TLDR: A bunch of ride sharing companies sprouted up in the 2010s built around no frills EVs they leased to employees and then most of them consolidated or went out of business a few years later, leaving parking lots of used vehicles. Expect them to be auctioned off to either be recycled or hopefully sold on to lower wage nations.

How about just using the rules the Olympics have been using for fifty years for competitive sports that they came up with after doing a proper study into the issue, which is if your fully transitioned for more than two years you can compete.

For sports where there isn’t a pro industry and people arn’t getting paid to compete, like in schools, just let people do whatever they present as. The point is to have fun, not ban people for maybe having a quarter of a percent advantage. If it was then games like basketball would need to have height and weight classes. The whole reason we allow, much less spend money funding, sports in schools, parks, and community centers is for exercise and fun, not just to cater to the adults betting money on the results.

Well on the bright side, getting fired from one of the largest mega corps in the world for complaining about the company’s providing resources to kill civilians is a hell of a thing to be able to put on your resume.

On the not so bright side, I don’t like being a background character in a cyberpunk story.

The best part of Open AI’s self professed goal to make an AGI is that the more we learn about LLM’s the more it becomes clear that they inherently can never bridge the gap to AGI.

One would almost think the constant complaining about mythical dangers of AGI might be a distraction from the real more mundane dangers LLM’s pose here and now like exasperating bias, making mass misinformation easy, and of course shielding major companies from accountability.

Or the other option is that it’s just marketing, look at how scary our totally real product is, look how fast it improved when we went from a medium sized dataset to the largest that will ever be possible, don’t ask questions like why would a autocomplete that has been feed the entire internet actually help our business, just pay us and bolt it on to whatever you can.

While I agree with most of the articles points, even if they and the title are nearly all phrased in very hyperbolic language and the extent of the “slowdown” has been rather overstated given that sales are still increasing, I take issue with it citing Norway’s 89% EV sales as insufficient becuse only 20% of vehicles on the road are EVs yet.

Namely, the average lifespan of a ICE car is 12 years. While it’s definitely better for the environment to replace a functional ICE with an EV after two to four years, buying a new car when you don’t need to is a big financial cost and so it shouldn’t be surprising that many people are waiting until their cars get old to replace them.

While I also agree that simply replacing every ICE with an EV isn’t enough on its own and that trollybuses and other electric mass transit need to be part of the solution, it’s not a question of one or the other. If we are to have any hope of staying below 2C, we need to be doing both and a whole lot more beside, especially when it comes to cleaning up industry.

We simply don’t have the time left anymore for any one solution to be expanded to the point it can solve the problem on its own, if that was ever possible to begin with. We need solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear to generate clean power in the first place. We need heat pumps and geothermal to turn that into the heating and cooling necessary to keep people safe in a world with increasing dangerous temperatures.

We need trollybuses, metros, and high speed intercity rail to electrify the transport of people. We need denser housing in our cities and EVs in our rural areas and service and delivery vehicles. We need overhead cantanarys to electrify our railroads. We need green hydrogen to decarbonize farming, steel marking and a thousand other processes. We need net zero bio and synthetic fuels for ships and aircraft. We even need carbon capture and sequestration to deal with the industrial processes that can’t otherwise be decarbonated.

Any framing that expects a single one of these to solve the problem on its own ignores the things it can’t cover. Our current actions are insufficient to tackle the scale of the problem, that is not a sign we should roll back one in favor of another, it is a sign that we need to be pushing increasing the scale of all of the above.

Yes, but at the end of the day SpaceX is the work of tens of thousands of people, not just the guy who provides a pile of money in exchange for constantly forcing the engineering teams to do stupid stuff if they can’t explain why not at an eighth grade level.

Minecraft, you can only pretend to have gotten away for so long before the block game calls again.

Personally, the thing that gets me the most about the whole thing is that the vast majority of the singe use ones you find lying next to the road have perfectly good rechargeable lithium batteries in them. No charging port or easy way to refill them, but for two cent change pins on the main circuit board and a change in the molding the same device could easily be used for a decade or more.

“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”

Even more importantly when it comes to assessing properly, machine learning, now referred to as AI, has been continuealy shown to not just repeat the biases in its training data, but to significantly exaggerate them.

Given how significantly and explicitly race has been used to determine and guide so much property and neighborhood development in the training data, I do not look forward to seeing a system that is not only more racist than a post war city council choosing where to build new moterways but which is sold and treated as infallible by the humans operating and litigating it.

Given the deaths and disaster created by the Horizon Post Office Scandel, I also very much do not look forward to the widespread adoption of software which is inherently and provablly far less accurate, reliable, and auditable than the Horizon software. At least that could only ruin your life if you were a Postmaster and not just any member of the general public who isn’t rich enough to have your affairs handled by a human.

