OP, you have just spammed the same post to 9 communities. The document you posted is from year 2016. I should note that a few things have changed since them. Iran has massacred over 1000 protesters during the Mahsa Amini rebellion. Iran has supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Iran has had a war with Israel (but I can’t really blame them, since escalation was mutual). And most recently, Iran has massacred what’s likely several thousand protesters during the past few days.

I should note that Iranian people, all of them, also have plans. The US isn’t the only organization on Earth with ability to plan things, and attempt to fulfill their plans.

Some ayatollahs plan to keep ruling with an iron fist, killing thousands if needed. Some leftists joined them in revolution decades ago, but were surprised to see that the ayatollahs hijacked state. Those leftists used to blow the ayatollahs up (in scores) decades ago, but had to retreat out of the country. Some king used to rule before the revolution, and surprisingly some people think the king’s son might be a suitable person for a transition government. I notice that he seems intelligent, but I don’t think he’s suitable. He’s just their best known opposition figure currently…

…but of course, talk of a transition goverment is pie in the sky fantasy as long as 12.7 mm flies on streets.

The most pressing problem is that protesters have lost over 10 000 people as prisoners (likely to be excuted as “enemies of god”) and likely several thousand as dead, while the Basij and IRGC have lost less than 100 members.

The most pressing problem is that Iranian protesters aren’t armed, don’t have explosives, don’t have decent communications and most of them don’t know how to improvise weapons, explosives and communications. As a result, they’re getting slaughtered.

There is also a secondary problem. A US president promised to protect them, and it seems they believed him. They shouldn’t have. Even if he intends to do something, they’ll be dead by that time.

I would buy it. :)

Story: I drive a Mitsubishi electric car of generation 0 (MIEV). They have a typical error: a high voltage comparator on the motor controller breaks, stopping the car. The fix involves 1 resistor, and works (you just need dwarves with titanium hands to reach the correct part in less than a whole day). The resistor costs cents. Authorized representatives propose swapping in a 5000 euro motor controller (the remaining value of the car is about 1000 euros).

Easy maintenance is an absolute requirement.

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After thinking about this for a while… I can’t say I agree with that.

Sensors can fail. Some companies may even produce sub-standard sensors or faulty logic. I think it’s OK to tell people that copper and aluminum aren’t allowed on an induction top, and the makers of induction tops seem to think similarly, they just add a sentence “unless equipped with a magnetic base”.

Let’s take a manual of a randomly chosen induction cooker:

https://www.caple.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/C850I-Instruction-manual-May-2017.pdf

Let’s examine what it says:

Cookware made from the following materials is not suitable: pure stainless steel, aluminum or copper without a magnetic base, glass, wood, porcelain, ceramic, and earthenware

On one hand, an aluminum pot won’t heat. On the other hand, aluminum foil will melt, or if placed somewhat closer, catch fire. I think I should be allowed to claim that “aluminum is forbidden” on induction tops and add that “aluminum foil is extra forbidden”.

Will you kindly restore my post? People can downvote it if they don’t like my interpretation, but I don’t think it’s misinformation. It explains some things they might not even know about. I would be sad if people think that ferromagnetism is required for induction heating to happen.

Thanks for correcting.

There seems to be contradictory information on the subject.

Aluminum foil is proven to melt on induction cookers (see attached photo). But that’s because foil is thin.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foil_on_induction_cooktop.jpg

…as for thick aluminum cookware, or copper cookware, I was not implying that they would overheat themselves, I was implying that the induction cooker would overheat its coil attempting to work with them, because they conduct current better than the coil. But perhaps that’s prevented by protection circuits. I can’t test since I don’t have an induction cooker at home.

EM-fields induce current in copper and aluminum perfectly fine, no ferromagnetism is needed. These metals simply conduct the current very well, so no heat appears. Steel and cast iron, having considerable resistance, heats up in a similar field, conducting similar amounts of current.

As an added benefit besides the environmental ones - you can’t blow out a wall and collapse a house with careless use of an induction cooker. :)

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In the “smaller vehicles” part, great obstacles need to be overcome.

