Odd? Redwood is already claiming 96% So an explanation as to why this is somehow relevant is indicated.

Maybe they are exploring a different pathway with a different cost/payoff matrix?

Not even that old..not that bright either.

Chatbots are a scam. look up eliza code and tell me there is a meaningful increase in 'intelligence'.

What a load of BS! I wish it was true but it isn't.

As a bit of background I've been waiting for 'auto chef' for about a decade.

Chef is the fancy word for cook. They go to school for it. and they can all take a standard recipe, standard ingredients, and produce standard results. The chefs of the star and superstar variety invent new recipes. There are a few dozen of the hyperstar variety who become world famous, the regular stars of the day who run 'starred' restaurants, and billions of everyday cooks (us, our mothers, and the folks running diners and food carts the world over).

Inventing recipes is dead easy: if you don't believe google meatloaf recipe and some 26 million people will disagree. If that doesn't convince you then expand your definition of meatloaf to include hamburgers (personal meatloaf?) and another 234 million, mostly distinct!, people disagree.

Cooking itself is not difficult. Learn to use the knife! That means learning how to chop veggies. Yeah when the recipe calls for julienned carrot you need to learn what that means and how to produce it from a raw carrot. You also need to learn how to carve up various pieces of meats. This part of cooking is basically prep work: get your ingredients to the stage that they are ready to be cooked. This is mise en place. Think of being at the counter ordering a pizza and watching them make it: a bit a flour, a dough ball, lots of technique and voila a naked pie! the sauce is premade, the ingredients pre sliced and diced and the pie gets tossed into the oven.

Watch it over and over again. There is nothing hard to pie making*! You can see it! Still the pizza maker is reasonably well paid and the automation crowd can't make a bot to perform this 'simple' job.

I picked pizza because it is so 'easy' to automate not to mention being absolutely delish. The pizza guy is stretching the dough and assembling the ingredients requested by the customer. The oven is at a constant temperature...and still I keep track of who is working at my favorite pizzerias.

Think about it. The dough gets made in an industrial sized food processor: automation require? add ingredients and hit start button. The sauce is canned. Slicing and dicing ingredients is a no brainer. If we can't automate that then there is something seriously wrong with our expectations.

Same thing when I hit a sandwich shop. Doesn't matter if it's a burgher, a dog, a ham and cheese on rye, or a really nice deli sandwich. People assemble them for me, not bots! Even kids can make sandwiches but it is beyond the capabilities of bots? Give me an 'effing break!

*Pizza pies only. making a proper crust for meat or dessert pies is specialist work..

Meta Rule 1: Don't be an a**hole.

Chatbot: I don't know how. Show me times in your life when you weren't being an a**hole. I will learn from those examples.

Chatbot: Still waiting for training samples...

Sodium is an interesting battery chemistry. First, we are never going to run out of salt, second it is highly recyclable, and third it cheap. Cheap as salt!

I love the A00 designation, it is basically the Wuling MINI EV class of vehicle: top speed 60 MPH, range 100 miles, efficiency 8 miles/kWh...blah, blah, blah! It is roughly the same class of vehicle as a 1960 VW Beetle.

The point I wish to make is that 200 kg of sodium batteries gives a good range, for a light weight vehicle that should stick to city driving, and perhaps the secondary road systems for visits to the 'country'.

A secondary point is to consider hybrid battery packs: sodium ion for range and lithium ion for oomph!, highway driving benefits from 'passing power' after all.

My driving needs could be met with a $5K Wuling MINI EV, something like the GM Bolt EV is overkill for my situation but I predict it will be a best seller as long as Treasury doesn't kill the tax credit.

I'm not sure about the actual numbers but something like the Wuling MINI and the GM Bolt twins should satisfy about 70-80% of the market. Can you imagine the demand for used Bolts when the $4K used tax cred kicks in?

The transition is getting very interesting very fast.

Do a bit of research. This is just wrong: "One is the idea around how life as we know it evolved from viruses to us through a process I’ve nicknamed Organic Intelligent Design."

Think about it: viruses have no ability to reproduce without hijacking a cell's machinery. So viruses logically come later than cells.

Unfortunately thinking about things leads to us killing off about 99% of the ideas that occur to. Of the ones you can't personally kill, reddit will do the job for about 99.999% of the rest.

The ideas that do survive are not really worth all that much: google meat loaf recipe and you get 25 million+ hits, creating a 'new recipe' won't exactly add much to the conversation.

But we do get oddball ideas that don't want to die. Like FTL flight. Impossible according to relativity, mathematical loophole allows for negative energy. If that turns out to have physical significance who knows what we might end up with? I get annoyed when people on futurology play around with that type of idea without explaining which physical laws, as we currently understand them, are being abused but I know that interesting stuff may be hidden in those unkillable ideas so I rant away and keep reading.

