Solar panels aren’t worth it for a normal EV, but supposedly the Aptera is so small, lightweight, and aerodynamic (with that teardrop shape) that they actually add a significant amount of range.

They’ve done that periodically for years.

I don’t dual boot anymore but when I did I kept each installation on a separate hard drive for that reason.

Interesting to note that although HAARP was originally a joint project between the US Air Force, US Navy, DARPA, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, since 2015 control was transferred exclusively to the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

I think you may have misread their comment.

Pretty good track record with videogames too.

Some ARM CPUs that are advertised as microcontrollers have 32 bit address spaces and roughly the same power as an i486.

Big Bang Theory is less like nerd humor and more like autism blackface.

This model isn’t “learning” anything in any way that is even remotely like how humans learn. You are deliberately simplifying the complexity of the human brain to make that comparison.

I do think the complexity of artificial neural networks is overstated. A real neuron is a lot more complex than an artificial one, and real neurons are not simply feed forward like ANNs (which have to be because they are trained using back-propagation), but instead have their own spontaneous activity (which kinda implies that real neural networks don’t learn using stochastic gradient descent with back-propagation). But to say that there’s nothing at all comparable between the way humans learn and the way ANNs learn is wrong IMO.

If you read books such as V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee’s Phantoms in the Brain or Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat you will see lots of descriptions of patients with anosognosia brought on by brain injury. These are people who, for example, are unable to see but also incapable of recognizing this inability. If you ask them to describe what they see in front of them they will make something up on the spot (in a process called confabulation) and not realize they’ve done it. They’ll tell you what they’ve made up while believing that they’re telling the truth. (Vision is just one example, anosognosia can manifest in many different cognitive domains).

It is V.S Ramachandran’s belief that there are two processes that occur in the Brain, a confabulator (or “yes man” so to speak) and an anomaly detector (or “critic”). The yes-man’s job is to offer up explanations for sensory input that fit within the existing mental model of the world, whereas the critic’s job is to advocate for changing the world-model to fit the sensory input. In patients with anosognosia something has gone wrong in the connection between the critic and the yes man in a particular cognitive domain, and as a result the yes-man is the only one doing any work. Even in a healthy brain you can see the effects of the interplay between these two processes, such as with the placebo effect and in hallucinations brought on by sensory deprivation.

I think ANNs in general and LLMs in particular are similar to the yes-man process, but lack a critic to go along with it.

What implications does that have on copyright law? I don’t know. Real neurons in a petri dish have already been trained to play games like DOOM and control the yoke of a simulated airplane. If they were trained instead to somehow draw pictures what would the legal implications of that be?

There’s a belief that laws and political systems are derived from some sort of deep philosophical insight, but I think most of the time they’re really just whatever works in practice. So, what I’m trying to say is that we can just agree that what OpenAI does is bad and should be illegal without having to come up with a moral imperative that forces us to ban it.

Make the page 15x more bloated with JavaScript popups and it’ll be “modern”.

CRI is defined as how closely a light source matches the spectral emission of a thing glowing at a specific temperature. So, for a light source with a 4000 k color temperature its CRI describes how closely its emission matches that of an object that’s been heated to 4000 k.

Because incandescent bulbs emit light by heating a filament by definition they will have 100 CRI and its impossible to get any better than that. But the emission curve of incandescent lights doesn’t actually resemble that of sunlight at all (sorry for the reddit link). The sun is much hotter than any incandescent bulb and it’s light is filtered by our atmosphere, resulting in a much flatter more gently sloping emission curve vs the incandescent curve which is extremely lopsided towards the red.

As you can see in the above link, there are certain high end LED bulbs that do a much better job replicating noon day sunlight than incandescents. And that flatter emissions profile probably provides better color rendering (in terms of being able to distinguish one color from another) than the incandescent ramp.

Now, whether or not you want your bulbs to look like the noon day sun is another matter. Maybe you don’t want to disrupt your sleep schedule and you’d much rather their emissions resemble the sunset or a campfire (though in that case many halogen and high output incandescent lamps don’t do a great job either). Or maybe you’re trying to treat seasonal depression and extra sunlight is exactly what you want. But in any case I think CRI isn’t a very useful unit (another reddit link).

There is already a Chinese EV that uses a sodium ion battery, the JMEV EV3.

It’s a tradeoff of range vs price. The EV3 only has 155 miles of range, but thanks in part to its sodium ion battery it costs only $9220 new. Which is a price that will probably drop even more as more sodium ion plants come online and economies of scale kick in.

EDIT: even if your commute is 40 minutes long, driving 60 MPH the entire way, that range is enough to get you to work and back using a little more than half your charge. Given that it’s also generally cheaper to charge an EV than pump gas, and there’s less maintenance costs, I think there’s absolutely a market for such a car.

Trying to create a cheap microwave burrito that’s also healthy and filling seems like a pretty noble (if difficult) goal to me. Making it vegetarian also decreases its ecological impact (though I don’t know whether or not Adams cared about that).

Trying to fortify each burrito with 100% of your daily vitamins was a really stupid idea though. It was unnecessary (just take a multivitamin if you feel like you need it), it made the burrito taste worse (Adams described it as “chalky”), and it was potentially unhealthy if someone were to eat multiple burritos per day (and thus receive multiple times the recommended daily dose of… everything).

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Adding on to what GreyEyedGhost said, since the year 2000 the price of solar power (per watt) has fallen by more than 50x. Because of this huge drop in price the installed solar capacity has been doubling every 3 years. That means that in the time since 2020 we’ve built more solar capacity than we did in the previous 20 years combined.

If that’s not good enough then idk. Imagine holding any other technology to that standard. The model T came out almost 100 years ago for an inflation adjusted price of $27,000 and with an MPG of 7.5. ICE cars today are better in a lot of other ways but they are not 50x cheaper and they are not 50x more fuel efficient than that.

The SSN system is one of the more moronic things the US does, which is really saying something.

If the tank were made of a carbon fiber composite it would make it a little less scary. CF’s high strength and brittle failure mode mean that the tank would “open up” on a seam when ruptured, but would stay mostly intact. Additionally CF’s low density would mean that any small pieces of shrapnel that were created would have limited penetrating power and range.

Still I’m not sure I would want to stand next to it. At 10,000 PSI a small hole (or opened valve) in such a tank would produce a gas stream with enough energy to seriously injure or kill you (leaks in 4000 PSI steam lines can cut your flesh and create gas pockets inside you). The entire tank letting go all at once would surely create a shockwave that would obliterate you.