I would be content with doing only the parts that are reasonably economical and efficient:

• produce it, store it as a compressed gas
• if CO2 is available, convert it to methane (can be liquefied for distribution) or even bigger molecules
• if there is demand, use it to reduce steel
• if storage maxed (no CO2, no ore to reduce) burn it back to water in a turbine, selling electrical power when the market needs it

Economically, this would likely make ends meet - and keep hydrogen away from consumers (consumers are careless and their systems often faulty, while hydrogen is demanding and dangerous).

I would especially want to comment about:

Norway

A country that swims in oil, and has few other natural resources of comparable value, so indeed nearly all parties support using it.

What example will he bring next, Saudi Arabia?

That aside, Norway has a huge electric vehicle adoption rate. They will sell you oil, but have themselves almost stopped using it.

Chatbots have a built-in tendency for sycophancy - to affirm the user and sound supportive, at the cost of remaining truthful.

ChatGPT went through its sycophancy scandal recently and I would have hoped they’d have added weight to finding credible and factual sources, but apparently they haven’t.

To be honest, I’m rather surprised that Meta AI didn’t exhibit much sycophancy. Perhaps they’re simply somewhat behind the others in their customization curve - an language model can’t be sycophant if it can’t figure out the biases of its user or remember them until the relevant prompt.

Grok, being a creation of a company owned by Elon Musk, has quite predictably been “softened up” the most - to cater to the remaining user base of Twitter. I would expect the ability of Grok to present an unbiased and factual opinion degrade further in the future.

Overall, my rather limited personal experience with LLMs suggests that most language models will happily lie to you, unless you ask very carefully. They’re only language models, not reality models after all.

If you think of Kadyrov, he’s visibly very unwell. Watched a video of him condemning a Ukrainian drone strike recently. Barely keeps his eyes open and reads like a robot.

In the first 2 years, we waited for use of armoured vehicles to hit their monthly rate of production. This has largely happened, the reserves of armour that USSR built up have been spent by Russia. Vehicles that still stand in parking lots require deep renovation (slow and costly). So this prediction has largely come true.

In the first 3 years, we waited for Russia’s sovereign wealth fund to empty, ending Putin’s ability to shelter the economy against the cost of war. This now seems to have largely happened, as the central bank is selling reserves of gold. It follows that more appropriate things to sell are scarce.

We also waited for Russia’s inventory of civilian planes and railway locomotives + carriages to degrade due to lack of spare parts. This has not fully come true. Planes fly less, railways transport less, but they smuggle spare parts from third countries.

We have waited for Russia’s oil and gas revenues to fall, and they have fallen, considerably. At current levels, under Ukrainian “sanctions by drone”, Russia has to cut other budget lines to finance the war - and it has cut or frozen other budget lines (social security, health care, education, almost everything - war makes up approximately 40% of the government budget).

We have waited for the wages of soldiers to drop, and for soldiers to understand that inflation will make the money they got worthless. This has only partly happened - several regions have announced that they cannot pay large one-time compensations to people going to war.

We have waited for a crisis in Russia’s economy, and in some sectors there already is a crisis. Purchases of new cars, real estate and agricultural equipment have fallen sharply. Many companies have reduced work weeks (reduced pay), owe employees wages, or cannot service their debts.

If Putin overplays his hand and economy does collapse, this does not automatically mean his replacement. He’s a dictator and has a KGB background, he knows to expect rebellions and can supress them. He knows to expect a coup and may prevent one.

Eventually he’ll be replaced. We can’t influence or predict the personal characteristics of his successor, but whoever replaces him will very surely want to end the war, and doesn’t have to save face while doing that.

However, Levada’s polls - arguably the only polls which could indicate the real state of Russian society - do not indicate the ground shifting yet. They indicate that people are universally tired of the war, but not yet willing to end it by returning land to Ukraine.

For example, the “country is going in the right direction” indicator currently stands at 65%. Surfing on waves of war propaganda, it topped at 75% last year (rising from a low of 48% before the war - explains why Putin needed the war - to secure his own power), but it’s in a downward trend.

So, sadly, propaganda is still working, but it’s not working as well as it used to. In the “battle of the fridge and TV” (for people’s opinion) sadly the TV still prevails.

Interesting article, thank you.

A note about black carbon, however - it requires a carbon based fuel. This launch vehicle (and some others too) used H2 as its fuel. As a result, we can note emissions of zero for black carbon, alumina and chlorine.