That being said some ideas don't belong here. Like this one: lithium from seawater; EVs and battery storage demand will cause the price of lithium to go through the roof; it takes years to start a new mine...blah,blah,blah. We can obtain lithium from brine (one currently used method); brine is just condensed sea water; some places need fresh water so set up a brine making shop using solar and wind power and sell the evaporate i.e. fresh water.

Sounds like a decent idea, for the here and now but there isn't any 'futurology' to it.

Can we remember that globalization is the result of increased international trade which itself was the search for cheaper wages (higher profits)?

I like the good bits of globalization and I don't like the bad bits. So let's keep the good bits and trash the rest.

First the big trend today is localism. It starts with rooftop solar and doesn't stretch very far out of town. Fairly soon all the power feeding cities will come from about 100 miles from city center. That is 100% generation, storage, and consumption is local. All that money stays in the local economy sparking economic growth.

My city (Toronto) is surrounded by local farming aimed at keeping us feed with good seasonal produce, local dairy, and regional meats, and poultry. Pretty soon vertical farms will start displacing all that produce imported from across the continent. Lab grown protein from stem cells will displace all imported meats except for the high end foodie bits.

When we toss in wide spread 3D printing we run into the 'make it where you use it' meme. You just download the file and print what you want where you want it. Since good atoms are forever you just need good recycling to keep making new stuff and unmaking old stuff.

The end result, as I see it, is a return to something like the Hanseatic League mixed up other city state eras. We have already seen that large cities have more in common with each other than with the countries they find themselves in.

New Delhi time at the Indian Lunar base, Beijing time at the China base, and Washington time at the US base.

DUH? Or what? Political theater.

Not to be overly critical but this thing just bent the needle on my BS meter!

Folks, take a good look at 3D printing. We can 3D print metals, ceramics, and stone!

Yes! 3D print Lunar habitats out of Lunar materials! Martian habitats out of Martian materials!

Growing mushrooms is neat. Growing them in space is neat. So why all the BS about them being anything more than a pizza topping?

1177 is interesting. It is also near the beginning of the Iron Age and all those mythical magical gift from the gods weapons sound like meteoric iron to me.

Renewable energy seems to be highly local, started with roof top solar in some places. If you can make your power locally your local economy benefits. Then we get vertical farms that will eventually feed everyone on the planet, and in space. Then we toss in 3D printing so that most stuff gets made locally...

I see a return to city states being the dominant political/economic entities for a while.

At least! I just read that what passes as the Wyoming 'brain thrust' just introduced a bill to ban EV sales by 2035!

That's the annual rate for 2022. In December Germany hit 55.4% plugin sales.

Consider localization and fair trade.

Localization refers to, at least at first, to energy generation and consumption. No more oil producers and oil importers. Got a country? Buy solar panels and windmills and grow your own. No more parasites like OPEC sucking the lifeblood out of economies.

Next comes fair trade. I like Tesla's idea of making cars where you sell them. That provides good jobs in those markets. It remind me of Henry Ford paying good wages so his employees could afford to buy what they made!

We are starting to see the emergence of a system of distributing jobs fairly across economies. Consider the US IRA bill: make the vehicle in USMCA and get half the credits, use batteries made here and get full credits. The EU is doing the same.

I imagine that in 2-3 the system will look like this: BMW makes cars at its US factory, half the credit; BMW buys made in USMCA batteries and gets 100% credits. Expect for ultra high end stuff that uses 'super special batteries only made in one tiny Bavarian factory' which wouldn't qualify for credits anyway.

So good jobs get spread around. Everyone wins.

I have argued the same for a couple of years.

The mass media being owned and operated by the folks who also own and operate fossil fuels has been busy lying about the pace of the transition for years.

The BS dies in 2023. Germany's EV penetration rate went from 0.3% in 2013 to 3% in 2019, to 30% in 2022. So extrapolating we get 300% in the middle of 2024! That's silly of course but not nearly as silly as politicians* telling us that ICE vehicles will still be 50% of car sales in 2035! That is brain damage level dumb.

The transition just kicked into high gear and there are going be some very chaotic episodes. I call this phase the Jack, be nimble! time.

*guess who owns and operates politicians...

and the cows are arguably twice as smart as the people...

The code quality sucks! It sucks less now than then but decades to go yet.

I like the verbal interface in ST:NG not essentially more complicated than nested menus but the brain processes speech and video faster than text.

The problem is that no one has figured out creativity as an algorithm. Programming isn't going away any time soon.

Absolutely and obviously NO!

