Free speech includes lying.

My biggest beef with the whole self-driving thing is that we should NOT have started with cars.

Why not a self-driving cart that takes you around the store? Or a self-driving golf buggy? Or a self-driving airport passenger carrier to get you to your gate? Or even those little "trains" that some shopping centres have for the kids which are just wheeled vehicles?

THAT'S where we should have begun. A limited controlled environment, low-speeds, little impact, useful, even a pay-for service (do you want to walk to your gate, or get on a little cart that'll drive you there for $1?), and iron out all the myriad problems with driving in close proximity to pedestrians, etc. in a safe and controlled environment.

The fact that those things AREN'T mature technologies tells me that self-driving car people have NO INTEREST in our safety. None whatsoever. If they did, they would have started small and built up.

Hell, even a self-driving bus makes far more sense, even if it goes slower. They often already have their own dedicated lanes!

What they did is exactly what you describe in your last sentence. Think about the quickest way to profitability and screw the testing, research, consequences, even the laws in some cases.

the vehicles start looking more like a wingless airplane than a car.

And what does the company's name mean? ;) (Hint: it's Greek)

It adds up to 40 miles per day, not 5. 5 would be a cloudy day.

I used to be anti-solar-panels-on-cars back when solar panels were expensive, and ones of reasonable efficiency were even more expensive - the argument was, "put it on your roof where it belongs". But that's just not the case any more. Adding solar is just not that much of a cost to the car. It adds some complexities, but mainly in the design / early manufacturing phase.

Also:

The average American drives 37 miles per day.

1) So if you're in a sunny climate, it covers all of said average-driver's driving. Otherwise, said average-driver has to plug in occasionally, but not nearly as often.

2) Most people drive less than the average (the average is skewed by a long-tail - small numbers of people who drive very far every year). What you actually should be meaning is the median US driver; the median drives 23 miles per day. Most Europeans, even less.

3) Even for said "average american", their daily average is skewed by long drives (e.g. road trips and similar). Wheren of course you're plugging in, you'd be plugging in even if the car was adding 80 miles a day. But when not on road trips, their daily average is lower.

4) Surely you can see the appeal of the tangential benefits, such as being unstrandable - where even if you run out in the middle of the desert 20 miles from the nearest town, you're still going to get there, just delayed (remember that EV ranges, if you drive very slowly, increase like 2x, so 40 miles a day becomes 80, so a 20 mile shortfall is only a ~4h delay on a sunny day).

5) Nobody is saying, "One car for everybody". Of course appeal varies by person and by location. Here in Iceland for example we have three problems. One, very little sun at all for a good chunk of the year. Two, even in the summer, when the days are long, the sun is mainly low and circles around you. Solar power just kinda sucks here in general. And three, the three-wheel config would mean that the centre wheel wouldn't align with tracks in the snow from other cars (although there is a slight advantage, in that it also wouldn't align with road ruts from studded tyres, which often fill with water in the rain and become hazardous).

But somewhere in the southern US, it's a great option.

For those who didn't follow it, it's not that it's a contact binary that is so neat in and of itself, it's that when they modeled it, they determined that, the collision that formed it was less than 5 meters per second (less than 11 mph / 18 kph). Like a parking lot fender bender, but with the cars being ~750 billion tonnes.

ITaaS

Insider Trading as a Service.

If lots of people don't go to jail for this at some point, America is dead.

I don't live in the US but I recently moved to a rural area and in doing so I have started to plan out a utility-independent future.

Why? Well, various reasons, including water and sewage companies taking the piss (or actually... not... just dumping the piss in every river in the country and crying that they can't process it because they gave all my money to their shareholders, but... anyway) but also because electricity is literally a con too.

And nowadays? I *can* viably make my own electricity. So... why wouldn't I? Why would I pay a company to do a bad job when I can do it myself?

I did a number of things when I moved to that area, including demanding smart meters on everything, and I monitored my electricity down to 30 minute intervals for 2 years. And you know what it showed? That 1% of the time, I have no power. That's in dribs and drabs, a power cut here or there, a scheduled one lasting a day or there, and so on. But 1% of the time they can't even get electricity to me and... there's nothing I can do about that.

So, if I want a computer to stay on... I already need to spend money and do it myself because they simply can't do it. 1% may not sound a lot, but that's 3.65 days a year if you think about it. Spread out randomly - an hour here, an hour there. Literally my computer "uptime" was "two nines" and that was driven entirely by grid power supply.

That's ATROCIOUS in my opinion, in the 21st century. And I wasn't prepared to tolerate it. I was already buying the house with the intention of becoming utility-independent but that really drove home why I need to. So I started to build my own solar, for several reasons.

1) To ride out the outages
2) To reduce my bills so they got as little money from me as possible
3) To not be reliant on the grid
4) To ultimately remove the need for grid entirely

And it's really not been hard. I started with cheap junk just to see if it would even work in my climate, with that house orientation, etc. It did. I started with a small 12v panel and an old car battery. And it was actually worth doing when I ran the numbers. It would take a few years to pay off the cost of the panel, but it would do so.

And then every month for 2 years, I would get more panels, more and better batteries, more efficient and powerful equipment in between. And it got to the point where it is technically capable of running my whole house for much of the year. And that's before I ever got onto SERIOUS panels and professional installs. That's just me, a bunch of cheap 12V panels, some 12V LiFePO4 batteries and a serious enough charger/inverter, then later going onto 24V by re-arranging them.

