No mention of Agriculture, Whitworths 3 plate method of making flat surfaces, The screw cutting lathe, The Micrometer, Gage blocks, Ford's mass production, the Haber-Bosch process for producing Ammonia.
Technologies are also the result of intellect applied to practical problems, and also deserve recognition as achievements.
If all laws were written by the engineers I know, they'd contain loopholes so they could do whatever they want.
* Houses must follow building code, except for subparagraph C part II.
* Vehicles must obey speed limits, except for subparagraph C part II.
…
* Somewhere buried in subparagraph C part II: Any owner, occupier, or user of property, real or physical, can file a writ of "I don't want to" with the county, which shall be automatically accepted, exempting said owner, occupier, or user from regulations.
I don't know how anyone can sleep normally knowing this madman has sole authority over the second largest nuclear weapons stockpile on the planet. It usually takes me until 5am.
I've stocked up on Potassium Iodide tablets for the child to avoid cancer after the nukes fly. I don't think we'll be hit soon in the US, but it's getting a lot more likely.
Potassium iodide is not going to help you much in the event of a nuclear war.
It's only really useful for nuclear accidents where the primary radioisotope release is I-131. It's not a magical radiation protection shield (for example against Cs-137 or Sr-90 released as a result of nuclear weapons).
Adding to this KI wont keep anything out of the other organs. People not in sealed bunkers will air filtration systems will get acute radiation sickness and eventually cancer either way. Intentionally leaving out the extra morbid details.
Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens. - Epictetus
As someone who also thinks about the world a lot, I know it is easier said than done. But it helps to mentally separate the things that you can control and the things you cannot control. Then try to accept the things that you can't control.
You cannot directly control Trump or the US army. You can protest, go on strike, boycott, call your congressman/senator, love your neighbor, be there for your kids.
Likewise. Trump 1 caused my long term sleeping disorder to re-appear and Trump 2 is having me wonder why I thought it was a great idea to have kids. It is complete insanity that someone like this should be holding the Presidency of the USA.
There’s an urge down there in the modern people secretly hoping for the destruction the civilization. Get out of the current systems that dictate a life for you. I suspect that’s why very few people are panicking, a lot of people are rooting for it to happen.
It’s not a rational thought, it’s an urge. Besides, people naturally believe that they will survive and the bad things won’t happen to them. That’s how people do stupid things all the time.
I believe all the AI providers are reaching capacity limits, and they want to preserve their margin for customers paying by the token, instead of monthly plans(which are effectively subsidize advertising).
The basic problem is easy to grasp, like the mess with charging cords for laptops before it, every large power transformer is a custom design. The fix would be to standardize on a much smaller number of options, and parallel them for the desired loads.
Think of it as analogous to USB-C power, on the megawatt/gigawatt scale. ;-)
People already parallel transformers. That's nothing new but it's usually undesirable because the extra ancillary equipment costs make paralleling more expensive than having a single transformer of equivalent rating if you are building it all at once.
But even fairly small standard specification distribution transformers are custom designs or very short runs. It's not economical to make the same design year after year because the relative prices of copper and core steel vary over time. A design made last year can be uneconomical to make this year because last year copper was relatively cheap so the designer used a lighter core and more copper to achieve the required efficiency. But if this year the copper price has gone up while the core steel price has gone down it would cost more to make the same design while the same specification could be achieved for a lower material cost by making a new design.
The new design is not a new type and for distribution transformers the effort required to design it is of the order of a man hour or two, far less than the difference in material costs.
For very large transformers (megavolt HVDC for instance) the situation is somewhat different and the design can take a very long time. But the opportunities for standardisation are relatively small because the quantity of units in the market is small and the manufacturers and regulators are always chasing ever greater efficiencies.
A far as specifications go there is already quite a lot of standardisation. But standards evolve over time and transformers can last for over half a century so you inevitably end up with a mixture of device types
Also, if one of your paralleled large power transformers fails you can't just buy an off the shelf replacement because no one keeps a stock of items that cost a million dollars each.
Switching to USB-C was trivial because most of the devices involved are essentially consumables with lifetimes measured in handfuls of years ad often much less so the old stuff withers away rapidly. That is not the case with large capital projects such as national electrical networks
If they are to be interchangeable while also being paralleled they have to have very nearly exactly the same reactance or they won't share power evenly and there will be circulating currents between the transformers wasting energy.
