I find it a lot more palatable if you assume it’s viewed from penny, as an unreliable narrator. There’s actually a lot more geeky stuff going on under the obvious, but she doesn’t notice it.

He’s not, it flows out of both ends as fast as he can produce it.

He’s a shit fountain.

That’s how AI systems should be used. A “heads up, something weird here” system.

I could also see it being used well like this for patient history analysis. Often a doctor is treating 1 symptom of something larger. They can’t see the wood for the trees. An LLM could pick out oddities and flag them. The doctor can then filter out the mistakes and hallucinations, but be alerted to rare or unusual conditions that match the patient’s symptoms and history.

Have you SEEN the price of pitchforks now?!? How the hell are peasants supposed to afford one?

If you figure it out, let me know. That sounds fun to play with.

It’s worth noting that this is talking about plug in solar, so would be at standard mains voltage.

1kw would be around 4A in Europe, but 8A in the USA. Also, since resistive losses scale with I^2 that’s 4x the heat dumped in the walls.

At least in the UK, they tend to run 3 phase to a road, but only a single phase goes into a given house. You need to get a special hook up to get 3 phase to a domestic premise, and they don’t like doing it.

I had a chat about this with a friend who works for the national grid (UK).

Apparently the problem is keeping the grid balanced and stable. Basically, the grid struggles to react fast, so they plan ahead. Things like large scale solar can provide predictions on output. Home solar can’t.

When clouds pass over an area it can cause slumps and surges in the local grid. The more home solar, the worse it gets. The current grid is designed to work top down, with predictable changes in demand. It needs upgrading to deal with large scale bidirectional flows.

The plug in units are (potentially) even more ropey. If used properly, they are no worse than normal home solar. Unfortunately, being cheaper, there are worries over the microinverters not shutting down. Either due to the manufacturer cheaping out, or turning on an “off grid” mode.

There are also worries about overloading household circuits. Back feeding bypasses the household circuit breakers and RCDs. They could overload wall wiring and cause fires, or stop an RCD tripping, allowing for a person to be shocked.

I don’t know how much this would apply to the American Grid, but I would imagine it would be worse. Your grid is older and larger. You also use 120VAC which makes the current overload issue a lot worse.

Older PCs couldn’t always boot from CD. In those cases, you needed a boot disk. It had just enough OS to get the cd drive working and allow for a full install. They also allowed for basic repair or maintenance tasks e.g. resizing the windows partition.

Veterans kept a couple about at home. Nothing like the catch 22. “I need a boot disk to fix my PC/I need my PC to make a boot disk.”

Combustion engines will likely have a place for a long time. Large equipment just doesn’t do well on battery power. They can’t get the required runtime. Also, in places where they are used, electrical power is often limited.

Hydrocarbons are an excellent way of storing energy. We will also need to overproduce renewables, to keep grids stable. Synthetic hydrocarbons could be a good solution to both issues. Currently, they are nowhere close to competing with fossil fuels, but that will change in time.

I fully agree. The only thing to add is that a lot of the economic issues are due to the type of reactors used. The new designs could be a lot more economical. Unfortunately they get buried under the same red tape as the old bomb factory designs.

I suspect we won’t see a lot of them used until after fusion power renders them redundant.

You would still have that issue when trying to inject commands into the fibre.

You also don’t need to target the fibre directly. Just sweep the area with enough focused power to burn one out.

Defocusing would be the biggest range limiter. You could likely get 100m+ with the right setup, and keep it drone mountable. Not ideal, but potentially viable.

I suspect it wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective. Torpedoes fill that roll already (at least mostly).

A shahed drone carrying a modified torpedo could be terrifying however. The drone gets into range quickly. The torpedo makes final approach. It would also be a lot quicker for Iran to develop and deploy.

Modern warships basically gave up on heavy armour. Instead they use manoeuvrability and suppressive fire. They are also intended to support each other in a fleet. A single warship, running close escort, loses all these advantages. It can’t outmanoeuvre an attack, and it lacks the firepower to suppress a heavy attack on its own. Iran would make a point to try and sink both the escort ship and its protected cargo ship.

In order to work, the American navy would have to run a full convoy. A far bigger logistical challenge.

The actual power to cut the fibre would be a lot lower than you think.

Assuming a 100um thick fibre, ant heating a 5cm length, it’s a volume mass of around 10e-7kg. That would take about 1.5J (not kJ) to melt.

The catch is whether you can find an efficient enough laser, that outputs at a frequency the glass is opaque to.

I used to play tournament level chess. I found leaning into this to be quite effective.

I was never very good with memorising opening gambits. I excelled in the mid and late game however. If I realised (or suspected) my opponent was playing a preplanned gambit, I would make a deliberately suboptimal move or 2. I might lose some positional advantage, or even a pawn or 2. I could generally make it up, once my opponent was kicked off their rails.

If it helps, a lot of these stories don’t go anywhere in the end.

CCTV cameras are a lot more accepted, but it’s not as extreme as the media often makes it out to be.

Likely true.

I can still hope that there are some people with a bit of integrity, willing to rattle the cages, when they can.

Remember that dB is a logarithmic scale. Each 10 is 10x bigger than the 1 before. We talk at around 60dB, so 10,000x quieter. We can hear from around -9dB to 90dB (into hearing damage territory) that’s a 10,000,000,000x range. If you allow for hearing damage, a gunshot is around 140dB. So add 5 extra zeros to that.

Human hearing is insane.

It’s easy to prove he shared the files. It’s harder to prove (legal proof) that he raped children. It’s akin to Al Capone being convicted of tax fraud.

I’m personally hoping it’s a “shake the tree” charge. By going after a royal, they will hopefully unnerve others with similar material in the files. They can then potentially use plea deals on those to go after the bigger fish.

Nuclear should be part of the solution. Unfortunately, most older plants are bomb factories, that happen to make power. No-one built the newer safe designs, till China got hold of the aborted UK designs.

At this point, most of the west doesn’t have the skilled personnel left to spin nuclear up quickly. We also no longer have the time to deal with building nuclear, as part of the near term solution to climate change.