AbsentBird

This article is about Gemini, not GPT. The generic term is LLM: Large Language Model.

Make the chips in Guadalajara, ship them out of Puerto Vallarta to Vancouver to power server farms in Surrey; cut the US out entirely.

Hell, use the waste heat to power hot water heaters or something. It blows my mind that we don’t do more cloud computing in cold environments. The servers produce heat, the people need heat, solve one problem with another. Instead we seem to be putting them in the driest and hottest climates available.

To each their own. Personally I can’t stand MS Office, I think Google Docs is easier for most nontechnical people these days anyway. For the rare cases when Office is needed, the web version works fine on Linux.

LibreOffice works great, and WPS Office is proprietary but at least it’s free.

Personally I write my documents in markdown and use pandoc to convert them into PDF or docx or whatever. It’s like writing the source code and then compiling, I like it.

I’m sure you’ve looked into all that, but for anyone else who is interested in alternatives those are my recommendations.

Pfft, proprietary propaganda. How hard is it to let go of every app you’re familiar with, learn half a dozen scripting languages, and memorize a hundred different commands in vim?

What you say is true, though I’ve become so jaded with Microsoft that I don’t think there’s any software or situation I’d use Windows for; I’d sooner switch to Mac.

What do you have against Linux?

A 3.5" cartridge slot with a hard drive reader in it sounds kinda awesome, not gonna lie.

They usually only use the horn at crossings. Automated trains are grade separated. The SkyTrain rolls through Vancouver all night and you can hardly hear it.

Trains are way easier to make self driving too, we’ve had autonomous trains since the 60s.

Most EVs don’t have transmissions, so at least that’s one less thing to worry about.

At first glance I was like ‘why is there a deep red state in the Midwest?’ then I remembered Indiana. I passed through Bloomington a while ago and it was sad, old punk graffiti covered up with big trump signs.

With math you can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed to enforce cryptographs in the past.

Did you read past the headline? They’re restoring add-ons banned by the Russian government, defying Russia.

The Fiat 500e’s battery weighs 295kg.

150km of range usually requires about 200kg of lithium ion batteries. More for larger vehicles.

What’s wrong with charging? At 350KW you can get 150km of range in 5 minutes.

There’s a couple thousand in China for Nio, but they haven’t really taken off anywhere else.

By contrast there’s over 1.8 million public EV chargers in China alone.

Batteries are heavy, which makes them hard to move and requires secure attachment to the vehicle. EV chargers have no moving parts and require much less maintenance.

Swappable batteries are a giant headache, charging is better.

Batteries are lasting longer and longer, LFP are already able to last 20 times as long as typical lithium ion, while using less cobalt.

Modern EV tech is still relatively new. It took combustion cars a long time to get to present day longevity and efficiency. EVs will catch up.

What about all the HD Zelda remakes?

You could say that about basically anything: it only takes one or two passionate people to [write a great novel, build a house, invent something new, prove a scientific theory, advance the field of mathematics] in a matter of weeks.

Those are rare and impressive exceptions, it’s not so simple in practice. The Mythical Man Month has some good insight on this. Big projects cost big money, and don’t necessarily get the job done faster.

Yes

The cost of hiring a team of programmers the size of a large class can easily cost millions of dollars. There’s a long history of school projects accomplishing things in computer science that would have cost millions. Look at BSD for example.