pbmonster

Yes, medicine pays better, median is around 100k but with significant back loading towards the second half of the career.

Finance can be (much) better, but feels like far fewer jobs, especially outside Frankfurt. I'm not sure finding a high paying finance jobs is easier than finding a software job at the German office of an American firm (which pay similarly well).

> I suppose factory workers cannot be let go as easily.

It's important to look at comparable companies. If you're a SE at a company with many factory workers, firing the SE is usually equally as difficult as firing the factory worker. They usually have the same protections and are in the same union. Software shops just tend to be smaller and those have lower job security.

Even more interesting is if a thinking LLM would come up with tricks mitigating its own known limits - like listing animals in alphabetical order, or launching a shell/interpreter with a list that contains previous answers (which it then checks each new answer against).

> The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.

Not necessarily. Red Hat is a billion dollar company just on FOSS support services and consulting. And if you put hundreds of thousands of clients on a completely novel FOSS stack, you're going to need several of those.

Sounds like you have a music discovery process in nicotine? Can you elaborate on how you find new things to listen to? Just my looking at what individual other users listen to?

Music discovery is the one thing I cannot drop Spotify for. I want to make a playlist with 10 songs and then have an algorithm suggest 20 more - ideally songs I have never listened to before, or songs I haven't listened to in a long time.

Spotify is mediocre at that task, but I just can't find a replacement at all...

PipePipe and Revanced both do both perfectly.

A YouTube client that can't AdBlock and SponsorBlock automatically is strictly worse.

Dota 2 is a real time strategy game with an arguably more complex micro game (but a far simpler macro game than AoE2, but that's far easier for an AI to master), and OpenAI Five completely destroyed the reigning champions. In 2019. Perfect coordination between units, superhuman mechanical skill, perfect consistency.

I see no reason why AoE2 would be any different.

Worth noting that openAI Five was mostly deep reinforcement learning and massive distributed training, it didn't use image to text and an LLM for reasoning about what it sees to make its "decisions". But that wouldn't be a good way to do an AI like that anyway.

Oh, and humans still play Dota. It's still a highly competitive community. So that wasn't destroyed at all, most teams now use AI to study tactics and strategy.

That's probably a quick way to do it, but considering that using a miller cycle means we're going to want the turbo version of the engine, that alone is going to cost like $4k on Fords end. Add a 100kW+ generator with the power electronics to charge while driving, fuel system, exhaust system and cooling system, and we're probably approaching $10k upcharge for the customer.

Gotta remove a whole lot of batteries from that car to make it cost competitive again. Realistically, with an engine this powerful, we can probably cut down to like 30kWh of total battery capacity, which gets us back to where we started financially. And 30 kWh is enough to drive 70 miles all electric, which should pretty much should cover most daily use for people who charge at home.

Now, the questions if we can do that cheaper with a much smaller engine. Ford has a 1 liter inline 3 in the Fiesta and Focus that makes half as much power. Should be enough...

> especially silly to lug that around if 90% of your trips are in battery range

The same argument works for large batteries, right? On 90% of your trips, you're lugging around several hundred pounds of battery you're not using.

If you want to tackle the weight argument, you could always drop 40 kWh battery capacity from the truck. That frees up around 600 lbs you can now use for the genset.

The maintenance thing is a real problem, of course. A 50 kW genset that almost never runs will be much better on mainenance than a classic ICE car, but still add significant maintenance cost to a BEV.

> my bet is it's almost identical to the BEV version but with an engine where the big beautiful frunk is now

Would be interesting how small and how cheap you can design a ~50kW genset to be (any smaller and you don't gain that highly coveted towing range). I don't think it's an easy task, you still need to integrate the crash compliant fuel tank, the emissions compliant exhaust system, water cooling for the engine, ect.

It's a pretty long BOM you're adding to an already expensive BEV, so you don't really have thousands of dollars of budget to add to the production cost.

> I would feel very uncomfortable towing an empty 4x6 trailer behind my sedan, not to even mention the occasional couch or dresser or bunch of boxes from helping a friend move.

Why? 1500 lbs rated tow hook on an average sedan should be no problem at all. And that's more than enough for a 4x6 with a couch and a couple of boxes. Might even get a slightly larger trailer so you don't have to take the couch apart.

I've towed 14' sailboats including all gear behind a Corolla, didn't even feel the trailer was there.

> Something that will change in the next century. I'm curious how that will affect shipping. I'm imagining it won't have much impact on container shipping

No, on the contrary! The effect on container shipping will be absolutely massive with the Northeast Passage opening up. It's going to cut thousands of miles off shipping routes, since its the much shorter route from American East Coast ports and the Euros to Asia.

Yeah, ultra high voltage DC power lines have something like 3.5% loss per 1000km. American sun belt to European sun belt is at least 6000km, so you just gotta eat the 20% loss. Same ballpark as pumped hydro storage.

6000km sounds like a lot, but the Chinese have built a 3000km UHVDC line delivering 12 GW, and putting down submarine communications cables this long is complete routine today. Would be interesting how much aluminium/lead/copper such a project would take. EDIT: found a supplier that specifies a 1GW cable at 7000 tons per spool. A spool is 130km of cable, so that's 350 000 tons of cable per GW for the transatlantic link. So just the raw aluminium is around a billion dollars per GW.