But hey, on the bright side, if Horizon set UK legal precedent than any person or property agent is fully and unequivocally legally liable for the output of any software they use, after the first few are found guilty for things the procedural text generator they used wrote people might decide its not worth the risk.

Hmm, this seems like the sort of addition where it might have been nice to have a bunch of world leading developers and designers hanging around. Seems odd to fire them all if this was the plan.

Indeed that does seem like the sort of mistake that someone who made the largest purchase of thier life after staying up alll night playing Elden Ring would make, but i’m sure it was really a cunning 5d chess move and not evidence that our overlords who are born into wealth are just as dumb as the rest of us.

Worth noting before you get too excited with the possibilities that this is just at lab scale. Being able to manufacture a few grams of a novel design is no guarantee that you can even make it on the scale of tons, much less do so cost competitivly. Even if it is actually possible it will likely take at least a decade before it starts to be available to the public.

I mention all this because battery tech is an area of massive dramatic investment and rapid research for decades now, and a lot of the news coverage tends to talk up the lab stuff and ignore the boring practicalities of what their talking about, which leads to a lot of the public asking why they’ve been hearing breathless news about how new batteries are going to change the world, but never these miraculous new inventions never make it to the public.

The answer of course is that a lot of them run into practical manufacturing problems or are too expensive to be competitive, and the ones that do make it and are coming out today were the subject of breathless news coverage back in two thousand five, which are now competing against the ninties new perfect future batteries.

It’s also worth noting that the practical effects of such new batteries are unlikely to change much. If you need a battery that can output a massive amount of current you use lead acid. If you need a cheap battery that can last for 8000 charge cycles you use lfp, and if you want millions of charge cycles you use the middle 70% of a lfp battery since degradation only happens on the extremes of its range. If you want very small powerful batteries and fast charge times you use lithium ion.

As a result of this, there are few applications where you can’t already do something becuse the battery tech is the limiting factor. Like being able to recharge an EV in five to ten minutes is great, but it’s not going to suddenly allow EVs to do a bunch of things they couldn’t do with our current fifteen to twenty minute charge times, which themselves arn’t that diffeent than the early 2010s thirty to fourty minute charge times. I mean it is a improvement, and it does help with range anxiety while making long trips more comfortable, but it’s not an massive shift that will change the world forever overnight.

Similarly, having a phone that is 20% thinner or lasts an extra hour is an improvement, but it’s not going to suddenly change how we use phones or comilunicate. These are small incremental improvements, like all new technologies are.

The transistor was the largest technological leap of the twentieth century, and it was invented in the forties but only starred to make its way to industry in the fifties and even then it only began to have an impact in the seventies. Technology takes time to scale up and is almost always an small incremental improvement on what came before.

Sure, but it is perhaps the most blatant.

To be fair, when talking about a control system that moves tons of metal feet away from bystanders these sorts of safety critical systems should be given a level of weight greater than that given to Candy Crush.

While may always be improvements to such software, it’s not a trivial matter to get it wrong.

TLDR: A study by Consumer Reports found that found that across the industry EVs tended to have higer rates of reported reliability issues compared to conventional gas cars. The authors contribute this to the large number of new EVs models that have come out in the last few years as well as new car companies, and doubt that it has much to do with the drivetrain technology itself.

Interesting they also found that hybrids were 26% more reliable than conventional gas cars dispite the addition of an electric drive train. Even more oddly with that information they found that plug in hybrids were the worst, at 146% worse than conventional gas, though note that the Rav4 plug in version was one of the most reliable vehicles surveyed.

“Most electric cars today are being manufactured by either legacy automakers that are new to EV technology, or by companies like Rivian that are new to making cars,” says Jake Fisher, senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports. “It’s not surprising that they’re having growing pains and need some time to work out the bugs.”

“While Tesla’s EV components are generally reliable, the company continues to struggle with the build quality of its vehicles,” says Steven Elek, who leads the auto data analytics program at CR. “Tesla powertrains are now pretty solid for the most part, but Tesla owners report a lot of build quality issues including irregular paint, broken trim, door handles that don’t work, and trunks that don’t close. All of these pull down the brand’s reliability score.”-

So TLDR of the TLDR, expect manufacturers new models to have teething issues, especially if not owned by Toyoda, Hyundai, or Kia.

I highly doubt that Lithium mines have that sort of power. More likely there are either more mundane suspected downsides that aren’t being so breathlessly reported, or simply that it’s too new.

It takes time to switch production lines, and actual demand from battery consumers. Of Lithium Ion is good enough to meet thier requirements than why rush to something that hasn’t been proven in the field yet? If thier already struggling to meet demand with thier current output why risk taking a bunch of lines down to maybe see demand there?

