torpfactory

Worst case scenario we dig up more lithium. I'm convinced the Nickel and Cobalt will be recycled. Lithium is a small percentage of total mass, 1-3%, and is abundant in the earth's crust. Maybe 5-10kg of lithium in a pack. Compare that to 40-80kg of petroleum every time I fill the tank.

These are old talking points from the fossil fuel industry. The batteries themselves will be recycled to recover their valuable minerals. The process will certainly require care to avoid localized pollution. Compare that with burning fossil fuels- baked into their design is emission of heat trapping gasses which systemically affect the entire planet. It’s clear we need to stop burning fossil fuels lest we overheat the earth.

On top of the obvious grift and bribe seeking potential there is also now an obvious mechanism for ideological control. Govt doesn’t like the way the model describes the events of Jan 6? We’ll have to see how many people get to use it…

We are very clearly proceeding down the road to a dystopia here.

Why not also require that cell companies share up to the second location data with authorities? It would be so much easier to catch criminals!

Just to expand on my ideas above about how we might manage them:

(1) Entities creating these data sets should require licenses to do so. (2) Creation of real-time location data sets would itself be a criminal offense without a license. (3) Data would need to be encrypted and stored according to a set of best practices. Failure to do so would be a criminal offense. (4) Access to data would be available through a court, ideally with the judge literally controlling access to the cryptographic keys. (5) Accessing the data without permission would be a criminal offense. (6) You would probably need to add civil penalties not subject to sovereign immunity. Otherwise cops would just ignore the law about unauthorized access and then also fail to prosecute themselves.

Or you know we could just make them illegal altogether (including the ones the cell phone company creates for advertisers). Much simpler!

I don't think any entity (including but not limited to the government) should be allowed to create or maintain data sets of people's near or real time location data. Think about all the ways this data can be misused.

We are truly creating the chains that will bind us by allowing these kinds of tools to exist. And for what? We managed for generations to do policing without LPRs. Are we so drowning in crime that we should create universal surveillance as a solution?

The problem is right now LPR data is available to just about everyone who wants it for any reason as long as they are part of law enforcement. They are using it, for example, to crack down on dissent, to stalk ex lovers, and to enforce abortion restrictions that are constitutionally dubious.

If we are to maintain our liberty, the vast power such a surveillance apparatus should either not exist or only be accessible through an adversarial court system (i.e. a search warrant).

(1) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/how-cops-are-using-flo...

(2) https://local12.com/news/nation-world/police-chief-gets-caug...

(3) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...

What are the alternatives for Europe? Continue to import oil and gas? Have some of your most important economic inputs price and supply controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs alive?

Nuclear? Good luck building it on time and on budget. Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from? I’m not necessarily against nuclear I just don’t think there’s much you can do in five or ten years to move the needle with Nuclear.

Wind? Actually a good option as it has a strong domestic supply chain.

Solar? Buy China’s cheap panels as long as they are selling. If they stop selling figure out how to do it yourself. It’s not some big mystery how panels get made, China just had the foresight to invest in the scale required to drive prices down.

Coal? I mean at least it’s local. But solar + batteries are either beating it now or will be in the next few years if the same trends that have held for the last 30 years continue for the next 2-5. So you’d be investing in a more expensive, dirtier technology for what end?

There is no world where you get to not make a decision and the risk just disappears. I think renewables have the clear advantage here and have very manageable risks.

We aren’t making a very good case for ourselves on the world stage are we…

Solar and wind are scaling much faster than gas and oil right now. After the recent Iran war I think it would be insane to rely on new oil or gas. Yeah let’s rely on this commodity whose supply and price are controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs on the planet.

You can scale battery installations basically arbitrarily to the size of the grid connection you have. Put the batteries at the end user if you can. Then they get power outage protection and the grid gets much of the same flexibility.

Atomic power is in a bit of a sour spot as a technology. The large size of plants means we don’t build very many means we don’t get much cost reduction from learning curves. Wind and solar are getting much much better cost reductions over time. Batteries are in the same boat- small, modular, benefitting from learning curves.

A small number of large plants are much easier to target during war than distributed wind, solar, or batteries. It’s not that batteries are immune to grenades. It’s that you’d need to put grenades in orders of magnitude more places to get to all the batteries as compared to large nuclear plants.

Batteries do pose a fire risk, but so do petrol cars. We pump flammable gas into our homes in large parts of the west and have designed ways of keeping ourselves safe. I see no reason why batteries won’t follow the same path.

That land is producing food for cars. If we covered half in solar panels we’d have almost enough energy to power the country. Turn the other half over to food production and you’d come out ahead on both energy and food.

It’s really not niche anymore. It’s the dominant form of new electrical power generation and has been for a few years.

https://www.publicpower.org/system/files/documents/Americas-...

It’s weird that he’s so in the numbers but then doesn’t carry through with the battery electric truck calculations. He just dismisses it out of hand.

Your cargo may be reduced but your fuel costs will also be reduced. It’s quite a complicated calculation.

Are you hauling sand? Then you probably can’t spare a single kg of cargo limit. Doing LTL work? Then maybe you’re not totally filled anyways. It really depends. If you’re fine with a 35 ton limit you might be able to make good money with the fuel savings.

It is totally nuts. We will see I guess. If there will be a ground invasion, people will see the convoys moving into position. You can’t really hide that much stuff.

My read is most likely some kind of strike on the cartels. There hasn’t seemed to be any significant US military buildup so it’s something they’ll be able to do with a smaller force.

The trapezoid makes me worried about a ground incision there- it extends to the border and would be a cover space for an invasion force. Absolutely bonkers that we are even having this discussion.

