> Every roadblock you have mentioned is merely a prejudiced perspective that needs to be overcome

I'm very certain that physical compatibility is more than "prejudiced perspective." Fuck man it took twelve years to decide on a connector standard in North America and that doesn't even impact the size and shape of the vehicle like a battery format would.

> Battery swapping *IS* the way forward until the tech changes

You know that even among vehicles that are swap-capable, the most common form of recharging is like, still plugging in same as non-swap-capable vehicles, right? Swapping is just one solution to an edge case.
=Smidge=

> unlikely to be insurable

This is in China.

But if you want to make it US/EU-centric, I just need to point out that we have zero problems putting stockpiles of flammable and explosive materials right next to commercial and even residential zoning.

> Or are all those videos of EV fires that can't be extinguished fake news?

Yes, because they absolutely can be extinguished. There are published procedures for extinguishing EV battery fires (spoiler alert: It involves water, and not even all that much water if done properly) and safely handling them after they are out. You have a lot of ignorant people saying what you are saying without evidence, when there is lots of evidence to the contrary.

> I do know they managed to ignite the worry in me.

Ignorance tends to have that effect on people, yes. My sympathies but the situation can be fixed through learning.

No, EV batteries do not "make their own oxygen."
No, EV batteries can not burn underwater.
No, putting water on an EV battery fire will not cause the lithium to burn/explode.

=Smidge=

> You just said there's no infrastructure needed, and then describe putting up thousands of buildings around the place.

You're ignoring the context; "you STILL need to build charging infrastructure anyway" - you do not, at least no more than any other business would need infrastructure which is already local and existing. Contrast to "charging infrastructure" which invokes mental images of huge cabinets of electrical equipment and rows of kiosks all out in the middle of nowhere.

> That's a lot of investment for no current customers

Nio has sold over 750K vehicles and they've only been in business like, seven years? They have customers. I use Nio specifically because they are the only company that's doing this on any scale worth discussing of course.

And I guess it needs to be pointed out after all; You can still charge the cars "normally" using L1/L2/DCFC systems, including home charging. You don't NEED to swap the battery every time...
=Smidge=

> Convolutional neural networks are NOT "behind nearly all generative AI models today", as Benn Jordan so casually states. LLMs overwhelmingly use transformer architectures which do not use convolution.

Correct, but the generative models being discussed are music and visual, not language. Would you like to guess what kind of neural network is most common in those applications? (Hint: if you actually watched the video, he explains that the processing of audio is mostly done using visual/spacial algorithms by converting to and from spectrograms)

> Benn Jordan is a musician, not a technologist

Correct, though because he is a musician he has a big stake in the issue of AI use and training/theft. Again, if you watch the video, he's working with actual researchers and is taking the role of a science communicator rather than a principal developer.

> Embedding information in audio streams has been proven for decades to always be audible

You did not watch the video. You also clearly didn't bother to do any lateral reading.

> it reflects a flawed mentality that says that destroying the work of others should be the goal

Destroying who's work, exactly? The AI companies? If someone is stealing your work, I don't see why anyone should defend or facilitate that behavior. If they want to train their AI on my work, they can negotiate a licensing deal for the non-poisoned versions. (And if your argument against that is it would be too expensive or laborious to get permission from all the authors and artists whose work is used to train AI, then you may as well just admit in plain language that your favorite hobby horse requires IP theft to exist...)

> Sure, if you're technically illiterate you'd believe that.

Man you sure do love being wrong don't you? If it wasn't a problem there wouldn't be so much research into solving the problem.
=Smidge=

There is almost no infrastructure required for this; It's a single building about the size of a small service center or car wash. In there is all the charging infrastructure you need, too.

The problems with battery swap are nothing related to what you mentioned. The real hurdles to mass adoption are questions about battery ownership, standardization, and to a lesser extend vehicle integration.

Since an EV is useless without a battery, laws in some countries (like the US) make selling an EV without a battery basically impossible. Even if you lease the battery separately. It would be akin to selling a new car without an engine; since it's not in a functional state, it can't be sold as a road-worthy vehicle. Countries like China don't have this hurdle so manufacturers like Nio and BYD have been rolling out that kind of business model - Nio alone has thousands of swap stations.

