That wall isn’t structural. There’s a much thicker wall behind it; this is just a thin internal layer for running electric and mounting drywall.

Three year olds aren’t all that smart, but they learn in a way that ChatGTP 3 and ChatGPT 4 don’t.

A 3 year old will become a 30 year old eventually, but ChatGPT 3 just kinda stays ChatGPT3 forever. LLMs can be trained offline, but we don’t really know if that converges to some theoretical optimum at some point and how far away from the best possible LLM we are.

Exactly.

AI, as a term, was coined in the mid-50s by a computer scientist, John McCarthy. Yes, that John McCarthy, the one who invented LISP and helped develop Algol 60.

It’s been a marketing buzzword for generations, born out of the initial optimism that AI tasks would end up being pretty easy to figure out. AI has primarily referred to narrow AI for decades and decades.

One low hanging fruit thing that comes to mind is that LLMs are terrible at board games like chess, checkers or go.

ChatGPT is a giant cheater.

Keep in mind, though, AI progress is often more like punctuated equilibrium.

Each new approach gets you much further, and polishing each approach gets you slight improvements until the next approach comes along. Improvements to chatgpt might plateau until the next big breakthrough architecture. Or maybe not.

Levelized cost averages the fixed costs over the lifetime of the generation

They’re generally comparing utility scale installations, not home rooftop solar though.

Israel is adjacent to an incredibly strategic shipping location - the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal links the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean without having to go around Africa or around Siberia.

Israel isn’t strategically important because it has big oil reserves. It’s strategically important because it’s near a lot of important things. Oil and shipping play a bigger role than you’d think.

When was the last time you had mutton for dinner?

In 1884, how often would you be eating mutton?

Sure, just like the egg must have come before the chicken - you have to build the first iPhone factory before you sell the first iPhone.

How many Blackberry factories still operate? Palm pilot factories?

Capitalists market goods and create demand for them. But that demand requires people to buy their products.

Sheep production in the US peaked at 51 million head, back in 1884. Today, there’s only 5 million head of sheep. Consumer preferences absolutely impacts what farmers grow.

So that’s not a Palestinian Pogrom.

How so?

Notice the sentence right above that:

A pogrom[a] is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews.[1] The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement).

Arabs wouldn’t have called something like the 1929 Palestine riots a “pogrom” or a “riot”, because they didn’t speak English, French, Yiddish, or Russian. Things have different names in different languages. They call it the Thawrat al-Burāq.

In English, we might use either the more specific Russian loanword pogrom, or the more general French loanwords riot or massacre. Labeling something a riot doesn’t mean it has to have been done by the French, and labeling something a pogrom doesn’t mean it has to have been done by the Russians, even if that’s the origin of the loanword…

People lie about their age all the time. There’s been many elderly people with badly documented births who fudged the numbers and added a decade or five to their age.

Unless there’s good documentation, be skeptical of extreme longevity claims.

What exactly does it mean to be an apartheid state?

Apartheid was explicitly racialized discrimination. White citizens and black citizens had vastly different rights under the law. Black South African citizens, for example, couldn’t vote for parliamentary representatives by 1959.

Israel is different, in that most legal discrimination is on the basis of citizenship. Arab-Israeli citizens face a lot of private racism, but their legal rights are completely different vs Arabs in Palestine without Israeli citizenship.

The difference between Arab Israelis and people in Gaza isn’t racial, it’s whether they lived in Gaza or in what was partitioned into Israel, and if they fled during the 1948 war or not.

Israel’s regime is deeply problematic in many ways. Whether it’s aparthied or not seems mostly in how you generalize your definition of apartheid. If apartheid must be explicitly racialized discrimination against citizens, Israel is obviously not an apartheid state. If discriminating against non-citizens counts, Israel is an apartheid state.

Fundamentally, you can’t. The same as how a gas car can’t avoid a $5k transmission or engine replacement. Cars being totaled due to their most expensive part failing isn’t really a new thing or unexpected. Beaters are sold for scrap literally every day because it’s not worth repairing them.

All cars have a limited lifetime. For ICE cars, that’s on average around 12 years, and things often start going wrong around ~150k miles. You can get particularly well-maintained cars to last much longer, but most people don’t. Classic cars are mostly a hobbyist thing for a reason.

The question isn’t “will the battery eventually die”, its “will the battery last 15-20 years while still having 60-80% of its initial capacity?”

And based on real-world data, the answer appears to be “yes, unless you have a lemon or really abuse your battery.” Lemons are also nothing new.

The problem with FCEVs right now is cost.

First of all, we already have good electric distribution infrastructure, but don’t have an industrially-sized hydrogen distribution infrastructure. It’s way easier to install a new charging site than a new hydrogen refueling site. Building hydrogen out will be expensive, unless you’re talking about vehicles with a centralized depot, like busses or ferries.

Second, fuel cells aren’t really that efficient right now, and neither is electrolysis. Due to losses at each step, 100 miles worth of green hydrogen is way, way more expensive than 100 miles worth of electricity.

With more research, that could change. But for now, there’s a reason you don’t see many FCEVs.

Rain kills cars literally all the time when idiots drive them through flooded roads.

Gerrymandering isn’t a thing in Israel.

The knesset (Israel’s only lesgislative body) uses party-list proportional voting, using closed party lists and the d’hont method for apportioning seats.

Basically, each party publishes a list of candidates. As long as that party gets at least 3.25% of the vote, they’ll get a seat.

On the plus side, everyone has a voice. On the minus side, it’s not hard for the crazies to get a seat at the table and an outsized voice due to having to make a governing coalition.

The direct problem isn’t that the other side has a different religion, it’s that the other side essentially has competing land claims, and a competing nationalist vision.

Right.

But those nationalist visions aren’t entirely secular in origin. For both Hamas and religious zionists, they’re rooted in their religion.

This isn’t religiously motivated violence the same way that the Spanish Inquisition was. But religion is pretty deeply baked into the conflict, in some very important ways.

Misfires happen, but “rocket falls short of target on empty field” isn’t a news story; you’ll never hear about it. You’ll only hear about them when they result in tragedy.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-says-islamic-jihad-rocket-misfire-caused-gaza-hospital-blast/

Rockets occasionally misfire and don’t make it to their destination. Israel is claiming that’s what happened - that a Hamas rocket fell well short of its intended target.