Keeping a stock of million dollar items in case one fails once in fifty years is pretty poor use of capital. By the time you get to use it the standards will have changed. And how many different transformers will you keep in stock> You can't reasonably use 500 MVA transformers everywhere, some places only need a 250 MVA unit and might not have space for anything larger. Which voltages will you choose and what will you do with your 500 kV transformer when the backbone gets upgraded to 650 kV or 750 kV or 1 MV?
Do you think that the people who run electricity distribution systems don't think of these things?
>everything to do with gold more than doubling in price in a year.
Gold's price doesn't change, it's 42 2/9 US Dollar per fine troy ounce[1], and has been since 1973.
The problem is that this exchange rate hasn't been enforced, or adjusted since then. This allows the spot price to set the effective price of the dollar in a reciprocal arraignment.
Since, the "Gold Window" was closed by executive order, I posit that, In theory, Donald Trump could get a bunch of conspirators together, with 10.4 Billion in cash (the "Book Value" of the US Gold Reserves), and direct the Secretary of the Treasury to re-open the gold window, in private, and drain the US reserves, personally.
Edit: Nope... the law changed, thank goodness.
If the US somehow re-anchored the Dollar to Gold, the deflationary collapse would crush the economy everywhere, instantly, as all dollars outstanding would increase in real value by a factor of >100, and all debts would crush most people, companies, and economies.
So, realistically, if we wanted to re-anchor the dollar, the new value would have to be greater than the current spot price. To fully back all dollars outstanding, it would be somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 US Dollars per fine ounce.
I had previously expected this to happen a generation from now, but thanks to the complete collapse of institutional memory, and the current administration, I now expect it to happen before the end of the next administration.
It's important to note that electricity is 21% of the World's energy demand, according to the IEA[1]. This implies that if we could 10x solar, and figure out how to convert some of that to liquid fuels with decent efficiency, we could become sustainable for all energy.
For example, you're counting all the energy in the gasoline that gets loaded into a car, not the useful work that the gasoline actually produces. Gasoline gars typically are only able to convert 20-30% of their fuel into propulsion.
Counting the energy in the fuel loaded into engines is like counting the amount of energy in the sunlight hitting a solar panel.
Similar things go for heating by the way. A modern heat pump often has a coefficient of performance of around 3x, meaning that for every joule of electricity you put into the pump, you can heat up a house with 3 joules of heat, so 3x as efficient as heating the house with combustion.
I don't see why anyone would balk at the idea of using backwards compatible fuel sources, synthesized using a sustainable process powered by solar energy.
Replacing ALL of the liquid fueled devices in the world impractical, to the point of absurdity, to do. Where would we get electric versions of the Emma Mærsk[1] and her sister ships in a reasonable timeframe? Where would all the infrastructure come from to build out the grid to handle the charging load? Where are the ports with that kind of power capability coming from?
What about the world's aviation? There are no viable ways to do air transport on a large scale using battery power.
The world is optimized for liquid fuels, it would make far more sense to synthesize them from low cost solar power during the day, and accumulate the quantities required, rather than rip and replace every single industrial engine on the planet.
2/3rds of that other 79% is wasted as unwanted heat, so we only need to replace 1/3rd of 79% (~26 percent points) so slightly more than double the current clean energy supply.
An extensive explanation of this "primary energy fallacy":
I updated Ollama (again) and changed my windows swap file settings to use up to 200 Gb of C: (an SSD). On the largest model (gemma4:31b), I seem to be getting about 5 tokens per second. This is amazing to me, because I'm using a $100 computer, without any fancy GPU. I love watching it "think".
Consider this is thousands of times faster than any written conversations in the past. Those involved pieces of paper being transported, read, considered, replies written, then transported back.
If it'll write code that doesn't completely suck, I think even this is good enough. What do you consider the lowest acceptable rate of generating tokens/second?
I think it depends on the kind of answer and how long the round trip is. Even a fast model that waffles for several minutes before giving an actual answer (coughqwen3.5cough) can feel very slow. Few seconds per word output may be fine if the final answer is correct and short.
But generally, I'd like to see above 20, >50 is mostly great, and more is better. For conversational response, that is, not batch or interactive loop.
Under 15 is too slow for conversation personally. I guess 5 tokens per second is nice if you're one of the people who likes letting coding agents run overnight
Technologies are also the result of intellect applied to practical problems, and also deserve recognition as achievements.
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