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Comment Conspiracy theories are boring (Score 3, Funny) 102

Nobody comes up with interesting conspiracy theories, they're all boring and much of a muchness.

To combat this, I am working on some next-gen conspiracy theories which will improve this shoddy market.

1. Line noise was caused not by faulty connectors, but by a herd of buffalo that wandered onto the networks by mistake when someone left the back of a network cabinet open. What you were hearing was the buffalo grazing on passing connections.

2. Symphonic metal was invented as a way to smuggle the elder gods, disguised as musicians. to Earth without anyone noticing. This explains the typical themes of songs and why Odin and Loki have played bass for Nightwish.

3. The missing Doctor Who stories were all penned by actual Time Lords. The High Council found out and tried to erase them from existence.

Comment Re:Our infrastructure isn't ready for these anyway (Score 2) 125

It is already happening all over the world.

Just not in your yahoo country.

In most countries, no one "replaces" a gasoline car. They phase it out and by a new car. 50% of the new car decisions are electric.

People who never had a car, most of all times by electric.

In ten years a used non electric car is unsellable.

Comment The pentagon finally noticed! (Score 3, Informative) 75

The drone war in Ukraine has rearranged the tactics much like the machine gun did in WW I. Infantry is hunted down by drones that fly through open doors and windows. Armor is mobbed by multiple drones that eventual break something important.

Drones have deleted the Russian Black Sea fleet.

The U.S. Navy so far fought off the drones burning through large numbers of very expensive missiles that can not be replaced all that quickly. On top of that the destroyers have to return to a safe port to reload the vertical launch systems. The destroyer tenders that used to exist for such purposes were all scrapped decades ago.

The military has discovered once again it's ready to fight the previous war.

Comment Re: Renewables are not replacing coal in China (Score 1) 124

It's wonderful they are increasing their solar sector but we need them to stop using coal.
Nope.
We need _EVERYONE_ to stop using coal. And for that matter: Gas, and as we are on it: Oil.

And as long as you have not done your share, you have no right to put pressure on any other one.

Comment Re:Once again, la Presidenta loses (Score 0) 124

China is actually pretty heavy hit, just like any other South East Asian country.

Also I really wonder about such brain dead comments that get modded insightful.

How exactly does Solar Energy put gasoline into the fuel station, or oil into your house heating or gas into your cooking fire?

Oh? Ah, you want to point out that China is rolling out EVs massively? Well, they do that anyway, has nothing to do with the war.

Comment Re:China coal use still growing (Score 1) 124

But they are not using those renewables to displace coal internally. They still prefer to use coal as fast as they can mine it or import it.

I don't think that's accurate -- the only people who "prefer to use coal" are in the Trump administration. China, like the rest of the rational world, prefers to use whatever energy source is cheapest and most effective, which might be coal in some situations, or it might be solar, or nuclear, or hydro, or something else.

Comment Re:corrupt (Score 1) 166

How about those people who intentionally buy American and hardly buy anything else? Should they be reimbursed?
Reimbursed on what?
They did not spent anything on tariffs ...

i.e. the costs of the tariffs were shared and prices weren't raised as much as the costs. Sorting this sort of thing out is just about impossible.
No it is not. It is a simple or complex as filing a tax report.
Have an extra line like VAT spent, and call it ... let me think:
"Tariffs: " - oh, that was easy.

Note: if you import something and pay a tariff, you get a tariff bill/invoice ... just like any other ordinary invoce.

Comment Re:But what do they do? (Score 1) 3

Ok, to clarify a few things:

Current designs I've put up:

1. A modernised version of the DeHavilland DH98 and Merlin engine, where I basically fed ChatGPT and Claude with all of the known historic faults and some potential solutions to various problems, then let them run wild, feeding off each other to fix, refine, and clarify the various design. The premise here is that we're using known designs with known properties, changing only materials but doing so carefully so as to ensure that the balance is unchanged from the historic design. The aircraft is probably the least interesting part, as it would be very hard to make that safe, but a fully modernised Merlin that starts where Rolls Royce left off is something that could be built with minimal risk and could be quite interesting in its own right.

2. A High Dynamic Range microphone. This basically riffs off assorted physics technologies for measurement and the basic idea in many HDR schemes that you can split an input into the fine detail (essentially an equivalent of a mantissa) and a magnitude (essentially an exponent), producing a design that aught to permit (if it works) the same microphone with no adjustments handling everything from a nearby whisper to the roar of a jet engine -- but with all of the fine detail still captured from that engine.

3. An electric guitar that operates not by magnetic pickups but by accurate mapping of string behaviour in two dimensions via lasers, where this is then turned into an accurate representation of the sound in an external device. So it's not a synth guitar in the classic sense, it's actually modelling the waveform for each string in two dimensions precisely. The reason for doing 2D modelling is that this has the potential for novel behaviours but without an obligation for it to do so.

4. A synthesiser/wave processor that looks at everything that they knew how to do, and allows you to link it together arbitrarily. It is designed in two forms. The first is engineered to match the components, materials, and knowledge available in 1964, so it is something they could have built if sufficiently insane. The second is a modernised extrapolation of that, using modern digital electronics, where I can show that the modern version is a strict superset of any existing DAW, simply because I started with none of the assumptions and metaphors around which DAWs were subsequently designed.

5. Multiband camera. An attempt to build a digital camera that is far smaller and more compact than a 3CCD camera, but (like the 3CCD design) produces a far better picture than a conventional digital camera, where I don't stop at three frequencies but support many, albeit with the limitation that the time required for a photograph is abysmal.

Each design I've put up has a detailed hardware specification (including wiring where appropriate), validation/verification documents, and testing procedures. Software is defined by means of formal software contracts and occasionally Z-like forms. The designs are extremely detailed, although not quite at the level you could build them right there and then. However, the synthesiser is described right down to the level of individual transistors, diodes, and connectors, and the Merlin engine specifies precise materials, expected temperature ranges, material interactions (and how they're mitigated), and other such information.

Again, it's precise but not quite at the point where an engineer would feed comfortable feeding the specifications into an AI, having it order the bits online, and be sure of building something that works, but it's intended to be close enough that (provided the AIs actually did what they were supposed to) that an engineer would feel very comfortable taking the design and polishing it to working level.

If, however, an engineer looking at these designs comes to the conclusion that the AIs were utterly deluded, then obviously they can't handle something as simple as selecting candidate items from ranged data.

Comment Re:"China is evil" (Score 1) 124

They actually have since about 3 or 4 years optical AI inference chips, about 1000 times faster than GPUs and roughly 10,000 times more energy efficient.

Germany has some companies working in the same areas, I know about 2 ... not sure how many in total.
Then Asia is shifting to Gallium Nitrit semi conductors, at least in high voltage/power computing, chargers and similar things.

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