I've had some off-brand M12 batteries stop charging after a while - they make the charger flash an error. I haven't bought any aftermarket M18s.

If you're going to use it, just spend a few hours experimenting and get a feel for what it can and can't do reliably. It's capable of some amazing things, but it also has huge gaps.

I asked it yesterday if it could decode uuencoded text and gave it a sample. It said sure, and decoded it as "Hello world" which wasn't what it said at all. Base64-encoded text, though, it supports and can decode appropriately - but it was equally as confident in its ability to decode both formats.

If you really want to see it freak out a little, try Base64-encoding some directions for it. It'll process them, sort of, but goes very slowly and gets confused between whether it's supposed to be interpreting things or repeating them.

Weiner whale

You must have never experienced black walnuts. For those you'd preferably use a big bench-mounted cracker with compound leverage.

This should be required reading. The psychology was well known 170 years ago.

Heck, I experienced that myself in elementary school. Our school went through a number of weird bubbles. One was adhesive grip tape for skateboards. The few skaters in the school would use it to decorate their decks but somehow the entire school got in on colored grip tape speculation.

No one cared about the intrinsic value, as long as they thought they could turn a profit.

Because not all parts have this problem, and complex things like cars use a lot of different parts.

I still can't get the microcontrollers I need until at least summer of 2024. I'm having to port everything to whatever I can get.

Can confirm. I went to the Glastonbury festival over the summer and as soon as I posted something tagged with the location on IG I started getting pictures of drugs. Took me a second to realize it was advertising.

Oh, and the girl with the backpack full of chocolates up at the stone circle was handing out business cards with her IG along with her wares. Marketing is everything.

I don't know if it's still there, but there was a free payphone years ago (the no-pay phone) in an inconspicuous spot in the tiny town of Gerlach, Nevada and you could call anywhere in the world on it, back when that still kind of meant something.

Seems like an odd place to find it, but Gerlach is surprisingly connected for a remote desert town. It's the town closest to where Burning Man is held every year so thousands of tech types pass through and have a particular fondness for the area. Some have settled there, and lots of people have worked to bring solar power and internet to the NV 447 corridor.

If you've watched the movie Nomadland, the town of Empire where the main character starts out is a few miles away.

I found an estimate of 35 kJ to cook a steak, so at 50 kW theoretically 0.7 seconds. I'm not really equipped to test that but I think it wouldn't work out well in practice. I expect it'd just ablate the surface and not transfer as much energy as you want into the rest of the meat. If you could dial it down to 5 kW I'll bet it'd work.

Interesting, thanks! That's really impressive. If they could get it to a reasonable size, 0.1 bits/second still has real value for a use case like nuclear submarines when you just need to say "fire ze missiles" or "surface and establish a high-bandwidth connection".

If we ever get to that point, I suspect we'll already be building planet-scale megastructures and won't have any need to be boring holes through the Earth.

Because of the speed of light. In fiber optics it moves at something like 70% of the speed it does in a vacuum.

Maybe someday we can use neutrinos for communication and not worry about having the Earth in the way.

Short answer, no.

A quick Google search tells me that the lithostatic pressure in the lower mantle is something like 24 gigapascals, and the strongest high-performance concrete in the world can handle 1% of that.

And that's not even considering the temperature, which starts at around 1000 C.