Standardization also generally means you are vendor locked. The battery pack needs to be physically and electrically compatible with your vehicle. It's not impossible but it's very unlikely that the industry will develop such standards especially when it puts hard constraints on the shape and size of the whole vehicle that needs to be build around the pack. Again, not a problem for single manufacturers but if you buy a Nio you will only ever be able to use battery swapping at Nio locations.

Finally integration; To reduce costs some manufacturers (read: Tesla) tightly integrate the battery pack into the structure of the vehicle making it impossible swap without a multi-day ordeal. Imagine trying to battery swap the Model Y where the top of the battery casing has the front seats and center console bolted to it, because it's also the floor of the cabin.

> With that factored in, what are you paying per swap? 3-4x what normal recharging would cost?

From what I understand, Nio charges a flat fee of 180 renminbi, or about US$25, per swap. I'm aware of some schemes that also charge based on battery SoC but I don't think Nio specifically uses that business model. Remember; under this system you do not own the battery, you're basically renting it. This also makes the car cheaper up front.

> Besides, battery tech is improving daily. Increasingly seeing mentions of 5-6min recharge times.

I have not seen any credible demonstrations of "5-6 min recharge times" though I've seen plenty of sensationalist tech news headlines about the possibility of such... relatedly, a battery swap does take about 5 minutes.

And the fact that battery tech is constantly improving is an argument in favor of the swap model, since you can potentially upgrade to a better battery automatically at no cost or inconvenience.
=Smidge=

Adversarial noise isn't "noise" like static or random junk. It's specially crafted to make the model see things that aren't visible to humans, to alter their behavior.

Benn Jordan created a pretty good video about audio-specific implementation. Examples include perfectly normal sounding audio clips tricking digital assistants into thinking they're getting voice commands and having music completely misidentified. The practical application means an artist can apply adversarial noise to their work and have it sound perfectly normal to a human audience, but any generative model that tries to train on it will end up producing inappropriate and useless output.

There are also methods to do similar with images. Text may be a bit harder but it's still possible with websites through embedding or invisible text and similar tactics.
=Smidge=

Adversarial Noise. Poison AI learning through crafted content.

Yes, this will (has already?) become an arms race as AI developers figure out ways to avoid traps, but it can make operating LLMs and image/audio models less economical and less safe to operate.
=Smidge=

> How many countries have deep decarbonized their electric grids with just solar and wind energy?

China's carbon emissions have dropped 1.5% so far this year, versus last year, despite total energy demand growing by about 10TWh in the same period. Maybe not "deep" or whatever but they are investing heavily in decarbonizing, and succeeding, while still growing quite quickly.

None of that was new nuclear power by the way; All of the plants they said they were gonna built between 2020 and 2035 are either still under construction or planning stages. Assuming they meet their goals and build all of them they will have added 500GW to their production... and another 3000 GW just in solar if they maintain the pace they were putting it online in 2024. A testament to how slow and expensive nuclear power actually is for addressing the problem.
=Smidge=
(And more than 3000 GW of wind at current pace)

What a time to be alive...

=Smidge=

Cookbooks won't hallucinate and instruct the barista to make that latte with lithium grease instead of milk.

=Smidge=

>Where?

Anywhere. Like literally anywhere.

> Whos land?

Yours. have your attic cleaned out by Thursday.

More seriously though; there is no shortage of space. Utilities own or otherwise control tens of thousands of acres for their infrastructure and facilities.

Using Australian's BESS project as a rough guide, we'd need about 75 acres per GWh. That's a conservative estimate. If the UK uses about 710 GWh per day, and assuming we'd need a full day's worth of battery storage - let's just call it 750GWh - that's 56,250 acres or just under 90 square miles.

I've taken a few minutes to prepare this image for you. It's a map of the UK with a red square that's approximately 10 miles on a side, or 100 sq.mi. Now imagine you spread that out into several dozen, or even hundreds, smaller areas and spread them across the country... you'd probably not even be able to find them. The world is a big place...

https://i.imgur.com/Ic0RaWf.pn...

