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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of personal computing device would fit in these power envelope.

    I dunno if this is what I want, but I like the idea anyway. ESP32 is like 500mW class or so (very rough estimate because I don’t care to look it up right now lol). So you can get more than 24-hours of processing with 4x AA cells or 18650 Li-ion.

    I feel like there’s something ‘under’ the classic smartphone that might still be useful as a personal gadget. But alas, smartphones are an always in your pocket device today. Bluetooth keyboard + Phone would be a more practical note taking application.


    Maybe this same thing, but instead as a minimalistic SSH shell for computer IT tasks? I like the design of this things keyboard at least.





  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8

    Anti-air guns are the countermeasure. RADAR good enough to detect drones + an aimbot and programmable air-burst round to “shotgun” your pellets to damage those soft plastic bits.

    We’re going back to WW2 tech. AA guns were considered obsolete because Helicopters + Missiles had more range. But now we need to build cheaper AA Guns for the anti-drone role.

    AA Guns are also useful vs infantry, so in an infantry vs infantry fight, having an AA Gun platform will be useful even without any drones around. Airburst and rapid fire is always useful, and I expect the computers that make RADAR possible will be far cheaper today than decades past.



  • 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.


  • 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.




  • 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.

    1. No storage can hold that. Its likely a computer generated system.

    2. 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.




  • 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.