Is it wrong that I’m stuck trying to figure out what language this is?
Trying to figure out what string.length and print(var) exist in a single language… Not Java, not C# (I’m pretty sure its .Length, not length), certainly not C, C++ or Python, Pascal, Schme or Haskell or Javascript or PHP.
Profitability is beginning to matter more. 5.25% Federal Funds rate, and a Prime-Rate of like 8.5%, means that it costs 8.5% for businesses to borrow money now.
So that means that if a business borrows at 8.5%, they must grow by 8.5% to just stay even with interest rates and the cost of borrowing money. Because a lot of these “growth” strategies involve losing money for years-and-years, you have to factor in the costs of those losses as well.
When Federal Funds Rate was 0.25%, no one cared about the cost of money or the cost of loans. Today, Wall Street cares, and you can see it in all the stock movements. The less-profitable companies have been getting hammered.
Eventually you reach the point where the battery replacement cost exceeds the cars value.
Yes. Fortunately, the cost of this is predictable.(Capacity of the true battery x durability) / kwh-per-mile == miles of durability.
Different batteries have different durabilities: anywhere from 800 cycles to 3500 cycles is a reasonable guess.
Wth the new crop of 3000-cycle LiFePO4 cells at lower costs, the estimated cost per mile of electric driving is reasonable today IMO. But run your calculations and make your own decision. Different vehicles have larger true battery sizes than advertised as well, so finding the 'True Battery Capacity’s is harder than expected, but assume a 10% bonus or so if you don’t know
Especially run this math on solar battery systems, where it’s obviously not worth it to me at least. But electric cars are competing vs more expensive gasoline prices, so it’s actually a reasonable cost in this more expensive use case.
The geopolitical calculus here is about manufacturing.
If China owns EV production lines, that gives them the drone advantage in the next war, as the Li-ion battery is the hard thing to make in a drone.
If USA has EV lines, even if it’s more expensive, we have the resources to make drones as well. (Or Li-ion batteries in other useful weapons).
Ceeding the military advantage to the Chinese for some cheap consumer goods is a bad tradeoff, especially as China is building a Navy to fight us in Taiwan.
why are Chinese automakers able to bring down prices
Because their economy is entering a deflationary spiral built off of 25%+ youth unemployment.
Yes, unemployment lowers labor costs severely. That’s… not a good thing or a strategy we’d want to replicate.
The other thing the Chinese do:
Take over swaths of Africa to obtain cheap rare-earth metals. Use even cheaper African labor to extract Cobalt and other metals.
Ignore environmental regulations. Lithium is obtained by pouring sulfuric acid into mountains, and then draining the acid out the bottom which now contains Lithium. Its simply a very destructive process full of possible issues where the acid will contaminate the natural environment. China doesn’t give a care.
Have huge amounts of unemployment to drive down labor costs lower and lower.
Create an export-driven economy, artificially deflating the Yuan to lower your currency. Yes, this lowers costs. But it also makes it harder to import goods.
There’s a few things we should learn from the Chinese. They have invented incredibly efficient electronic lines in Shenzhen for example. But the bulk of Chinese policies that cause a decline in prices are… horrific. We should never do what the Chinese do on a grand policy scale.
Import-driven vs Export-driven economies have naturally different tradeoffs. Export-driven economies have lower costs but difficulty buying foreign goods. Import-driven economies have higher costs but easier time buying whatever we want from around the world. The most important question: is there a market out there in the world where someone is willing to buy our stuff? I… don’t think so. So the only manufacturing we need in the USA is what we can’t buy from elsewhere… or what we chose to make here (like cars, weapons, and some semiconductors).
Solar/battery is not cheaper than natural-gas peaker plants yet, even today with all the cheapest Chinese panels with Chinese battery packs.
And natural gas home-heating is comparable to a natural-gas peaker feeding a heat pump in overall emissions. (!!!), because capturing near 100% of the heating energy from natural gas is easier than turning natural gas to heat, turning heat into electricity, and then running electrical losses to a home.