> Perhaps the batteries should be spread out, uner each panel in a field can be a battery

Good call; ground mounted solar already occupies 52,000 acres which is just about the space we'd need.
=Smidge=

> We don't really have any definition for 'intelligence,' nor do we understand how or why neural networks behave the way they do

There are a few key features of what we consider "intelligent" that "AI" distinctly lacks. Chief among them being the capability to work in abstractions and concepts.

LLMs don't work in concepts. This is why the spit out bullshit so often. They are pattern generating through word associations, not dealing with what those words represent at the abstract level. If you ask an LLM to describe a car, and by some quirk of how the question was asked it determines the word "bird" is statistically relevant as it processes the data. Perhaps part of the training data involved a journal of a famous ornithologist touring the world in their Ford Falcon, or some material discussing the history of cars since a lot of them are named after various animals including birds. In any case, the LLM stumbles upon a statistical link between cars and birds and this snowballs into a full-blown hallucination. Now it's explaining with full confidence and authority how cars have distinctive feathers and specialized beaks. How does this happen? Because it doesn't understand what cars or birds are and has no way to separate the words from the abstractions they represent.

> So why should AI be any different from biological neural networks?

You opened your post stating - correctly - that we don't fully understand how 'intelligence' works. Then you incorrectly declare that because we don't fully understand how A works, or how B works, why can't they be the same thing?

Except we know enough about A and B to have good reason to say they are not the same thing. We don't need to know what something is before we can know what it isn't.
=Smidge=

> they're generalist eaters

Humans are also generalist eaters. That doesn't mean there won't be severe problems if you suddenly eliminated, say, all rice crops.

> genetic solutions involve releasing some form of male mosquito that can sterilize eggs ... Most transgenic things can't maintain the foreign gene for about 10-20 generations

Setting aside that your description is a bit wrong but probably just mixed the words up... how exactly can an any mutation - artificially induced or otherwise - that results in sterility be inherited "for about 10-20 generations?" The whole point is the females, who only mate once, will waste that chance mating with a modified male and thus prevent any future generations. The genetic modification used for mosquitos involves a mutation that prevents the larvae from reaching adulthood, meaning there is no second generation of modified genes, let alone 10-20 of them.

> So the solution would involve releasing male mosquitoes to fertilize the eggs that sterilize females in the eggs

This is not at all how the mosquito lifecycle works. Not even close.

Adults mate with adults. Males mate repeatedly, females only once. A single modified male can therefore prevent maybe four or five females from laying viable eggs, 100-200 at a time multiple times in their life, which is about a thousand eggs in total depending on the species. The females are not "sterilized in the eggs" - they're not sterilized at all. Their eggs will hatch but the offspring will never mature into adults.
=Smidge=

I think you're missing the point of the analogy...

We are forced to share the atmosphere. Any reduction in pollution is better than no reduction at all (even if it's still a net increase, because it didn't increase as much as it could have) and it does not matter where those emissions come from. Do you agree or disagree with this? Because if you agree, then the argument "Why should we do anything to reduce our emissions when 'they' are producing emissions too" is complete nonsense.

Sure, there's always going to be emissions just like there's always going to be some urine in the water. But you see, the emissions are high enough to be causing real problems - so imagine that the pool is so polluted that it's visibly discolored if that helps you appreciate the scale of the problem. Still going for a swim?

The analogy falls apart of course, because nobody is forced to share a swimming pool. We don't have any choice when it comes to the planet and its atmosphere though.

As an aside; not terribly worried about the chlorine. I'm more worried about the chloramines - the chemical compounds that give swimming pools that "chlorine smell." Chloramines are the product of the hypochlorite (the form of chlorine used in pools) reacting with the other stuff in the water, like urine. Chloramines cause eye, skin, and respiratory irritation. So yeah in reality peeing in a treated swimming pool actually, literally, creates toxic chemicals that physically harm you and everyone else in the area. I should add that to the analogy.
=Smidge=

Okay so, for the record, you are perfectly okay with pissing in the pool as long as you're not the only one.

Glad we could set that straight, along with verifying that you do not understand how the atmosphere works.
=Smidge=