OK, maybe not so obvious to some. But not too complicated to learn either. The trick is separate economics, technology, and politics.

The economic/politics starts with Karl Marx and his prediction that capitalism self-destructs. The mechanism is simple: labor costs are a cost; Duh? Absolutely! but important; costs are to minimized if profits are to be maximized; hence labor is to eliminated.

But you say (or rather Marx said): 'Labor income is the sole support of the general economy. No income, no spending, no profit, no economy; sure says the capitalist but that's way down the road, after I get my slice!

In a socialist or communist system profit is just one variable out of many. From a political point of view it should be slightly above zero but not by much. What is important is having jobs and careers for people. It gives us both a sense of purpose and something to do (idle hands and all that stuff).

It isn't AI or automation taking jobs away, it is capitalism. So let's get rid of that broken economic system.

I compare it to skill acquisition. Learning to tie shoelaces is hard. Then it's so easy to do that those who haven't learned yet get mocked.

Learning to ride a bike is hard. Riding a bike is dead easy.

Checkers was simple, BUT Chess? Never! Chess was harder than checkers but not all that hard. Go is a totally different class of game which AI will never master...

Look up Piet Mondrian. Generally considered an artist. Got copied by computers back in the 1960's. Got copied well enough to fool experts.

So, if there is a Turing test for art, it got passed nearly 60 years ago.

The term Artificial Intelligence, we understand artificial it just means man-made. When it comes to intelligence we are out of luck. We can't sit down and give a cogent explanation of what it is. That's is pretty damn weird! Think about it for a minute. We recognize intelligence easily enough, we all have friends who need to work harder than we do to 'get' stuff and we all know some folks who make us look slow on the up-take.

One argument I make is that if we don't know what Natural Intelligence actually is, then everything we say about AI is more than likely BS! How likely is it that random crap is correct?

I can't define intelligence better than anyone else but since I can, like all of us, identify it then I pick mathematics as a stand-in for intelligence. Why math? Because it is the only unbroken line of development of intellectual history available as far as I know. Our first written math comes Mesopotamia and Egypt from 2,000 BC. 4,000 years of hard fought progress. Earlier stuff is lost to us but we know that math and art started roughly at the same time: Rock paintings of hunting scenes and bones with notches that may be counting sticks, or not. What is assumed to be a five count, four uprights and a diagonal, could just as easily be a pictograph of a hand holding a spear.

We spend 12 years in school to learn 4,000+ years of research. Just the very basics, nothing later than 1800 or so. Essentially just one long survey course. Higher education beckons and we learn some things in depth. Some even add another brick to the pile.

The takeaway is than 1980's AI pet Expert Systems were essentially a Rube Goldberg version of 20+ questions. Today's version is sophisticated pattern matching. Both are likely threads in what make up the tapestry of intelligence. That is just raw materials. Then we have to consider the machinery. And finally the 'ghost in the machine', the weaver.

AI turns 75 in two years. It will get a hell of a lot older before it gets 'intelligent'.

plugins is shorthand for BEV + PHEV, with the understanding that PHEV is morphing into BEV. It specifically excludes ICE, hydrogen fuel cells and any 'other' tech.

As to media manipulation take a look at this chart by Auke Hoekstra in the article at: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/07/12/has-the-international-energy-agency-finally-improved-at-forecasting-solar-growth/

Anyone that incompetent would have been fired after the second prediction. Since they never did that, the lying is intentional.

Different tech but same pattern. Plugins hit 0.3% of the global light vehicle market in 2013, they hit 3% in 2019. That's an order of magnitude growth in 6 years. In 2022 they hit 30%, another order of magnitude in just 3 years. And yet most articles talk about EVs hitting 50% in 2035!

US grid solar capacity is at 77 GW and FERC reports another 72 GW are being added in the next year to 18 months, with another 130 GW for the following 18 months. That puts solar at 25% of the US grid capacity by the end of 2026

The EU restarted its solar deployments to avoid Russian energy. And China has been solar's poster child for years.

I expect that the people who own all the assets that are soon to be stranded are in a state of denial and since they control the media people are being mislead.

And the locals are expert at picking exactly the right potato for the purpose.

First year allotment garden mistake, planting zucchini. Put in 2 plants and found out I didn't have as many friends as I had thought. It should be classified as an invasive weed species.

Potatoes on the other hand are fun to grow and eat! A 5 gallon container will grow a lot of spuds, if you have the room you can grow mini potatoes all season long.

Got something against frying?

Tell the seller what you want to use the potatoes for. He/she will steer you to an appropriate variety.

It is like talking to the butcher. You may have a copy of Julia Child's cookbook but the meat today is different than in her day. the cooking times NEED TO BE adjusted.