The Tesla semi is supposed to have a 900kWh battery, so even at the full 1.2MW delivery, it will still take 45 minutes to fully charge its battery. Assuming that, to preserve battery life, it's charged only to 80%, and recharged when between 10% and 20%, that's a half hour at the charging station. A large truck stop on an interstate can have 15 to 20 fuel pumps, with a fillup taking 10-15 minutes; that makes a recharge 2x - 3x the time to fill up with diesel (unless the jerk in front of you has gone in to take a dump or a shower while their truck is sitting at the pump). Now assume that the electric truck stop has 20 charging stations and a 10MW power feed; if it's full up, you're only getting 500kW; that pushes your charging time to 60-75 minutes.

And I have to wonder what the net efficiency of the process is -- i.e., if you're getting 200MWh of energy out of a fully-charged system, how much more than 200MWh did you have to put in to charge it?

And 10 hours of storage is enough to flatten some of the day/night cycle of solar power, but it doesn't do much for protracted low-production periods -- if it's overcast for three days, and the solar farms are producing 10% of their normal power, that's 72 hours where the pumped CO2 storage has to provide power, so a plant 10x the size would only cover the base 20MW with a cushion for another day, and if someone builds a power-hungry AI data center nearby in the expectation that they'll be getting reliable power, they can drain the storage pretty quickly.

I'm not sure that it's possible to come up with a way to throw AI systems out the back of a spaceship fast enough to make them viable as a propulsion system, no matter how much better they would be used that way.

They'll need something to keep the lights on during a dunkelflaute. Oh, wait; with Millibrain's wisdom, all the subjects can just sit in the dark when the renewables crash and take the entire country's grid with it -- it's the AI datacenters that are important enough to get continuous power.

And the ongoing implementation of misfeatures that just add instability to the OS. These "StartMenuExperienceHost" failures? WTH is the start menu 'experience' and why would I want it? Just give me the fscking Start Menu and have it do what its name implies without any bells and whistles; if I wanted some AI-curated selection of what the system thinks I want to do, I could just dump a pile of fewmets on my keyboard and get the 'experience' directly.

A thought just occurred to me... could Microsoft relying more and more on AI-generated code explain some of the increasing enshittification of Windows? And Microsoft execs asking AI to tell them what new 'features' to add to Windows account for most of the rest?

If there is a limit on the size of the config file used to identify automated traffic, then the process for updating it needs to save the updated file in temporary storage and sanity-check it; if it fails the sanity check, it should throw an error and reject the update. If it passes the sanity check, the old file should be backed up, and only then should the updated file be moved to replace the old one. That way, if there's an identifiably out-of-band update, it doesn't stomp on the current good data, and even if it passes the initial check, the previous iteration of the file is immediately recoverable to restore service. And there should be a utility that copies -- not moves -- the backup file back to the main file.

A trash can full of shit with flies swirling over it?

"Don't Be Evil... unless we can do it covertly."

Sounds like a great idea!
With the best of intentions!
What could possibly go wrong?

The "We think that some of you might be passing around illegal material, so it is imperative that we be given the power to invasively look at everyone's private communications. We're only going to be looking for this one narrow category of illegal material, and we won't look at anything else. Honest. You can trust us not to abuse this." declaration using the justification "we have to protect the children !" is one of the most abusable power grabs ever. Once a government has the power to read all your communications looking for one thing some individuals may be breaking the law by doing, there's nothing preventing them from saying "Well, we're already reading their communications to find this, so we can just look for this other thing, too, as long as we have their communications" and extending their strip-mining of those communications looking for anything else the government might want to prohibit, starting with other illegal activity and becoming more and more invasive until they're looking for anyone saying something that might be considered to be simply critical of the government.

Paying someone to review the AI's assessments will wind up being cheaper than paying out the settlements on the lawsuits for 'overenthusiastic' police officers forcing a child to their knees, cuffing them, and searching them after a false accusation. And, presumably, the number of times that the AI will trigger on such an event will be small, allowing the human tasked with reviewing AI positives to perform other duties when not actively fielding an AI system's misperceptions.

The farm-vs-city differential goes back centuries -- look at Edward Jenner and his discovery that farm girls, who worked closely with the animals, would contract cowpox but wouldn't contract smallpox afterward, and developed the technique of variolation to introduce cowpox to uninfected individuals, and acquired immunity to smallpox. But smallpox remained a threat in urban areas until variolation, and later vaccination, became common.

The EV manufacturers could always adopt the Chinese innovation to protect the occupants of an EV in the event of a battery breakdown and fire being detected -- add a mechanism to eject the battery to the side of the vehicle, where it becomes an SEP (Somebody Else's Problem) -- but the occupants are safe from the battery pack immolating itself.