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Comment Re: Leaving. Billionaires or billionaires' money? (Score 1) 93

so a company like Apple with billions of dollars doesn't owe 5% of their holdings to the state, just the less than 300 individual billionaires that live in the state.

I feel like I need to spell out the math.

300 * 1,000,000,000 = 300,000,000,000
300,000,000 * 5% = 15,000,000,000

That's all CA will get from the one time tax "from Apple". Just 15 Billion Dollars.

Comment Re: Oh well (Score 4, Insightful) 227

my oldest is 26, and my next is 22. oldest was told to go into cyberseurity , get a degree in it, gets out, no one will even interview without 5 years experience. no feeder jobs or anything that would give them that experience, just magically you need experience. they've been a supervisor at a fast food place for some time now, applying to 100-150 roles all over the USA and not getting a response, let alone a rejection.

My next just graduated in May, he has a little more of a plan, wants to be a professor and teach English to autistic kids (as he is one, but graduated magna cum laude with a BA in English)

Just wanting to work for a year to save up for his master program, finally found a job for $9.50 an hour at a movie theater, no other place would call him back as he has a BA in English and 'is over qualified' or doesn't have grocery store experience.

This is what happens when you don't hire people for the long haul, everything is transactional. I don't think you should work same place until you die but now business is so unwilling to invest in someone for them to leave, they won't invest.

Comment Re:"Reasoning" (Score 1) 187

You are speaking irrelevant nonsense. LLMs are trained in words

They are not. They are trained in tokens. Tokens do not align with word boundaries, and an arbitrary word can be tokenized in many different ways.

and they think in words

They do not. They don't even think in tokens. The process is: words are split to tokens, tokens point to an embedding position (latent space) while RoPE encodes a relative position, and all reasoning is done within latent space, which is not at all verbal (concepts are directions in latent space, and math is done on concepts, not words).

Comment Re:Why not put a generator on the engine? (Score 1) 45

Also, a note: when spec'ing a generator, you need to know how much you're planning to use it vs. batteries. If it's only going to be used rarely, you prefer low mass, low volume, low cost, and low maintenance when unused (at the cost of low efficiency and higher maintenance in use), whereas if it's going to be used a lot, you prefer high efficiency and low maintenance cost in use, even if at the cost of higher mass, volume, cost, and maintenance when unused. In the former case, you'd prefer to allocate that extra mass, volume, and money into a larger battery pack.

Comment Re:Why not put a generator on the engine? (Score 1) 45

That's why you don't use a tiny petrol generator? Diesel generator efficiencies are roughly:

Small backup generator (1-15kW): ~20-28%
Midsize backup generator (20-200kW): ~30-35%
Large industrial generator (200-2000kW): ~35-42%

Also, ironically this company's plan of the trailer providing a boost will actually make the tractor less efficient. ICE engines use "brake specific fuel consumption" (BSFC) graphs to plot their efficiencies across different RPMs and different torques. You can see an example for a small diesel engine here. Note that they require very high torque conditions and relatively high power conditions to be efficient. You can change the balance between torque and RPM within a given power band (blue) via gearing but gearing doesn't change what power band you're in. If you're in a low power band, you're fundamentally forced into inefficiency (note also that you're not going to be driving around at 1000 RPM just over a stall all the time).

Indeed, if you were forced into a low power band, you'd actually be better off with a series hybrid powertrain, as the engine can alternate between operating in an efficient powerband and shutting down. Of course, parallel hybrids are more efficient than series (albeit with added complexity and mass).

Comment Re:between 165k and 222k usd? (Score 2) 45

Unfortunately, the math doesn't work that way (even ignoring that a 400kWh battery is very small). Battery packs taper the closer you get to full, they're not a constant power all the way. Unless your battery pack can take 400kW at 80%, you're not charging that quickly.

Also, while 40 mins is fine in Europe (breaks: 45 minutes every 4,5 hours of driving... though using 70% of a 400kWh pack on a loaded class 8 truck going even at a slow 80kph will only take you 2 1/2h of driving in "average" conditions, so the truck's range is fundamentally undersized), the US is 30 minutes total break in 11 hours of driving, so ~6 hours on your first leg and ~5h on your second leg with 30 minutes to fill that 5h of driving. And US speed limits are usually faster for trucks than in the EU, so higher consumption. EU really needs 600kWh and >=600kW charging, while the US needs 800-1000kWh and >MW charging.

Note that in all of this we're assuming efficient-shaped trucks (Tesla Semi or the like), not your typical EU bricks, along with a well optimized powertrain and an efficient tyre config. If not, you need to increase those packs and charge powers further.

Comment Re:Barely enough for..dual-use? (Score 1) 77

The military implications are obvious. Think Ukraine. If you suspect the enemy is trying to infiltrate on a dark night along several kilometers of frontline, you light up the scene while launching a bunch of low-cost FPV drones, and those infiltrators are about to have a bad day.

You *can* spot infiltrators in the dark with IR cameras, but it requires much more expensive drones and isn't usually as effective, hence the preference for night operations. Plus, there's IR camouflage, with varying degrees of success. But it usually makes you stand out like a sore thumb under illumination (you're basically wearing a tent).

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