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jakeinspace
Joined 2,104 karma
Aerospace software engineer, putting bits in space.

  1. If China actually catches up and surpasses the West/TSMC in fab technology and production, I think they'd have a better option, which is simply flooding the world market with high-end chips and obliterating the Taiwanese economy. Eventually, joining an economically dominant China might become more palatable, or a necessity.
  2. Blind people tend to have less spatial intelligence though, like significantly more. Not very nice to say like that, and of course they often develop heightened intelligence in other areas, but we do consider human-level spatial reasoning a very important goal in AI.
  3. Because we live in a society, and all of us suffer if the average worker and citizen falls significantly in their competence and understanding of the world.
  4. A federal guarantee of debt is a subsidy, one with horrendous potential downside. A CEO really shouldn't be so flippant, though I think he knows what he's saying.
  5. 28kW of dissipation is pretty solid, though obviously is irrelevant during a short burst with hundreds of watts of heat generated. I guess the frame itself act as the fallback heatsink for storing excess heat in these scenarios? Because by my math, a modest 100kg heatsink (no idea if that's reasonable) would reach 270°C in only around 45 secondw if it's trying to handle 250kW+ of heat transfer (270C is roughly the max differential for heat pipes,liquid cooling might be significantly lower limit). And obviously the batteries can't handle 270C.
  6. 3000 hp? Not sure if that's measured at the "crank" or the dynamo, but that's over 2MW, probably pushing 2.5MW of power draw from the batteries assuming a motor efficiency of 90% and some other losses. Apparently that's getting drawn at 1.2kV from the batteries, so "only" around 2kA of current draw.

    That top power draw would drain the 80kWh batteries in around 2 minutes, though I'm guessing you'd hit thermal throttling or catastrophic failure before that. The batteries are allegedly rated to 30C, meaning 2 minutes to full discharge at max current.

    I'm curious how the heat dissipation of EVs compares to ICE vehicles. You have much higher efficiency vs combustion and get to split the power between 4 motors instead of one engine, but you don't get the heat capacity of a massive engine block, or the convection of cold air intake + hot exhaust out the tailpipe.

  7. A sanctuary city means not having local police cooperate with federal immigration officials. There is no constitutional requirement for local police departments to do so.
  8. Restorative justice makes a lot of sense to me in a society that has weak or no centralized power. Social hierarchy sure, but not an absolute monarch. Once you have a strong government with a monopoly on violence (police), then you can attempt to enforce retaliatory justice in a controlled and ideally neutral way, by the state. Without a monopoly on violence, then obviously just doling out mob retaliatory violence leads to anarchy.

    I'm not sure that you can have a modern large society with millions of strangers that relies only on restorative justice. I think you need strong communal cohesion for that to work by itself, and even in a relatively culturally homogeneous society, I'm not sure that scales beyond the size of towns.

  9. This Oracle surge and revenue predictions really feels like jumping the shark. I mean, it's Oracle.... I've never felt confident enough to bet against a company, but a short position on Oracle may well be too tempting for me.
  10. Neither of those things are considered protected speech, and you can be imprisoned for conspiracy to commit kidnapping/murder even if neither actually occur.
  11. At one point, many people would have said that quantum field randomness is non-mathe
  12. My experience with cheap modern microwave failures has been the door sensor failing, which for safety ofc prevents the magnetron from running. I had one fail in about 2 months, thankfully fixable with a $10 sensor and 15 minute of work. Same goes for a lot of appliances, repaired a dryer that had its door sensor fail (in fact, they all tend to use identical door sensors as far as I've seen, dryers and washing machines and microwaves).
  13. 1. Buy Twitter

    2. Remove moderation, promote far right accounts, retweet some yourself

    3. Allow Nazi speech to fester

    4. Train LLM on said Nazi speech

    5. Deploy Nazi-sympathizing LLM, increase engagement with Nazi content

    6. Go to step 4

  14. Engineering has for a long time had these sorts of issues, mainly with weapons manufacturing. I honestly have more sympathy for a 20th century mechanical engineer choosing to go work for a defence contractor than a 21st century software engineer taking a lucrative job at a company like Palantir or today's twitter, because there are so many decent paying more ethical alternatives.

    There's not even anything especially technically interesting about working for the evil side of silicon valley! At least working for Lockheed can mean helping design an amazing beautiful death machine, and lead to some complicated feelings on one's deathbed. But if you worked on Nazi Grok? That's just embarassing. Forget the banality of evil, it's the cringe of evil. Nobody is going to look at you like some kind of Oppenheimer tormented genius at a dinner party.

  15. The "no true racist" fallacy, I see.
  16. Maybe we should've made CS majors read a book or 2 after all. Maybe that wouldn't have helped, perhaps all it takes is $200k/year for people to stop caring about anything outside their immediate best interest.
  17. If you work for one of his companies, please find work elsewhere.
  18. Besides screen readers, using a single descriptive noun as the link text might help for maintainability in some situations. First, it reduces the chances of a given link accidentally getting copied to another section by an unscrupulous maintainer. Second, in case of a dead link with a non-obvious URL (like maybe some ancient sourceforge link to a now renamed project), the link text is an extra bit of information to remind you if and how the dead link should be updated (assuming no comment exists). I admit that's a pretty minor benefit.
  19. Agreed, she's pumping out too many videos I think. Perhaps she's succumbed a bit to the temptation of cashing in on a reputation, ironically one built on taking down grifters.
  20. Coping with the meaningless splendor of the universe is daunting, but I will do my best!

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