manholio

It's an excellent idea if the conversion market can be bootstrapped. In France there are already firms offering the service.

Millions of cars exist in the roads and they have 90% of what an electric car needs. There is absolutely no point of sending them to the garbage pile and remanufacture then add electrics, all for the good of the environment.

> Are you really running your test suite for every "i+=1" change on other languages?

You don't have to run your testsuite for a small bugfix (that's what CI is for), but you DO need to restart, reset the testcase that triggers the code you are interested in, and step through it again. Rinse and repeat for 20 or so times, with various data etc. - at least that's my debug-heavy workflow. If any trivial recompile takes a minute or so, that's a frustrating time spent waiting as opposed to using something like a dynamic language to accomplish the same task.

So you would instinctively avoid Rust for any task that can be accomplished with Python or JS, a real shame since it's very close to being an universal language.

The most annoying thing in my experience is not really the raw compilation times, but the lack of - or very rudimentary - incremental build feature. If I'm debugging a function and make a small local change that does not trickle down to some generic type used throughout the project, then 1-second build times should be the norm, or better yet, edit & continue debug.

It's beyond frustrating that any "i+=1" change requires relinking a 50mb binary from scratch and rebuilding a good chunk of the Win32 crate for good measure. Until such enterprise features become available, high developer productivity in Rust remains elusive.

My stated point was acid raid in the context of climate engineering, there was nothing said about quantity. Small quantities will cause acid rain in undetectable amounts, and have the same nil effect on climate, but presumably the end goal is to have a measurable effect on climate.

Since we already have SO2-induced acid rain on a warming planet, and there is no real motive to believe such intentional releases will be confined to the upper layers of the atmosphere, it follows that such climate engineering attempts will have a measurable effect on acid rain.

So the point is perfectly valid even if you won't follow it through to the logical conclusion. Just like these clowns here.

I indeed knew the scale, it's plastered all over this thread, but it's not relevant to the point being made.

The whole scheme is harebrained regardless of the amount, what depends on the amount is the harm it can cause, in the range <totally harmless, with perhaps some barely detectable rain acidity local increases ... Venus-like global catastrophe>.

Why yes, what could possibly go wrong by releasing the main constituent of acid rain in an haphazard attempt to cool down the Earth, a problem itself created by releasing uncontrolled quantities of other pollutants.

Sounds like the setup for a dystopia.

But you will not use it if the depreciation on your car vastly exceeds what you could earn from the scheme.

There is an economic case being made above that explains why, you might want to try and follow that and respond on point instead of mindlessly nitpicking.

There exist large scale trials for this idea, you never heard of them because (aside from the fact you are arguing on a subject you know little about) they failed or are barely limping along.

It can't, because the distribution fee is an amortized cost of having distribution infrastructure built. Since that infrastructure still needs to exist regardless of where you get your energy (and in fact needs to be upgraded to handle bidirectional consumer/producers), EV storage won't bypass it regardless of where the EV and the consumer is physically located.

If you consume what you store, then you will charge up at low (production prices + distribution fees) for the times when (production prices + distribution fees) are high. The second term is constant so you are arbitraging on production prices.

But if that limitation is repetitive to the point of investing in infrastructure to use EVs, then some other large-scale investor will close that arbitrage opportunity.

Basically, the next-day / week energy markets, where EV owners can compete, will be saturated by grid-scale battery operators. Renewables will leave large gaps for seasonal energy needs - for example two weeks of winter with no sun and no wind - but EVs cannot help there. So some spin on-demand non-renewables will need to cover that (i.e., the current main providers, after becoming too expensive to run due to carbon pricing).

Copyright exists to protect human authors and promote creation, which in turn leads to learning - from other human beings. Algorithms are not learning, they are automated tools which are consuming creative works and outputing derivative works.

The loophole is to use copyrighted works for free despite no learning taking place - no human being observing and developing their skills based on that work - rather, an algorithm transforming those works into some other useful interpretation of them.

That just means people will buy daily drivers with small batteries and charge them nightly. 15 years out of a cheap compact car with near zero operating costs sounds like a good deal, still does not make sense to waste a cycle for $1 = 20kWh fed into the grid.