The best part is from my understanding their new law allows cops to arrest anyone out walking their dog without ID as a possible ‘illegal’ until their family or the cops can break into their houses, shoot the dog, and then maybe find their birth certificate or passport.

That’s right, the same people who freaked out about private companies checking vaccines cards during a pandemic are now raving about how the courts are blocking them from arresting anyone who leaves their house without government permission. But of course, the leopards will know to only eat the brown peoples faces.

May I present the party of ‘small government’ ladies, gentlemen, and others, the party of small government.

If Israel is trying to target Hamas, why by their own admission have the majority of the bombs and artillery systems fired been systems that lack the accuracy necessary to target a specific vehicle or even building?

Why does the IDF refuse to send forces into these soposed tunnel networks in order to actually capture Hamas commanders for the intelligence necessary to actually target them?

Why are the refugees constantly being pushed closer and closer to the Egyptian border when that is the ONLY part of Gaza that has ever needed to be secured in order to stop the flow of all Iranian weapons into Gaza?

Why shut off power and water, actions which can only work to strengthen Hamas’s support among the civilian population?

Why limit IDF support and protection to humanitarian aid convoys to such an extreme that even the US has had to resort to air power because it can’t get through Israeli territory?

The definition of genocide does not and has never required that a force try and kill every last person of the targeted population, only that they try and expel or erase them from the population.

Don’t forget Putin bravely defending himself against western imperialism by invading neighboring nations, and how he must secretly be a communist no matter how much of the country he has privatized and sold off to his cronies.

How could that help at all? Seeing as the blockchain would have no way of telling the difference between human and Ai text, and if you could find a way to automatically verify that in way way that was so efficient you could expect all the text uploaded to the internet you could just run that program locally and not be beholden to people paying a fee to post anything to the internet.

It’s more of a stalemate, while technically every day Ukraine exists is a victory, ideally they’d be in a position to retake thier own land. Meanwhile the only long term possibility the Kremlin has been pursuing is expending vast quantities of men and material in hopes that Nato gets bored before they have to conscript from the cities and get overthrown.

A well noted part of this campaign has been in attempts to foster misinformation and shake confidence in the ability of Ukraine to hold the line and eventually take back its land and people from the invading imperial power.

If you are interested and have a spare hour, Perun’s recent piece on the political war is excellent as always.

https://youtu.be/pIKiFAKMoi0?si=jyDupy7xxT-qjYxg

Most of it is pure reduction rather than replacement. The region is pretty good at using wind and hydro for evening power but more to the point, it is hard to get across just how much that 4.6tons of co2 an average car puts out in a year.

It’s also worth noting that 4.6 tons is just tailpipe, and that it is in addition to the emissions from delivering that fuel to the pump or in manufacturing the car itself, and that thouse additional emissions alone are more than the entire lifetime emissions of an EV fed on the US grid, most of which are from generation.

Put all that together with the SF grid being less carbon intensive, and i’d guess that anywhere from 75% to 90% of those emissions are just outright gone period.

It would be even better if it was even more a move to bikes and mass transit of course, but in this case it actually is a notable drop in emissions and not just greenwashing.

Is it bad it i think that this isn’t that bad at all?

I mean it would be nicer if the sidewalk continued on both sides sure, but freeway enterance ramps are typically about as hard for pedestrians to cross as roundabouts given the slow speed you need to take them and single direction of traffic. It looks like there are even marked crossings and a sidewak, so this walk is very much intended. The freeway itself is grade separated and so not a factor in any of this, and while the road is five lanes it’s a arterial road so that’s quite resonable.

Except you don’t require an psychiatrist, endocrinologist, and a bioethicist before obtaining adderall, do you? Any single doctor in any hospital can prescribe it for you in a single visit and not six months after moving between states. It’s also between you, your doctor, and your pharmacist, no government mandated central registry necessary, dispite adderall being far more commonly abused.

In a quote from the referenced article.-

“Imagine you have diabetes. There are five top diabetes specialists in your state, but you like most patients get your care from your primary care physician. The specialists provide better care, and their patients do better.

Now, imagine the impact of a regulation requiring all patients in your state to get diabetes treatment from one of those five. If you can't see one of them your diabetes goes untreated.

If you're an ordinary patient, the most likely outcome is that you lose treatment for your diabetes entirely. You don't get improved care- there are still just five specialists, and they have no where near the capacity to see everyone with diabetes in the state.”

There’s a reason that these sorts of laws get overturned on anti-discrimination grounds, becuse they apply requirements to trans care that don’t apply to anyone else, including cis people taking the exact same medication.