The article has one more estimation error relative to this flight. They seem to have estimated 17.5% of the landing pod’s mass to burn up on re-entry. This is a reasonable estimate when re-entering from orbital flight (initial speed at least 7.8 km/s), but the flight in the news article was suborbital: a steep ascent to the Karman line (initial speed of re-entry: very low), followed by a ballistic fall.

As evidenced by photos of the capsule (also available in the news article), nearly none of its mass burnt away. It features no thermal protection tiles on the sides (there could be some under the bottom) and exhibits no visible signs of overheating or mass loss (even the painted text has remained readable).

So, while the article could be accurate in its analysis of solid-fueled and carbon-based launches and orbital re-entries, this flight differs considerably from the analyzed pattern. The capsule didn’t enter orbit, didn’t carry retrograde engines to initiate re-entry, as a result was lighter, and launchable using a relatively small rocket (19 m is really small for a passenger carrying rocket).

As a result, I think they caused very little harmful atmospheric emissions (I would consider water vapour harmless, thermal NOx harmful). Based on this, I would even speculate (based on intuition, no calculations) that during the flight (notes: not during the building of the spacecraft, not during spacecraft fuel production) less pollution was caused than an airliner burning aviation fuel emits over 500 km… maybe 1000 km.

It was just their energy bill that was huge.

Myself, I’m not so skeptical.

Yes, it’s a very expensive passtime. They burned H2 and O2, but used a lot of energy.

They had no practical purpose for going - only demonstrating that it’s safe. No experiments besides the flight itself, and it’s been demonstrated already that Blue Origin can fly and land. The added data point was just telemetry and small improvements, and the message that Blue Origin dares to fly VIPs.

I’m content to mostly ignore it, and note “there’s one more private space launch company out there”.

For greater traffic between Earth and space, things must change. The rocket stage that ascends out of the atmosphere would be better released from an extremely high-flying plane or airship. Chances of surviving accidents would increase. Required engine power levels would drop. This has been tried by Scaled Composites. Sadly their space programme was set back by deadly accidents unrelated to their architecture, losing 3 ground crew to an explosion and one pilot to a pilot error. :(

At a later time, instead of ascending out of atmosphere by burning carried fuel, one should seriously consider delivery of energy from Earth by laser (rocket as a solar concentrator, no looking out of windows) and maneuvering in orbit with the assistance of permanent space tugs utilizing highly efficient magnetic thrusters (orientation) and ion engines (propulsion). Probably ion engines that permanently sit in space and only get reaction mass and energy delivered to them regularly.

In the far end, if lots of cargo and lots of people must visit space, then a space elevator must be constructed. Materials that allow making one still don’t exist.

It would be a method of representing trust or distrust in a structured way that’s automatically accessible to the end user.

The user could right-click an image, pick “check trust” from a menu, and be presented with a list of metainfo to see who has originally signed it, and what various parties have concluded about it.

Negative proof: the AI company signs it with their watermark.

Positive proof: the photographer signs it with their personal key, providing a way to contact them. Sure, it could be a fake identity, but you can attempt to verify and conclude that.

Cumulative positive and negative proof: on top of the photographer, news organizations add their signatures and remarks (e.g. BBC: “we know and trust this person”, Guardian: “we verified the scene”, Reuters: “we tried to verify this photo, but the person could not be contacted”).

The photo, in the end, would not be just a bitmap, but a container file containing the bitmap (possibly with a steganographically embedded watermark) and various signatures granting or withdrawing trust.

or agreeing to tracking cookies.

Now that I think of it - yes. I agree to them, but my browser is configured to discard them on leaving.

The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall, it just shows an annoying message you can get past. At least my browser doesn’t prevent me from seeing the article, so I’ll copy the essence.

It was jurisdiction shopping by the oil company, trial errors by the court and manipulation of public opinion, third world oligarchy style. :(

• The jury – the most sacred due process protection available to a defendant – was patently biased in favor of the company. Seven of the 11 people seated had ties to the fossil fuel industry. Some had admitted they could not be fair, but the judge seated them anyway. There was no Native American or person of color on the jury even though issues of Indigenous rights were central to the trial.

• Morton county, where the trial was held and where many of the protests took place, voted 75% for Trump in the last election and has extensive ties to the fossil fuel industry. In a pre-trial survey, 97% of residents in the county said they could not be fair to Greenpeace. Yet the judge refused repeated requests by Greenpeace to move the case.