No.
Typical gas / coal plants are ~40% efficient. That means that if you do natural gas -> electricity -> heat pump, you only have 40% of the energy available to you. Yes, Heat-pumps then multiply that 40% energy out into “energy movement” rather than heating, but its a huge efficiency break.
If you instead run a pipe from the central source of natural gas and then burn the natural gas inside of a home, you have something like 95% efficiency (5% lost in the chimney).
Its only in the most recent decades have heat pumps actually become more efficient than burning natural gas inside of homes, because you have to factor the inefficiency of the power plant in your conversion. So today we’re finally in a position where modern, advanced, efficient heat pumps are worthwhile. But go back just 20 years ago and the math still pointed towards burning fuel inside of our homes as the most efficient solution.
Too expensive
Charging infrastructure is terrible for road-trips. Many families can only afford 2 or 3 cars at best, and being forced into a 1-hour wait every 250 miles even in the best case is terrible.
Terrible trailer performance. EVs “secret” is hyper-efficiency with lightweight loads like typical driving. Its a good thing if our daily drive were replaced with EV. However, the range drops dramatically more than ICE/Diesel when under load: mountain / hill territory, drag from trailers, and rolling-resistance from higher weights all worsen EVs. Meanwhile, ICE actually increases in efficiency in these high-load circumstances. Trailers, Trucks, RVs will likely be ICE or at most Hybrid for the foreseeable future.
Terrible hotel infrastructure. Again for road-trips, but most vacation spots (beach houses, mountain lodges, hunting lodges, vacations at lakes, ski resorts etc. etc.) do NOT have enough chargers. So you can’t even charge at night when you get there.
EVs are perfect for the daily drive, even on 110V outlets.
As long as you have a habit to plug in every night, even a 110V outlet provides like 40mi+ of range on a typical EV sedan. In practice, this means that every day you’re leaving the house with a full charge.
If you need more range than 40mi daily, you’ll have to upgrade to an L2 charger at home (220V outlet). These beefier chargers can provide over 120mi of range every night for the typical EV.
So in practice, an EV in these circumstances acts like a car that you never need to go to a gas station. Because your home garage / home-charger is a fuel-station.
This is actually one of the reasons why I push PHEV right now.
Note that PHEV has roughly 1/5th to 1/10th the battery size of a full EV. While every PHEV is different (do your research), the Prius Prime 2024 is perhaps the most practical. The new model has ~40ish miles of all electric range, and a button that can put you in 100% EV mode even at highway driving (at severe costs to your acceleration however: 0-60 in 11+ seconds in pure EV mode, while 6.5 seconds in EV+ICE mode). Still, the “pure EV” mode works on the Prius Prime, as crappy an experience as it is. This isn’t true for all cars (ex: Honda Accord 2014 PHEV switches to 100% ICE on highway driving).
In any case, the Prius Prime proves that a 13.6kW-hr battery pack is sufficient to cover a daily commute up to 44mi (EPA rating all-electric range). No need to buy a 5x larger pack like a Tesla (78kW-hr) or a 18x larger pack like a Hummer EV (260+ Kw-hr).
All PHEVs have an effective “generator” that converts gasoline into electric charge for your battery pack, and operates at far greater efficiencies than a regular car (gasoline -> motion is less consistent than gasoline -> tuned-generator -> electricity). Furthermore, most PHEVs (though not all) rely upon Atkinson cycle, meaning the engine is more efficient to begin with. (less fuel is injected per cycle, losing low-end torque. But the low-end torque is supplemented with EV engines so its a fine tradeoff for far greater efficiencies). So even in 100% gasoline mode, a PHEV offers substantial emissions savings off of a regular car.
Ex: Most cars waste their energy at idle. PHEVs instead run the generator to charge up the battery pack, so that your car has “effective work to do” rather than wasting fuel at a red-light. When the batteries are full, PHEVs and Hybrids can shutoff the engine entirely at each Red-light (0rpm electric engines are powerful enough to start the car / accelerate inside a city without any ICE assistance), so all the idle-fuel waste of a traditional ICE in stop-and-go traffic is eliminated. Etc. etc. etc.
