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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • While it’s true that EVs can be built with fewer moving parts in the drive system itself, and that companies could absolutely produce longer lasting vehicles if they focused on longevity, there are still a lot of parts of a vehicle that simply will not last beyond a certain point. The moving parts of an EV still cover everything in the suspension, wheels/brakes/steering, and a number of other components that are very costly to replace, not to mention the underlying frame/unibody of the vehicle itself being vulnerable to wear over time depending on the conditions it’s driven in. “The few moving parts that wear out” still covers a huge swath of a vehicle, even if you take the engine and transmission out of the equation.

    Well-built EVs with a focus on longevity and repairability could extend the lifespan of the average people mover by a great deal, but at the end of the day cars will by nature eventually reach a point where the cost to repair some major core component becomes too great to justify, outside of rare or collectable cases.





  • There are in fact a huge number of reliable counters to drones, including but not limited to anti-aircraft gun systems, anti-aircraft lasers, RF jamming devices (especially effective against cheap/makeshift drones), and several more. Drones are currently an emergent threat without a robust countermeasure scheme, but given their massive role in the Ukraine war that is not going to go unaddressed for long. From a purely mechanical standpoint, small drone munitions are also physically very vulnerable, making them readily destroyed by anti-air autocannon fire or even laser weapons if you assume RF jamming will not solve the problem.


  • There is a massive fundamental difference between having a person see your face in public, or even having a basic security camera record your face, and having a system recognize your biometric data and stalk you through every public environment with extreme precision.

    The general public should absolutely not accept the imposition of being expected to be followed through every public place by private corporate entities for undisclosed purposes. We can and should aggressively push government representatives to take strong regulatory action to outlaw this behavior and aggressively punish violations.

    Will making these efforts actually change matters? Maybe, maybe not. Will throwing your hands up and just assuming it’s impossible to change anything and that we should all just lay down and accept it as fact lead to the worst possible outcome? Absolutely.




  • This is something I think a lot of people don’t get about all the current ML hype. Even if you disregard all the other huge ethics issues surrounding sourcing training data, what does anybody think is going to happen if you take the modern web, a huge sea of extremist social media posts, SEO optimized scams and malware, and just general data toxic waste, and then train a model on it without rigorously pushing it away from being deranged? There’s a reason all the current AI chatbots have had countless hours of human moderation adjustment to make them remotely acceptable to deploy publicly, and even then there are plenty of infamous examples of them running off the rails and saying deranged things.

    Talking about an “uncensored” LLM basically just comes down to saying you’d like the unfiltered experience of a robot that will casually regurgitate all the worst parts of the internet at you, so unless you’re actively trying to produce a model to do illegal or unethical things I don’t quite see the point of contention or what “censorship” could actually mean in this context.