• Energy Transfer ran a major television and online advertising campaign in the county lauding itself in the weeks leading up to the trial. A newspaper called Central ND News, with articles critical of the protests, was also sent to county residents; Greenpeace believed Energy Transfer might have been responsible for it. But the court refused to allow Greenpeace to use court discovery procedures to determine how this unethical campaign to taint the jury pool happened.

• Adding to the absurdity, Greenpeace was blamed for the entire protest movement even though it played only a minimal role. The protests were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, on whose ancestral land the Dakota Access pipeline was being built. In fact, only six of the 100,000 people who came to the protests were from Greenpeace – yet Energy Transfer was able to convince the jury to hold the organization responsible for every dollar of supposed damages that occurred over seven months of protests.

• Secrecy pervaded the proceedings. The court repeatedly refused to open a live stream to the public or to create and release transcripts. A request by media organizations (including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times) to access the live stream was denied. Thousands of key documents were sealed and thus hidden from public scrutiny.

• The judge, James Gion, made evidentiary decisions that gutted Greenpeace’s ability to mount a defense. For example, a major expert report showed that the pipeline had leaked roughly 1m gallons of drilling fluids into drinking water sources used by millions of people. Greenpeace lawyers needed the document to debunk the argument that the pipeline was safe, but the judge refused to let the organization use it.

• The 35-page verdict form was confusing and the results seemed to prove the jury was in fact confused. It appears the exorbitant damages number was calculated by pulling numbers out of thin air – including millions for public relations expenses, private security costs, which were being paid anyway, and refinancing costs due to various banks withdrawing from the project once they learned about the protests. (Lobbying banks is also constitutionally protected advocacy.)

Interesting, but feels like abuse of the patent system (which is widespread) and feels pointless.

Personal experience: I drive the earliest highway-capable electric car, a MIEV from 2011. It has a “manual gear stick”. Gear B gives hard acceleration and hard regenerative braking. D gives medium. C gives slow acceleration and soft regenerative braking. In reality, there’s only one mechanical gear - the parking lock. All other “gears” including reverse are electronically implemented. As for why the letters are out of sequence, I don’t know.

I use B in summer and D in winter, because applying B on glass-flat ice can lead to skidding. I hear that people in mountainous places appreciate B when going downhill - constant deceleration with no touching of the brake pedal.

But something that’s been rinsed and repeated over the history shouldn’t be patentable any more.

The concept is new to me, so I’m a bit challenged to give an opinion. I will try however.

In some systems, software can be isolated from the real world in a nice sandbox with no unexpected inputs. If a clear way of expressing what one really wants is available, and more convenient than a programming language, I believe a well-trained and self-critical AI (capable of estimating its probability of success at a task) will be highly qualified to write that kind of software, and tell when things are doubtful.

The coder may not understand the code, though, which is something I find politically unacceptable. I don’t want a society where people don’t understand how their systems work.

It could even contain a logic bomb and nobody would know. Even the AI which wrote it may tomorrow fail to understand it, after the software has become sufficiently unique through customization. So, there’s a risk that the software lacks even a single qualified maintainer.

Meanwhile some software is mission critical - if it fails, something irreversible happens in the real world. This kind of software usually must be understood by several people. New people must be capable of coming to understand it through review. They must be able to predict its limitations, give specifications for each subsystem and build testing routines to detect introduction of errors.

Mission critical software typically has a close relationship with hardware. It typically has sensors coming from the real world and effectors changing the real world. Testing it resembles doing electronical and physical experiments. The system may have undescribed properties that an AI cannot be informed about. It may be impossible to code successfully without actually doing those experiments, finding out the limitations and quirks of hardware, and thus it may be impossible for an AI to build from a prompt.

I’m currently building a drone system and I’m up to my neck in undocumented hardware interactions, but even a heating controller will encounter some. I don’t think people will experience success in the near future with letting an AI build such systems for them. In principle it can. In principle, you can let an AI teach a robot dog to walk, and it will take only a few hours. But this will likely require giving it control of said robot dog, letting it run experiments and learn from outcomes. Which may take a week, while writing the code might have also taken a week. In the end, one code base will be maintainable, the other likely not.