We should also note that humans don't only rely on vision to drive cars. They also rely on noise heard by the ear, and on vibration felt with their body.

No one is actually pulling out. The U.S. has made it harder for foreign companies to import them. But there are still domestic manufacturers of EVs, like Tesla, Ford and Stellantis. This is something very else: For the last decade, one big argument against EVs was "bad resale value", because EVs were seen as a novelty, and fear for dead batteries, fueled by the problems with first gen Nissan Leafs, made buyers wary of used EVs. Additionally, there were not many used EVs on the market to begin with, fleet operators did not have many young EVs to sell, and prices did not really average out yet.

Now, demand for EVs is rising due to high fuel prices, and a good public charging network making EVs a viable alternative for many people. And also people looking for bargains are hitting the market, and with used batteries not being the problem they were thought to be, used EVs have its own value proposition. We have here the normal effect of demand rising more than the available supply.

Hi, I came across this thread and it's something which has raised a lot of concerns for me since Google's announcement. There's a discussion of how it hurts the open-source ecosystem at https://www.reddit.com/r/selfh... and Google's announcement is at https://android-developers.goo...

I like the idea of writing free, open source utilities for others to use. Users having to jump through even more hoops to sideload, or me having to pay money and reveal my identity to Google, get in the way of this --- especially if one of the things I've thought about is e.g. writing a tool to help LGBTQ+ people find locations where they can be reasonably safe in the current US geopolitical climate. That is exactly the sort of utility where the DoJ would make claims I'm some sort of subversive "antifa threat" and demand Google release my identity to them for harassment. Plus, the time where that utility would be most useful -- if someone suddenly has to go someplace unfamiliar on short notice (e.g. getting a call that a relative who lives a few hundred miles away in MAGA territory is getting emergency surgery), having to wait 24 hours to sideload the app if you don't have sideloading currently unlocked, just to find out which rest stops are safe to stop at or not on your drive, would be incredibly unfortunate!

I'm not saying improving app security is a bad thing, and at least Google didn't pull a "We Own Everything And There Is No Way Out Of Our Grip" like they could have, but the options they provide are not nearly good enough. It seems like they only thought about (1) average uninformed users who install things randomly, (2) big commercial developers [who still can get compromised and end up pushing malware, or might even include malware intentionally: just look at LG's McAfee situation, the infamous Sony BMG CD rootkits, etc etc], (3) independent developers who have identity documents Google is willing to recognize [what about the identity document fiascos going on right now with Ukrainian towns Russia is occupying? what about areas occupied in the Middle East by various regimes? what about the way cops confiscate homeless peoples' belongings including ID cards, but you need an ID card to get your belongings back?] plus extra cash [and $25 USD is a lot in some impoverished places, limiting the ability of people in such places to help themselves by becoming app developers], (4) students and hobbyists who only need to share their app with a small group of testers [limiting your ability to test scalability!], and (5) power users who are patient. If you don't fit into the scenarios they planned for, you might be out of luck. And I recognize that the vast majority of legitimate use cases do fall into those above categories, but there are legitimate use cases which don't. They could have at least had a series of open community fora to get feedback on other use cases and plan additional options, but they did not.

It's great that they thought about a few different use cases, at least. But that's not nearly enough!

Could I find an ally to register as the "developer" and publish such an app? Sure, but is that how it *should* be? I would now be dependent on someone else to manage the Play Store listing, which limits my ability to build. Could I spread the word to people who might need such an app that they should unlock sideloading indefinitely just in case? Sure, but maybe that creates new risks for them (and -- what if the option to unlock sideloading indefinitely gets taken away at some future point? Google gets to dictate all the changes here, and users have little recourse if they disagree with the specifics of the implementation)

I just want the guaranteed ability to say "hey, what about XYZ situation, which I or a friend have personal experience with? can you provide a way to handle that?" but I don't. There's no form to fill out to request some sort of special accommodation for an unusual situation, and there probably should be. When you have billions of users, planning for the needs of 99.99% of them still hangs hundreds of thousands of users out to dry. I know trying to accommodate more edge cases isn't as profitable, and having a large enough support team to hear people out when they have an unusual need requires a ton of extra staffing, but smartphone usage has become a critical utility rather than a luxury in much of the world. Google has an immense amount of power over numerous aspects of the lives of all sorts of different people, and if they want to continue to make money from that situation, they need to be prepared to deal with the complexities of it all.