How could Hamas do this?/s

What, a system that responds with the next most likely word to be used on the internet treats people of color differently? No, I simply can’t believe it to be true. The internet is perfectly colorblind and equitable after all. /s

At first glance I thought it was reuseing the coal plants turbines, but looking though the article the only connection I can find is that it’s located several miles away and the only connection is that it plans to hire a hundred or so people from the coal plant it’s replacing and that Wyoming’s powder river basin is nearby and its associated highly automated low sulfur coal mines are in the vauge area.

All this to say, yes it has practically nothing to do with coal.

Clearly, the only answer is AI. I don’t know how an unreliable autocomplete will help with this, but I am willing to pocket a massive amount of taxpayer money in the attempt./s

Technically, they don’t even make the actual graphics cards, they just design them and then outsource manufacturing to TSMC.

But don’t you know that doesn’t matter, because by 2028 every singe company in the world is going to need a data center filled with tens of thousands of AI accelerators turning their own scrape of the internet into a chatbot, and so one of the companies that makes thouse accelerators is definitely going to have as much business as companies that make half of everyone’s phones or computer software./s

I’d much prefer to stay federated with lemmy, even if the backend changes. Lemmy communities are already niche enough as it is, and the content helps it from feeling dead.

A point the article makes rather well is that something is not a bobble because it doesn’t work, but because the investment going into it is fundamentally irrational in scale. The web still existing has nothing to do if investment or companies tripping over themselves to advertise as a dotcom in the dotcom bobble was rational, percicly because it clearly wasn’t dispite the web being a fundamentally revolutionary tech.

The question when it comes to LLM’s, the near exclusive subject of the marketing around AI, is if bunch of random companies paying for a mildly improved chat bot are actually going to generate enough profit once the marketing hype has worn off and the legal challenges settled to justify the current massive scale of investment, or if instead once the project managers and CEO’s have moved on to the next buzzword to attract investors LLM’s will become a tight market where providers struggle to turn a large enough profit to satisfy investors.

While I think in this case they won’t have an effect because no Amarican company is even trying to compete in the space, I feel like claiming “history says tarrifs rarely work” is pretty misleading. The high tarrifs caused by the US generating nearly all federal income by tarrifs in the 17 and 18 hundreds are after all widely credited with being the reason the northern US went from being a minor agricultural nation dependent entirely on european industrial goods to becoming one of the largest industrialized nations so quickly.

Indeed that was why the WTO blocking third world nations from putting tarrifs on western goods was so heavily criticized by the left a few decades ago, before China proved you could do it without said tarrifs so long as your competitors were greedy enough to outsource their industry to you.

One country called country and one language called language.

I do hope we stay federated, while I get that moderation is a pain for you Admins and better tools need to be developed, I think you all have been doing a very good job. Nearly all my interactions with the wider fedeverse we interact with have been positive or neutral, and I think it would be rather dead and boring here if it was just us. It’s nice to have diverse subscription feed where I can find posts on more than just the few communities here, especially slrpnk, Bajhaj, lemmy.ca, and midwest.social

Now i know Australia has been having some trouble with conservatives recently and is overrun with emus, but i’m not sure the entire country counts as a bloody dictatorship yet.

I like the bright warning signs, they make a nice whooshing sound as we speed past.

I mean, the government has mandated that all cars built since the 90s have to have a lot of computers and sensors for engine monitoring and emissions logging so that ship has long since sailed. Automatic braking is also credited with eliminating something like 1 in 5 fatalities in car accidents, so as long as we have any motorized vehicles around at all I don’t really have a problem with the government requiring manufacturers to spend the extra 20 dollars or so per vehicle it costs them to add a few ultrasonic sensors and a microcontroller it takes to slow the vehicle to the point where a driving into a pedestrian might just be survivable.

I don’t see the contradiction, Russia went from the center of a nominally socialist union to a hypercapitalist libertarian dictatorship, of course the Republicans are going to try and support it.

Neglecting that Cobalt isn’t even used in non-luxury EV’s in favor of cheaper chemistries like LFP or Sodium Ion, it’s worth noting that while so called ‘artisanal mining’ has been supplying much of the cobalt needed for over a half century now in oil processing, it’s being replaced by larger and cheaper industrial mines as demand for cobalt in electronics and premium EVs grew.

Not that such industrial mining doesn’t come with local environmental costs, or that we shouldn’t work on better recycling capture for personal electronics, but sticking with oil sure hasn’t done anything to help the Congo so far.

We’ve seen the largest real wage growth among the lowest income workers since the 60s. Up until recently the real wage gain was actually entirely seen in essential, unionized, and low income workers, with the rich actually seeing real wage decreases in that time. Higher inflation is obviously going to be a lot bigger problem for owners than workers. It’s just the trend has a really long way to go to make for half a century of falling.

I mean, the Australian mines are terrible for the environment, not like the nice and clean coal mines next door; and i mean, you can only recycle like 97% of the lithium with modern processes, not like gas where you can use it over and over again./s