Latest LLMs that have good visual understanding (Gemini and GPT) are able to tell if construction work is up to code. You can give it a picture of electrical wiring, plumbing, framing and it will tell you if it's up to code with very good accuracy.
The current version of FSD drives better than most humans. You literally put in the destination address, press Start Self Drive, and it gets to your destination without you ever touching the steering wheel, and parks for you in the end. IMO it's ready for large scale robotaxi deployment. I only take steering wheel if I want to take a different route or park in a different place vs where Tesla decides to park.
Uber rides are around $1.5 per mile on average. Assume Waymo car drives 200K miles over it's lifetime, 3mi/kWh EV efficiently and $0.20/kWh electricity cost. It will generate $300K over it's lifetime and use $13K worth of electricity. Right now it costs $150K to manufacture Waymo car because they are custom built and Lidars are still expensive. Even at $150K unit economics should be OK. But the cost of self driving cars will go down as they are manufactured at larger scale and will eventually approach cost of regular mid-range car. In a few years they will be under $50K per car. Mapping is a one-time cost and the need for mapping will eventually disappear. This will be a massively profitable business for self-driving fleet operators.
Take-or-pay contracts appear as "contractual commitments" in 10-K. They are not hidden. That's the way they are reported in all industries where take-or-pay contracts exist. There's nothing nefarious about it.
> whats working is ML models trained on specific domains (not much different than 5+ years ago), and whats not working is a general model that humanity can let go to work on its own.
As usual, AI skeptics are moving goal posts. Modern LLMs are on a completely different level in terms of how GENERAL they are vs anything pre-LLM. You can give it a completely novel puzzle and it will solve it. 5+ years ago you had to train NN to solve particular type of puzzle.
Average American "cardboard house" is better insulated than average European brick or concrete house. Having heavy walls make your house feel "sturdy" but it has nothing to do with energy efficiency. A lot of houses in Europe are just brick or concrete with no additional insulation. In US it's it's rare to have uninsulated houses.
In US more people live in very hot places like Texas and Arizona and people mostly live in single-family houses. Single-family houses obviously takes more energy to cool than "flats". Plus average American house/flat has twice the living area.
ICON has been building houses like that for a while. You can find walkthroughs of their houses on YouTube to understand what to expect.
https://youtu.be/vcSaUXViD9g
It could be that dolphins are smarter than humans. Dolphins didn't build civilization, but it could be because they don't have flexible enough limbs for tool making. Maybe humans just got lucky with a combination of relatively high intelligence, language and flexible limbs.
> Why would the fact that the loans are now from the government mean that universities no longer had to compete on costs? The bill ultimately goes to the student in either case.
Because 17 years old student taking out the loan is not financially experienced, so the issue of cost is often not properly considered.
Modern houses have PEX plumbing. It has some advantages over copper, e.g. it won't burst if it freezes. But the main advantage -- it's less labor to install.
Are you sure the difference is not in your head? Try to do a blind experiment. Ask someone to pour a glass of milk from plastic container and a another glass from paper container and see if you can tell which is which.
Yes, but where would water come from? What you are describing is regular pumped-hydro storage. It uses two reservoirs with different elevations. It works well when there are two naturally occurring reservoirs with elevation differences. You are suggesting to create low-elevation reservoir artificially by digging a hole. It would be very expensive because hole would need to be either very deep or very large.
I'm not trying to defend Amazon, but I don't think Amazon can legally tow a vehicle in this case. It's not their vehicle, it belongs to an independent business/contractor. The best they could do is to contact the contractor and offer to cover costs of towing. But we don't know what the situation is, what they tried to do.
When police tows a vehicle, owner has to pay for towing to get the vehicle back. If nobody picks up the vehicle then vehicle is auctioned off and proceeds cover the cost of towing and storage. So the only way tax dollars end up being used is if the vehicle is worth less then the cost of towing.
Parent poster meant "properly cared for timber", not chemically-treated timber. Timber doesn't have an expiration date. As long as you keep it dry, it will last indefinitely. In fact, it becomes stronger over time. There are many 100+ years timber buildings in US.
For timber used outdoors, e.g. for making decks pressure-treated timber is used. It's a timber treated with pesticide (chromated copper arsenate). In the past creosote was used to treat things like wooden railroad ties and power poles, but it's no longer used because it's toxic.
There's a labor shortage in US right now. You can feel it everywhere: from having to book car mechanic appointment weeks in advance to construction projects going to standstill.
Right, and it doesn't even require actual tumblers. Any service where you can deposit and then withdraw bitcoin can be used as a tumbler: gambling sites, exchanges, bitcoin marketplaces etc. Each time this is done the link is broken, and to de-tumble you need transaction history from each of those services. It's like if you want to deanonymize someone who connects to Internet though 10 VPNs: you need logs for ALL 10 VPNs to deanonymize the user. Criminals can also exchange bitcoin to Monero through anonymous exchanges, let it sit for a while and then exchange back over time.
I learned a lot from watching YouTube. I was able to complete many home improvement projects based on DIY videos. And learned about many different subjects: history, science, engineering. I probably learned more from YouTube than from books. I do have YouTube Premium subscription so I don't need to watch ads — makes a big difference.