Yep. Open weights is closer to having precompiled binaries only (though you can do a little bit more with open weights). All training data with labeling, plus a detailed build log including any special fine-tuning logs, is needed, especially to help show how the final weights were arrived at (since there can be randomness involved). Unless someone else can both replicate your final output plus make their own changes to it, it's not fully open source.

We're entering the exciting age of AI-powered cybersecurity attacks. I imagine it won't be too long before something like a malware worm which polymorphs to evade detection and adapts itself as new CVEs get published, able to utilize tuned edge models, shows up. Wireless IoT could mean we end up with physical "e-quarantine" zones, wherein devices keep attacking anything in radio range...

So can I. The next supermarket is right across the street. The next one right beside the first one, and a third across the next street. Still, I like the cargo trike, because I don't need to carry stuff.

Me.

I solved this problem by a) riding an incumbent cargo trike for grocery shopping and b) not liking ice cream.

Your math is wrong. Not the actual numbers, but the way you apply them. Your idea is to build big power plants rivaling what you know from steam turbine powered based power plants (how the steam is heated, coal or nuclear or fusion or whatever the heat source du jour might be, is completely irrelevant). But that's not how Wind and Solar work. If you just cover the public parking spaces of Houston, TX with solar panels, you would not take a single farmer's land, and still, you would be able to power the whole city of Houston. It begs the question though why Houston needs that much parking, and if that's not the real waste of space. By the way, that's what Portugal does with parking spaces in the country - cover them with solar panels. It cools the tarmac below, improves the ambient temperature in the towns, and generates energy. And you can build glass houses with solar panels instead of pure glass sheets. There are solar panels which have 50% transparency. They provide enough light for the plants in the glass house, and still generate surplus electric energy.

Denmark started with wind turbines 40 years ago, and now, Wind accounts for more than 50% of Denmark's electricity generation. In Germany, Wind accounts for 30% of Germany's electricity (the high prices for electricity in Germany have very bureaucratic, and quintessentially German reasons with braindead legislation, but that's another chapter). Ah yes, biogas currently generates the same amount of electricity in Germany as Nuclear did the last year before it was switched off. And then there is balcony power - a concept completely alien to the U.S., but widespread in Europe. For about 300 EUR, you can get a small do-it-yourself solar power plant, and legally assemble it yourself and plug it into your wall socket (any wall socket will do). No licensed electrician required. It's limited to 800 Wp - but hey, free energy for everyone. In a town with 10,000 apartments, this would be akin to a 8 MWp power plant for the price of 3 million bucks - without any tax payer money. If you want to pay an electrician, buy 10 of them. Or 30. And he will do the connection to the grid. For 10,000 EUR, you get 25 kWp solar power, which should cover most of your electric energy needs. If the 20,000 households in a medium sized town would do it, we are talking 500 MWp. That's the usual size of a nuclear reactor.

I doubt that seriously. The big Iberian Peninsula outage already mentioned happened because a "reliable" power source was not decoupling correctly from the grid. France right now runs into electricity problems because its "reliable" nuclear reactors have to be shut down because of excessive heat making the cooling of the reactors problematic.

Your "reliable" power sources are not reliable, they are inert. This is not the same, and if conditions change quickly, or aren't within specifications, they fail in a big way.

Exactly. But you have to keep the original BSD license intact. You can modify the files, but you have to acknowledge, that you got them from FreeBSD. That's why many commercial companies like to base their systems on FreeBSD.

Which might be true for the Southern U.S. states, true.

On the other hand, we tried this in the 1970ies already, and it was abolished immediately after the first winter, after traffic accidents during morning rush hour had risen sharply, and school children had to wait for the school bus in the coldest time of the day (and the school bus took longer because of all the icy roads anyway).

That is not true. Left without clocks, humans in median latitudes tend to sleep longer in winter than in the summer. A standard schedule throughout the year is not healthy, except you live close to the equator, where the day length does not vary much during the year.

It's not only that. It's more that then, the very short daylight is concentrated in the evening, because you get up an hour early, during the coldest period of the whole day, and then you are wasting the daylight in the afternoon, when it is too cold anyway to have any outdoor activities which could profiteer from the light.

Not having DST, especially in regions away from the equator, is also dumb. You have to deal with the fact, that the Sun rises in the summer much early than in the winter, and getting up in total darkness and not having any daylight until late in the workday like DST in the winter is as annoying as trying to go to bed when it's still bright outside.

So either you abolish a strict day schedule and adopt during the year, which is not only two switch days a year, but multiple times, or you have some kind of switch between Summer time and Winter time.