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Comment Re:China and everyone else (Score 1) 48

"These systems cannot 'answer questions' because they don't understand them."

This is obviously false. AI systems are already answering questions, and whether or not the AI "understands" it is irrelevant if the information being returned is largely correct.
Sure, there may sometimes be some incorrect information or hallucinations, but most questions on general subjects do seem to yield reasonable results, and it's only when you get into areas that have small volumes of training data that you tend to get sketchier answers.

AI doesn't have to be truly "sentient" to be very useful, very disruptive, or very dangerous, depending on how it is used - and mabey all three of these at once, if you are using it to control targeting systems to defend you.

Comment Re:Convenient (Score 5, Interesting) 111

The war in Iran was the direct reason I decided to maximise the system I could put on my new roof - and oversize the battery. I was expecting oil prices and energy costs to go high and stay high.

I ended up installing 10kw of 23% efficient solar panels was all I could fit on the approximately 100sqm north side of my roof. They are paired with a FoxESS 9.9kw single phase inverter and a 48kwh stack of Fox CQ7 batteries.

I might have slightly oversized on the batteries but over the last three weeks since it was installed, including rainy and cloudy days I have been 98% energy independent (the inverter always draws a little power from the grid) while exporting 15 to about 34kwh a day.

A 25kwh battery would probably do just as well for home power most days, though obviously with less energy arbitrage capacity.

At 15k AUD for the whole setup and warrantied stored power throughput of 178 MWh that will work out to about 6c/kwh for any stored solar power power I am using from the battery, so if the grid export price is significantly above that its worth exporting excess power and turning a profit, to help cover the electricity providers fixed connection fees.
Its the beginning of "winter" here now (where the temperature plunges to 16 centigrade at night and I sometimes even have to wear a light sweater.
In Summer I'm going to be drowning in excess power, even with my AC cranked because the house is pretty well insulated.

It really is possible to use renewables to completely cover your energy needs with a modest up front investment (esp. compared to the overall cost of a house) , and it's only going to get cheaper and more environmentally friendly as sodium ion batteries ramp up in production.

My next car will be electric or plugin hybrid for sure.

Comment Re:That's not the problem (Score 5, Informative) 46

It is a supply and demand problem.
Since it requires such a huge amount of capital to ramp up production, manufacturers are loathe to ramp up production too quickly for what might turn out to be a bubble, so meanwhile there is excess demand.
This will eventually correct, and if it does turn out that AI was just a bubble, or even if it turns out to be useful but the rate of growth slows down, there will be an excess of memory and processors and we can enjoy cheap prices for a while.
If you want to help lower prices, invest in chip fabs, or stop using AI.

Comment Re: Something to learn (Score 1) 199

All those cars are parking somewhere for a lot of the time. It's a matter of setting up charging points wherever cars park.
  Not every parking space needs to support charging - but even for curb side street parking, if you have a street light nearby it shouldn't be that hard to add a charger to the closest one or two car parks - and considering many of those streetlights would have been installed and wired when lighting was using much more power heavy incandescent lighting, there is likely to be a fair bit of extra capacity that could be used for charging, now lighting is all low power LED.
That's just one option. Another is chargers in supermarket parking lots, etc.

Comment Re:mAh need too die (Score 2) 148

One of the driving factors behind showing power in mAh is that marketing gets to print a more impressive big number on the box.
Although Wh would be preferred, I'd be happy if they even just changed to displaying mWh on the box - and it should be a win-win. they get a bigger more impressive number to display and I get a unit of measure that actually gives the total amount of electrical energy the device can store, instead of trying to guess whether the rating is based on whatever the battery cell voltages are, or the output voltage that could be anything from 5v to 20v, for USB-C.

Comment Re:It's not lost (Score 1) 73

If it's radioactive enough to be a problem I would imagine it's easily detectable, considering that there are solid state sensors that can detect as little as 1 nSv/h of radiation and are apparently sensitive enough to be sometimes triggered by bananas.
If it's so radioactively inert that it can't be detected, then is it really a problem?

Comment Re:And then there are dog pictures (Score 1) 92

I forgot to mention that although it is possible to set some content rating based restrictions on some sited, there isn't any browser level standard. I think ideally what you would want is a way you could set your browser to be in "PG" mode for example, and then all websites (or content on websites) would be filterable accordingly.

Of course some websites might not choose to apply ratings to their content, or would apply inappropriate ratings to the content, but search engines could quickly down rate mis-rated content so it doesn't turn up in searches.
  It also goes without saying that the content filtering should be completely at the control of the individual user, with parents being responsible for setting appropriate filter levels for their kids, but only having to do it at the browser level, not each individual possible site their kid might visit.

Comment Re:Who are these people? (Score 1) 42

I would love it if there was some kind of mirror site for YouTube that would convert all the long video tutorial type videos into well formatted text with appropriate illustrations extracted from the video where necessary.
scanning the transcript sometimes helps, but it's not in a very easy to read format.

It's especially frustrating when I want to see how to do something or other in say, Unreal Engine, and nearly all resources available are YouTube videos instead of reasonable documentation or written tutorials.
Even playing the video at double speed to scan for the meat of what I want only goes so far to reducing this problem.

Of course it would be far better if there was just good documentation and example, but that's probably wishing for too much.

Comment Re:And then there are dog pictures (Score 1) 92

While it's true that you can't keep kids from seeing content that mabey isn't appropriate, social media companies haven't exactly done themselves any favours by failing to have any kind of rating system for their content.

I think a far better solution would be for content to be rated, with controls in place so rating filters could be applied, similar to how tv has ratings for content, and in some cases has the ability to set a parental lock for some content.

For sites like youtube, which has so much good educational content, as well as a lot of stuff that mabey you don't want your 12 year old kids to see, it would be far better than an outright ban if you could set a filter to only show say, G or PG rated content, and you could be sure your kids weren't going to be exposed to clips of people getting blown up in a war or something.
This might mean that all content would have to be rated "Unrated" until it was reviewed and rated by either a human or sufficiently accurate AI bot, but this should be something that be increasingly possible to do.
For comments, it might be be necessary to disable them, or similarly have them get rated in real time by a bot.

Comment Re:Stop now [and just give up] (Score 1) 117

Nuclear fusion is already taking over, with it being the cheapest power available. Best of all it's readily accessible with most homes only needing about 20-40 sqm of fusion energy collectors and about 40kwh of storage to capture enough energy to be completely off grid energy independent.
There will of course be some areas this is not fully practical, so grid connecting homes and allowing the power to be shared across longer distances will reduce localized fusion energy power fluctuations.

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