To be fair, the dramatic nosedive in quality of GoT happened when they ran out of source material and had to wing it.

3-body problem is a finished trilogy, so it could all have the quality of the first seasons of GoT.

A dozen cosmere novels is what, four years of writing for him?

Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.

Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.

Although it’s been used for a fairly wide array of algorithms for decades. Everything from alpha-beta tree search to k-nearest-neighbors to decision forests to neural nets are considered AI.

Edit: The paper is called

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning and deep neural nets are buzzwordy these days, but neural nets have been an AI thing for decades and decades.

Suppose one year you spend $60k, but only earned $50k. You lost $10k.

The next year, you spend $57k, and earned $53k. You lost $4k, and your losses narrowed by $6k.

Disney+ lost 1.3 million subscribers in the final quarter of 2023 amid a hefty price hike that went into effect last fall, but managed to narrow its streaming business’ losses by $300 million during the October-December period.

That doesn’t really sound like it backfired to me. They lost subscribers but made more money.

The main problem is just that getting a product from a one-off in a lab to a cost-competitive mass-market product is hard and can take a lot of time, to say the least.

For example, Don Sadoway initially published about a molten metal battery in 2009. He gave a Ted talk in 2012. They’ve run into assorted setbacks along the way and are apparently just starting to deploy the first commercial test systems this year.

It’s less that these breakthroughs are bullshit, and more that commercializing these things is hard. The articles about the breakthroughs are often bullshit, though, or at least way too rosy.

If you’re worried about the cost, have you looked into getting it through your library? That’s how I did it.

Nope. The idea in no till is just adding stuff to the top and letting worms and roots handle the tilling.

I’ve had good luck just dumping a foot or two of finished compost on the ground and growing in it.

Another solid no-till approach is sheet mulching. You put down a layer of cardboard (to kill weeds), then layers of carbon and nitrogen like straw and kitchen scraps. Wait a few months, then plant. So you could do that in the late summer or fall to prepare a site for spring planting.

A lot of these things depend on location, though. Something that works great in Pennsylvania might not work as well in Utah.

Merriam Webster is a descriptive dictionary. They don’t tell you how words “should” be used, they say how words are used.

Using literally as an intensifier goes back literal centuries. The earliest written citation we’ve found of that usage goes back to 1769. It can be found everywhere from Dickens to Brontë.

It’s also hardly the first word to go on a similar path towards becoming an intensifier. Very originally meant “genuine”, really meant “in fact”, absolutely meant “completely”, etc.

But who complains about sentences like “I was really bored to death”, or “I was absolutely rooted to the ground”? Does saying “it’s very cold” just mean “it is a genuine fact that it is cold”?

Literally still means what it means. You can’t use literally to mean “yellow”, for example. People aren’t generally confused when they come across the word.

7 million is “retiring doctor” or “retiring Google engineer” rich.

It’s generally considered safe to withdraw 4% of your nest egg the first year, and adjust that for inflation moving forwards. $7 million can sustain a $280k/year retirement. That’s certainly rich, but there’s a world of difference between that and a billionaire. A billionaire can safely spend $40 million a year.

I’m not sure that it does. All the articles I can find word it as something like “has a range of 710 kilometers (441 miles) on a sunny day.”, without actually explaining it. I’m assuming that’s going from 100% charge to 0% charge, plus all the range gained by charging during the day.

They don’t actually say anywhere I can find how quickly it charges.

Also, looking up some other articles about it, apparently there’s a bunch of extra fold-out solar panels in the trunk

If you wanted maximum range, you’d start before dawn, drive most of your battery away, park somewhere all day to use that solar awning for all its worth, then continue driving at dusk.

It’s not that it’s far-fetched. It’s just impractical. Solar panels don’t really generate that much power per square foot. Charging a car with just the roof can take days.

One model of solar roofed electric car on the market recharges ~20 miles per day with the roof.

Charging stations are a way better idea for road trips in electric cars, as is plugging the car in overnight. This is great for a remote hermit, but more interesting for the hack value than a practical option.

They’re a bit more than that.

They’re convection ovens where the fan sounds like they’re trying to take off and they vent a ton of hot moist air out the back.

If you put broccoli tossed in a bit of oil in an air fryer and a convection oven, it’ll come out way crisper in the air fryer.

Fundamentally, yes.

Practically, things labeled “air fryer” make different tradeoffs than things labeled “convection ovens”.

In particular, air fryers have comparatively big fans, and vent way, way more air out the back to keep humidity down, so they make food much crispier than a convection oven does.

You don’t really have to.

You can just handwave public static void main, and only deal with primitives, then static functions, before introducing objects.

That’s what they did at my high school. It’s weird, and there’s much better ways and languages to introduce procedural programming, but it’s possible.

You can actually make your own American pretty easily with good cheddar, sodium citrate, and water. That’s how I usually make Mac and cheese. A+ would recommend picking some sodium citrate up on Amazon.

American cheese is one specific cheese made in America. It’s essentially cheese made into a cheese sauce, then chilled back into a block. There’s a number of quality levels of it based on how much they skimp on the cheese. And when eaten melted, it’s actually pretty decent, if mild.

Most grocery stores in the US have two cheese sections. There’s the cheap shredded/sliced cheeses, and then there’s a separate section with the fancier cheeses, both foreign and domestic.

Cheese in the US is weird. We make both Velveeta and Humboldt fog. An American cheese won the World Cheese Awards a few years ago, but most of the cheese eaten in America is cheap, mild, mass produced, pre-sliced/shredded semisoft cheese. Most of it isn’t “american cheese”, though.

How do private block chains protect against 51% attacks?

How do you ensure the accuracy of the data going into the block chain in the first place?