This is never going to happen at scale. Energy is fungible: one cannot compete on "quality" of energy, just on price, a kWh is a kWh and the provider with the cheapest energy will always win in the marketplace. So this means any EV owner looking to make a profit is competing against large scale industrial storage entities that:

- have large mass and purchasing power, optimizing their battery purchasing and operational costs;

- have grid-scale storage oriented solutions tuned for maximum charging cycles and lifetime-storage

- use stationary batteries with no mass penalties, affording them the use of low density exotic chemistries (Na-ion) or non-battery storage systems.

Meanwhile, the EV owner has a mobility-optimized battery that is tuned for maximum density that still results in a cycle count comparable with the lifetime of the car. At market equilibrium, any revenue he extracts while serving the grid will reduce the useful life time of the battery and therefore depreciate his capital, and make his battery a "spare parts consumable" which is a major profit driver for most auto-manufacturers, especially a custom form factor battery for a 5 year old vehicle that is no longer sold.

Never mind that the whole operational cost, changing the meter to a bidirectional one, making sure the vehicle is connected for extended periods of time etc. is probably not going to be worth the pennies you will earn.

Grid storage is EVs is a decade old pipe dream, it will never make sense economically, it has been attempted multiple times and always failed, just let it die.

It's about a law designed by humans to give everyone a chance to make a living and contribute to the common good. You think you have found a loophole in that law that lets you use that work for free and deny author's any compensation.

Bear in mind, AI is not making artists or creative types obsolete - that would be fair game, just like computers made human calculators obsolete. No, this is about abusing other people's work.

The crypto market is the trash, a decade old speculative bubble with zero real world applications.

Well, here's my point of anecdata: despite Python being a very productive language and very easy to use, despite it existing for more than three decades and being perhaps the most massively learned language by aspiring programmers today, you hardly see any stand-alone application written in it. I can name not a single application that I use on a daily basis written in Python. It seems it's strongly confined to the web-server, where the environments are well controlled via containers, runtime bugs impact a single page load and fixes can be applied continuously. People don't ship Python standalone apps.

Based on the buggy and unstable Python desktop apps I have used, I have a strong suspicion that developing large applications in Python is strongly self-limiting after the initial sprint.

That example threw me off too because both the numbers and the perspective are non-nonsensical. 90% of the energy draw of those data-centers goes into things like inner video encoding loops, SSD/memcache storage and retrieval, ML algorithms etc.

But the vast majority of those 27.000 engineers do not work on such low level routines, but on things like millions of lines of crufty Python that power Adsense analytics, which are essential for maintaining a revenue stream. Yes, development speed is very important but it's mostly orthogonal to other operational costs if the right tools and architectures are employed.

What do you mean, autism is well established as a personality trait that diminishes empathy and the ability to understand other people's desires and emotions, while having a strong affinity to things, for example machines and algorithms.

Legislation is driven by people who are, on aggregate, not autistic. So it's entirely appropriate to presume that a person not understanding how that process works is indeed autistic, especially if they suggest machines are subjects of law by analogy with human beings.

It's not that autists are bad people, they are just outliers in the political spectrum, as you can see from the complete disconnect of up-voted AI-related comments on Hacker News, where autistic engineers are clearly over-represented, versus just about any venue where other professionals, such as painters or musicians, congregate. Just try to suggest to them that a corporation has the right to use their work for free and profit from it while leaving them unemployed, because the algorithm the corporation uses to exploit them is in some abstract sense similar to how their brain works. That position is so for out on the spectrum that presuming a personality peculiarity of the emitter is the absolutely most charitable interpretation.

What you and many other in the thread seem to be oblivious about is that algorithms are not people. Yes, it may come as a shock to autistic engineers, but the fact that a machine can do something to what a person does does not warant it equal protection under the law.

Copyright, and laws in general, exists to protect the human members of society not some abstract representation of them.

The model can generate original images, yes, and those images might be fair use. But it can also generate near verbatim copies of the source works or substantial parts thereof, so the model itself is not fair use, it's a wholly derivative work.

For example, if a publish a music remix tool with a massive database of existing music, creators might use to create collages that are original and fall under fair use. But the tool itself is not and requires permission from the rights owners.

