innuendo. It doesn't cure any actual wrongdoing, nor the actual basis of it's suspicions.
just that "questions have been raised".

The guardian article purports to quote smoking gun emails the closest that seems shady is from 2015 , 15 years later, where some Monsanto dude suggests ghostwriting a paper.

About the original paper it looks like normal corporate communication about a good event. There's no indication of saying anyone cheated or convinced scientists of untrue things or anything like that.

This overall seems more some sort of political purity declaration than about knowledge it even about scientific standards.

This is surprisingly on point. TFA ends with this:

and it may be true that the LLMs can't make paradigm shifting breakthroughs. But then ... how many people can? 0.1%? 1%? MAYBE 10%.

and the rest of people become no more ECONOMICALLY useful/competitive/viable than pets. Then what do we do ?

Which is to say that TFA may be right that LLMs aren't going to be AGI no matter what.... but they may yet totally upend (and possibly destroy) society.