Anyway, first we have to properly connect those two sun belts to the rest of their own continental masses with UHVDC, then we have a lot of political problems to solve, and then we can check battery prices...

Pretty sure that was scientists competing for 6 month training runs of new 100B+ parameter models, not coders burning through a couple of million tokens.

German police have a what amounts to a dyno mounted on a truck bed, and they pull over suspicious cars and sound check them while an officer goes through the gears on the dyno.

Failing that test is expensive, and you don't see your car again for a few weeks. They revoke your permission to operate the vehicle on public roads, so in addition to the fine, you face fees (towing, storage of car in evidence locker, towing your car to a shop after getting it back in order to make it street legal, then redoing the road-worthiness certification).

I'm currently wearing a 2 Duo that shows the weather and outside temperature on the watch face.

> existing grid scale battery round trip is like 82% which do not have moving parts.

This is incorrect for a lot of containerized lithium systems. They have a lot of moving parts in their AC systems - the compressors, the fans, the cooling water pumps.

Lithium cells really don't like to be hot. If you put them next to solar farms in the sun belt or if you discharge them moderately quickly, you'll have to cool them. This cooling system also eats into the overall efficiency, but what's even worse is that its the majority of the maintenance budget.

Pedestrian deaths in the US are up 78% since 2009. [0]

[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-so-many-pedes...

The low hanging fruit have been long picked. Reverse osmosis is within 50% of the thermodynamic limit.

If you have gigawatts of low grade waste heat (Iran does, in theory), you can run multistage flash distillers of the waste heat, and those have more than an order of magnitude separation to the thermodynamic limit (they also have lower CAPEX, lower maintenance and lower water pre-treatment requirements than reverse osmosis).

Yeah, I'd go the other way. Camera manufacturers should have the camera cryptographically sign the data from the sensor directly in hardware, and then provide an API to query if a signed image was taken on one of their cameras.

Add an anonymizing scheme (blind signatures or group signatures), done.

There's many more. Aeroderivative gas turbines are not exactly new, and they have shorter lead times than regular gas turbines right now, so everybody getting their hands on any has been willing to buy them.

> The only way I can get to the "crypto is inevitable" take relies on the scams and fraud as the fundamental drivers.

The idea of a cheap, universal, anonymous digital currency itself is old (e.g. eCash and Neuromancer in the '80s, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon in the '90s).

It was inevitable that someone would try implementing it once the internet was widespread - especially as long as most banks are rent-seeking actors exploiting those relying on currency exchanges, as long as many national currencies are directly tied to failing political and economic systems, and as long as the un-banking and financially persecution of undesirables was a threat.

Doing it so extremely decentralized and with a the whole proof-of-work shtick tacked on top was not inevitable and arguably not a good way to do it, nor the cancer that has grown on top of it all...

It is, since the obvious alternative to taking the heat from water would be taking the heat from the air or from the ground.

The air is colder in winter than the water, and the ground only provides a limited amount of heat before you can't extract any more. So water beats both.

The German luxury brands have made the "made in Germany" shtick a core part of their marketing. So Miele, Gaggenau, Vorwerk, ect.

Bosch/Siemens are far larger than those, but they outsourced a lot. But even here, significant parts of the higher-end stuff is still made outside China.

There's no way a modern smart phone or car relies on those ephemeris transmissions. They all just get it from the internet, which takes less than a second. That's one of the reasons why a smart phone has a reliable GPS fix basically instantly after being booted up, while old-school offline GPS units needed minutes to get a fix.

It matters when the level of that body of water drops by a lot in summer and the water temperature rises at the same time. Add environmental laws (cooking the fish is discouraged), and your nuke plant needs to go into safety shutdown pretty reliably every summer.

> The issue is that now the government knows what you are doing online

There's zero technical necessity for this. You could do zero knowledge proofs with crypto key pairs issued together with the eID.

The Swiss proposal for eID includes stuff like that. If a service needs proof of age, you use an app on your phone to generate the response, which is anonymized towards the requester and doesn't need to contact a government server at all.

If we ever end up doing that it would mean terrible things for the state of our regulatory landscape.

A completely optimized high capacity cargo rail line can move 500 rail cars per hour. That's 1000 FEUs if we double stack containers. A lithium battery system in a FEU has around 2 MWh of storage. So that rail line has 2 GW transmission capacity if we saturate it with batteries - the same as a single high voltage transmission line. Being unable to build one of those in parallel to the rail line would be extremely sad.

Note that 500 rail cars per hour is actually an impressive feat of logistics. A normal rail yard at a port would be very happy with a sustained rate of 200 rail cars per hour, and will frequently drop below that.

That also means you can trivially optimize your fuel/cargo ratios. Going across the pacific? Just load 200 more battery containers. Singapore to China right after? Room for 400 FEUs more than normal.

Probably just a matter of perspective. It's a few hundreds of TWh per year in 2025 - that's huge, and it's growing quickly. But again, that's still only a small fraction of a percent of total human primary energy consumption during the same time.