But they are not original works, they are wholly derived works of the training data set. Take that data set away and the algorithm is unable to produce a single original pixel.

The fact that the derivation involves millions of works as opposed to a single one is immaterial for the copyright issue.

Well, it's only natural that technological progress and competition will reduce prices and allow the masses to enjoy products that were reserved for the rich in earlier times.

There was no dramatic tech progress in Tesla in the last few years, while competition steadily increased, it's only natural that the prices would drop. The Tesla stock valuations that essentially predicted this would never happen were obviously delusional.

They don't have the scale to sway large parts of the public opinion, so they are irrelevant. Also, what you call "left" might simply be the truth, and it's very hard to fight against that.

For an example of toxic ideological delusion in the left camp you can see the harm done to adolescents by the gender nuts, it's absolutely out of control on Reddit and there will be reckoning day with its many victims.

> Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff.

So you are essentially saying Twitter has an over-complicated architecture with regards to its real technical needs, so Musk was right to axe the microservice zealots. Good we can agree on that.

The next step is to acknowledge that code and data-centers continue to work long after their original designers have left the company, that's what computers are, tools for automation. Keeping the lights on and services in a roughly functional state is an activity that requires much less people of relatively lower qualification, even if they couldn't have engineered it themselves.

Yes, there is a long term risk of code rot and entropy if Musk does not plan for a gradual transition to a better engineered architecture with competent maintainers. But we are not there yet, far from it.

Meanwhile, schadenfreude people have rooted for a twittocaplipse from day one, nay, predicted it as inevitable. There is absolutely no sign it's going to happen, and Twitter turned out sufficiently simple after all on the technical side.

It's all fun and games until you are slain in the street because people chose to regard you as subhuman after a little bird told them so.

Disseminating politically extreme misinformation kills people - look no further than Russia, where a state run propaganda campaign has made people no more stupid or immoral than you or me support a vicious war of aggression against their neighbors.

> Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business?

After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it.

The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to scale.

The problem with Twitter, and what Musk doesn't seem to understand, is a sociological and political one. Social networks are the crack cocaine of tabloid media, left to the whims of bad actors they can destroy democracies, incite lynchings, distribute hate and misinformation on scales without historical precedent. "Free speech" just doesn't cut it, social networks are publications not mediums, they chose what people get to see and react to, and the fact that the choice is made by an algorithm does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, especially if the algorithm is tuned for revenue maximization and easily gamed by bad actors to spread their content.

By firing the watchers, Musk is setting Twitter up as an menace to stable democracies around the world.

> Why does the EU believe every facet of life needs to be ordered and control by government regulation

It doesn't, the author is just projecting their authoritarian nanny state fantasies.

The EU regulates the internal market and sets minimal common standards for example for medication, food safety and allowed pesticides and fertilizers etc. These are necessary for the well functioning of the common market and need to be specified to a high degree of detail, otherwise states would try to cheat and flood the common market with products grown with the cheapest most toxic methods, and you wouldn't be able to remove them from your national market without breaking the free trade rules.

This nature of the internal competition needs detailed regulations that states need to negotiate and specify very well (and then try to cheat anyway), and it's unlike a national unified market like the US has. This gives the appearance of over-regulation, but in reality the UE is quite neoliberal and doesn't give a fuck about your car controls.

It's clearly a derived work, since the apparatus that has produced the work (the AI model) can only function when supplied with copyrighted works - in fact it cannot exists without copious amounts of such works. If there is even a passing semblance between a source work and the output, such as, for example, similar code structure and different variable names, then you are legally fucked.

I'm sure courts will clear this mess up really soon, and I'm betting money the rulings won't subscribe to the "it's mine now" mantra of the AI crowd.

The options are not always equivalent. 19 offers to work on blockchain scams are not equivalent with 1 offer from a top company that wants their products market ready and offers you a once in a lifetime opportunity. So get polishing.

In the case of ChatGPT, you can be almost sure that if a non-trivial amount of code works in production then it's an unlicensed paraphrase of some human written code. It treats code (and everything else) like prose, hence the atrocious results in the original story.

That does not mean other coding-optimized AI models won't be able to do much more, symbolic reasoning about the data, maintaining consistent variable and function names, understand libraries, respecting language constraints and invariants etc.