The TFR is most likely contingency planning for possible retaliation by cartel drones and the need to keep the airspace clear so they can see (with radar) and shoot down drones and not passenger aircraft.

My bet is a showy armored advance though the open terrain near there… it’ll look great on camera! /s

I'm just going to copy my comment on a previous post about this topic:

You think that Trump won't demand something in return for this?

I keep telling everyone I know that AI will be enshitified just like every other internet business. Tell me why the incentives will be different this time around. Putting yourself in hock to an aspiring authoritarian is certainly one way to supercharge that process.

What do you think OpenAI's output about Jan 6 will be one year from now if this goes through?

You think that Trump won't demand something in return for this?

I keep telling everyone I know that AI will be enshitified just like every other internet business. Tell me why the incentives will be different this time around. Putting yourself in hock to an aspiring authoritarian is certainly one way to supercharge that process.

Tbh an intensive class dedicated to teaching kids how to put their phone down would really be a good idea!

That sounds like dystopia to me… the smartphone is such a crazy distraction to deep learning why on earth would you bring it into the space willingly.

What’s the skill though? Most everything you do on a smartphone is trivially easy thanks to all those hard working app developers. We all know from experience that the vast majority of actual phone time is spent consuming some kind of media. I’m not at all worried about kids not learning to use a smartphone well enough- that part will sort itself out. It’s all the other (boring) skills that get pushed aside in the mindless scramble for dopamine that concerns me.

I’d argue most of the cost of scare housing is supply limits imposed by ridiculous over regulation of new construction. It’s not like we forgot how to build houses and apartments we just aren’t allowed to.

What the actual fuck are you talking about. Gonna need some proof that isn’t a 4chan sewer please.

Hear me out. Elon wants ultimate control over people’s lives and choices. Why he would want this is a psychological question about which we can only speculate. This is a change from (at least in appearance) his previous libertarian leanings. Whatever the case, this is the plan:

1) Acquire god mode access to government systems and citizens information (contacting, grants, spending, taxes, SSI benefits, you name it).

2) Add features to the Treasury Department’s software to allow him to, with extremely high granularity, control what payments go out. Friends can be rewarded, enemies punished. At first it will take the form of government entities he doesn’t like (USAID, for example). Next will be government opposition in our federal system, mostly blue cities and states with whom he disagrees. Next will be large private entities with whom he disagrees or are business competitors. Finally, individuals opposing him or the government will be personally targeted (for example, by not paying SSI benefits or paying out tax returns, perhaps extended to family members of the opposition, etc). These individual sanctions could extend to large geographic area he dislikes (all of coastal California, for example). He’s putting in place the tools to accomplish this right now as we speak.

3) Fire all bureaucratic opposition elements who might prevent this. Dress it up as a government efficiency measure if you like.

4) Eventually they will pressure large (and maybe small, too) private financial institutions to take part in this scheme (they may have already succeeded, see Citibank and NYC federal funding for migrants).

He’s putting in place the tools for total control by controlling access to money and resources. I don’t exactly know what he plans to do with them but I don’t want to find out given constant interaction with racists and neo nazis on his site.

It’s a bit like the old saying about the banks: “If you owe the bank $10,000 it’s your problem. If you owe the bank $10,000,000 it’s the banks problem”. If everyone in class is using LLMs to cheat, it’s really the university/instructors problem and it may be easier to bury their heads in the sand then to change their teaching methods and lesson plans. You can’t fail them all…

Eh, they make precision stuff like this all the time. If they wanted to make a bunch they would first standardize the sizing then create production tooling for the grinding setups. Those gears would come out basically perfect every time.

The bigger problem is the output link is supported by the gear meshes. This means whatever load you put on it is directly supported by the small mesh contact patches. A more traditional system can have roller or ball bearing or bushing support.

There’s a very sizable number of low paying, dirty, dangerous, and/or boring jobs that we can’t find enough locals to do. Think farm hands, home care aides, meat processors, etc. Unskilled immigrants do those jobs because that’s what is available to them (I.e unskilled). If they weren’t doing those jobs, we’d have to pay significantly more for the goods and services that labor depends on. Immigrant labor is disinflationary or at least prevents or ameliorates it.

It seems like the killer apps for generative AI right now are:

1) Automating boring reading and writing tasks. Think marketing copy, recommendation letters, summarizing material, writing proposals, etc. LLMs are pretty good at this stuff but these are not many people's core job responsibilities (though they may take up a lot of their time). Consider it a productivity booster for the most part. Some entry level jobs will be eliminated, and this may create problems down the road as the pipeline of employees to oversee LLMs erodes.

2) Code writing tools a la Copilot for certain "boilerplate" code in commonly used languages. I think the impact is similar to (1) where entry level jobs erode and this may impact employee pipelines.

The core problem (as I see it) is that LLMs don't produce outputs good enough to be used without human oversight except on a small subset of tasks. So you end up needing humans (maybe fewer of them) to check the LLM output is headed in the right direction before you let it out into the world.

Consider voice interface LLMs for customer service. When will they get good enough to do the job with real money on the line? If your airline help desk keeps giving away free flights or on the flip side infuriating passengers by refusing allowed changes, can you really use it in production? My sense is they aren't good enough to replace the usual phone tree just yet.

When accuracy doesn't matter that much, LLMs will really shine because then they can be used without a human in the loop. Think some marketing/advertising and especially, especially propaganda.

I think the existing killer apps don't yet have enough money/savings in them to justify the spend. If generative AI technologies can get good enough on the accuracy front to remove humans from the loop in more contexts, we will be talking about much more dramatic value.