And I'm looking at that and thinking: Why the fuck hasn't government / the utilities done this for me? Why am *I* having to do it? Because it really is that simple and they have access to far more land, far better kit. But, no, I'm still paying inflated grid prices from when Ukraine was first invaded because of the price of GAS. What the fuck are we doing?

So now, more than ever, I plan to be utility-independent by retirement, which is 20 years away, and whereas before I was wondering if that was even viable in that timeframe, I'm now expecting that to be 100% done way ahead of schedule, just by a factor of "whenever I can be bothered". It was that easy, and doing the maths was that easy.

I might retain a grid connection, or not. It depends on what happens and what kind of low-usage tarrifs I can get in the future but I'm looking at the whole thing thinking "Fuck you, I'll do it myself" because even as an amateur... it's perfectly viable to do so. I don't care if it even costs me more (it won't). I don't care about having a grid connection or not. It's just that I will be able to be *independent* of it. When they play games, raise prices, or have power cuts, I won't be reliant on it at all. I'll use it when it's to my benefit, and not other times.

But all I ever think about the whole thing is: How have I, an amateur, cobbling cheap Chinese shit together, come up with a more reliable and cheaper power supply, that's utterly independent of fuel prices, than an entire national electricity grid could do?

The answer, of course, is corruption and profiteering. That's the only part that I've eliminated. And that's the part that, when it's gone, makes it all viable and even cheaper.

And that's the thing that's going to see me having zero electricity bills when I retire. Just by removing the profit and corruption.

Yeah, there's two main problems:

1) People entering the wrong fields. For example, medicine really needs workers, at all levels, but not enough people are going into it.

2) Certain manual labour fields, like field work and home construction, because... well, I think we all know why there's a shortage of workers in those fields.

I'll say it again:

Active military personnel carrying around standard mobile phones is such a breach of all kinds of basic security protocols that it should be illegal.

But can't let the troops get bored, eh? Have to let them do their fitbit on board your cruiser that you're trying to keep secret, and have them checking into Facebook while they're in Helmand province, and giving away their movements when they're running around your bases at home, and having an always-on device capable of tracking and recording everything from audio to the radiowaves to location, made by the Chinese, wherever they go.

Dumbest fucking idea ever.

"OpenAI's success in hardware will hinge on bringing a novel approach to the market"

It says as it releases an Alexa....

Merit should always consider strictly value.

Or let's put this another way. Show of hands - how many of you "spicy autocorrect" / "stochastic parrot" people had "AI will start mass-solving Erdos problems" on your forecast list a couple years back? Huh, none of you? Fascinating!

Take some time to reassess your priors. And while you do so, understand that, yes, they are doing logic / reasoning.

They weren't discovered by an LLM. They were known conjectures that were proven by an automated solving language that was linked to an LLM.

I'll take "Things That Didn't Happen For $200", Alex.

Only a handful of meaningful proofs have ever been done by automated formal theorem solvers (the Four Colour Theorem being the most noteworthy example - but its proof is so long that humans can't verify it). By contrast, AI tools have been solving Erdos problems en masse. The majority of them just bog-standard commercial models. In case you need help, the only ones on that list that were hybrid (AI / non-AI) in the actual solving phase are:

1) AlphaProof / DeepMind Prover Agent / AlphaProof Nexus
2) Aristotle (Harmonic)
3) Seed Prover / Seed Prover 1.5 (ByteDance)
4) AxiomProver (Axiom Math)

In each of the above, LLMs come up with the lemmas / strategies but then use Monte Carlo search ("brute force") or likewise to investigate what they came up with. These are a minority. In the "AI Standalone" category, these "hybrid" tools made up only ~20% of attempts and successful proofs. Hybrid tools actually made more of a contribution in the "AI Alongside Literature" (related literature found afterward) and even more of the "AI Building On Literature" (related literature known beforehand) categories, which is the opposite of what people like you expect.

And even with the hybrid tools, it's still the AI doing the heavy lifting when it comes to strategy. Non-AI theorem solvers, again, don't have a spectacular record for churning out novel proofs to unsolved problems. Tools like Lean are more about mathematical rigour - a passive environment that requires a driver (a human or AI) to feed it actual strategies, lemmas, and proof steps. And no, you cannot brute force "strategy" in the vast majority of cases, which is, again, why automated theorem solvers don't have much of a track record with unsolved mathematical problems.

Let's take a random example: the disproof of the unit distance conjecture. It was solved purely by a general purpose commercial GPT model, not custom-trained to mathematics, with no external tools. Read what the various mathematicians reviewing / commenting on it have to say (sections #3 and onward). Seriously, don't skip reading them, actually read them. This was one of Erdos's favourite problems. He mentioned it commonly in his lectures. Essentially every mathematician working in complex geometry has thought about this problem. The approach that the model came up with was highly novel approach, based on CM-fields and class field towers.

I know you don't want to accept this reality, but it is the reality, so you better improve your ability to accept it,. The field of mathematics is already doing so.

Dang, link didn't post.

Ah, good 'ol "Model Collapse" theory that people have been pounding on for years now, predicting an imminent collapse in model capabilities. How has that been working out for you?