“self-healing, urethane-based film
Urethane? You mean paint?
https://www.eastwood.com/paints/automotive-finishes/colors/single-stage-urethane.html
Its like these amateurs are figuring out why we paint cars… its because Urethane protects the metals from rust. I guess they could use Urethane film instead, but that’s probably just not as good or efficient as paint…
“yeah but look at the stock price”
Uhhhhhh…
I think the stock market noticed this was a shit car guys. Look at that steep drop from December / January into February.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
That is just a website demonstrating the concept of a famous science fiction story. Everything I said above remains true.
No storage can hold that. Its likely a computer generated system.
Any computer generated set of text cannot be copyrighted.
Finding any particular book in that “library” would require an index that is the same length / entropy as a full length book in any case. So its a stupid thought experiment to any information theorist. (I’m a Comp. Engineer by trade and have been taught numerous theoretical comp. sci. problems from Nyquist Frequencies, theories on communication, entropy and other such concepts. So this is actually well within my wheelhouse, training an expertise).
Go search for a book in there that replicates Shakespeare’s Hamlet in its entirety. The only way that website could possibly work is if the link you give me has the same entropy / information space as all of Hamlet to begin with.
In the case of copyright law, the Website’s code (including its text generating engine and so forth) is subject to copyright. But the Quadrillion-pages of “text” (most of which is random-gibberish) is not copyrightable.
You’re taking a fictional work and trying to apply real world laws to it?
Copyright assumes that Library of Babel would take up so much space as it’d be impossible to create.
Which is true. Every possible combination of letters, spaces, and characters would never fit on anything in today’s universe (be it a 24 TB Hard Drive, or even a collection of thousands of them).
Secondly: any computer-generated work is automatically non-copyrighted as per US Law.
Its actually up right now today. The headline sucks.
Voiding the stock-based compensation means that all other shareholders will automatically get more control of the company. This is actually a good ruling for TSLA shareholders, not that the cult members understand anything about corporate politics, corporate control, or how shares fucking work.
Because they aren’t illegal and they don’t violate copyright
Because they are legal and they do violate copyright? People keep wanting them to be copyright free, but that’s not how copyright works. There don’t need to be amendments to copyright law in order to cover this case.
I mean, its obviously heading to the courts one way or the other, but I don’t think just making assertions like that are very good kind of arguing. The training weights here have clearly been proven to contain copyrighted data as per this article. I’m not sure if you’re making any kind of serious case that shows otherwise, but are instead just making a bunch of assertions that I could easily reverse.
Because it’s so easy to use people keep focusing on trying to kill the tool rather than trying to police the people using it. But they’re going about it all wrong, copyright isn’t the right weapon if that’s your goal. Copyright can be used to go after the people using generative AI tools, but not the people creating the tools.
Why? If the training weights are created and distributed in violation of copyright laws, it seems appropriate to punish those illegal training weights.
In fact, all that people really are asking for, is for a new set of training weights to be developed but with appropriate copyright controls. IE: With express permission from the artists and/or entities who made the work.
You don’t need to perform “for profit” to get sued for copyright infringement.
but AI isn’t performing in public any more having a guitar with you in public is ripping off Metallica.
Is the Joker image in that article derivative or substantially similar to a copyrighted work? Is the query available to anyone who uses Midjourney? Are the training weights being copied from server-to-server behind the scenes? Were the training weights derived from copyrighted data?
Otakon anime music videos have no profits but they explicitly get a license from RIAA to play songs in public.
I really do not believe midjourney is storing all the files on the Internet in a humongous database.
Are you sure?
The training weights can literally recreate images its been trained on. That makes them a humongous database, albeit with lossy compression. They aren’t replicated exactly, but they are replicated enough that I’m confident that these “Joker” images passes as copyright infringement before a jury (ie: is substantially similar).
It’s len(str) in Python. Not str.length.