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Comment Re:AI gives better answers. (Score 1) 85

I bought a big Merriam Webster dictionary along with...

You may be an exception. The books you mentioned are reference books. I am worried that reference books will disappear, because most people won't use them. Which means that we will be at the mercy of getting our information from AI.

Reference book publishers might publish their books through an LLM: you can ask questions but nobody gets the whole book.

Comment Re:LLMs - don't trust 'em (Score 1) 64

LLMs are trained on "large, uncontrolled media collections". But they could be trained on curated media collections.

The humanoid classroom assistants that companies want to introduce to schools may be a sneaky way to educate LLMs and get paid for it, by putting them in real classrooms with humans. With disastrous consequences for the privacy of these students.

Comment We need real examples (Score 1) 295

There should be some concrete examples published on what sort of taxes the ultra-rich pay or don't pay. Perhaps start that requiring that billionaires should have their tax-returns published for all to see, perhaps anonymously and redacted, but certainly it should answer the question of how much tax they pay, their total capital gains, distributions, exemptions, etc. Otherwise people will be voting on this initiative based on anecdotes, like so many comments here are.

Comment Re:Whitelisting? That trick never works (Score 4, Insightful) 124

Anti-freedom ?

If you create your own website, the phone won't be able to display it. That's why it is anti-freedom. A browser is an operating system on its own that runs on many devices, including iphones and most Android phones (except this one). Blocking browsers means that the phone can run only Android apps, not web apps.

If you don't like it, don't buy it there are a ton of alternative

If you like it, buy it. But make an informed choice.

Be a great phone to give kids though, you know that parental responsibility thing where they can keep kids away from the BS.

Assuming you don't want your kid to access any websites, including their school website, your family website (if you have one) a weather station website, government websites, or their own websites, if you kids have learned to build one.

Comment Re:I cannot understand... (Score 1) 75

According to the specifications on that website, the planes have maximum power of 750 HP = 500 Kw. If the plane flies for half an hour at this maximum power, it will use 250Kwh. If the batteries have energy density 250Wh/Kg, it will need 1000 Kg of batteries (1200 Kg, if the batteries are discharged to 20%). These planes have payload 500Kg. 1000 Kg of batteries is 2X the payload, which does not seem excessive.

For comparison, a Boeing 787 has fuel capacity of 100 000 Kg, which is 100 times the above battery size.

Comment Re:Let's eat Grandma, shoots, and leaves. (Score 1) 168

It would be quite a challenge to build a car with a 1000 Km long rigid battery.

One solution would be to mount the battery vertically. It would cause problems with aviation and satellites, and would require abolishing all underpasses and removing overhead cables. It should have a ligthning port a few Km from the ground, for free fast charging during thunderstorms. Balancing this battery so it doesn't tip over would be tricky, but if Segways can be balanced, so should this. It would have to be a cutting edge battery with no wind resistance.

The geometrical problems with mounting such a battery horizontally are formidable. The battery should be curved to the curvature of the earth, otherwise the ends would have a 20 Km altitude difference from the middle. City blocks would need to be at least 1000 Km long, and would fit only one car on each side for street parking. A car could avoid making U-turns by having its cabin rotate 180 degrees, instead of turning the whole car. It could also slide on rails along the length of battery, so as to avoid moving the whole battery for short trips down the street (less than 1000 Km). If we continue thinking along these lines, out of the box, we could embed the batteries in the streets, and have the cars move around freely on top, getting power from the batteries on the fly.

If the batteries are not rigid, then we have a lot of flexibility. A 1000 Km flexible thin battery could be coiled up to fit anywhere.

Comment Go went from #7 to just above Rust (Score 2) 184

I'm more interested in how Go went from #7 in July to #15 in April, just above Rust, in the TIOBE index. Go is much easier than Rust to learn and use. Comparing Rust and Go in the charts, the Rust ratings have mostly been going up since 2017, while Go seems to have stayed flat, with the exception of two spikes.

Comment Re:Science forgotten (Score 4, Informative) 69

The produced oxygen and other materials can be stored, therefore there is no need to store the energy in batteries.

There is also a solution to providing continuous solar power without batteries, if the base is near a pole. Put solar panels in a circle around the pole, so that at any given time, some of the panels are in sunshine. I read a paper abstract about this that said the panels should be at 87 degrees latitude (about 100 miles from the pole). I don't know why. It seems feasible.

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