Full self driving should only be implemented when the system is good enough to completely take over all driving functions. It should only be available in vehicles without steering wheels. The Tesla solution of having “self driving” but relying on the copout of requiring constant user attention and feedback is ridiculous. Only when a system is truly capable of self-driving 100% autonomously, at a level statistically far better than a human, should any kind of self-driving be allowed on the road. Systems like Tesla’s FSD officially require you to always be ready to intervene at a moment’s notice. They know their system isn’t ready for independent use yet, so they require that manual input. But of course this encourages disengaged driving; no one actually pays attention to the road like they should, able to intervene at a moment’s notice. Tesla’s FSD imitates true self-driving, but it pawns off the liability do drivers by requiring them to pay attention at all times. This should be illegal. Beyond merely lane-assistance technology, no self-driving tech should be allowed except in vehicles without steering wheels. If your AI can’t truly perform better than a human, it’s better for humans to be the only ones actively driving the vehicle.

This also solves the civil liability problem. Tesla’s current system has a dubious liability structure designed to pawn liability off to the driver. But if there isn’t even a steering wheel in the car, then the liability must fall entirely on the vehicle manufacturer. They are after all 100% responsible for the algorithm that controls the vehicle, and you should ultimately have legal liability for the algorithms you create. Is your company not confident enough in its self-driving tech to assume full legal liability for the actions of your vehicles? No? Then your tech isn’t good enough yet. There can be a process for car companies to subcontract out the payment of legal claims against the company. They can hire State Farm or whoever to handle insurance claims against them. But ultimately, legal liability will fall on the company.

This also avoids criminal liability. If you only allow full self-driving in vehicles without steering wheels, there is zero doubt about who is control of the car. There isn’t a driver anymore, only passengers. Even if you’re a person sitting in the seat that would normally be a driver’s seat, it doesn’t matter. You are just a passenger legally. You can be as tired, distracted, drunk, or high as you like, you’re not getting any criminal liability for driving the vehicle. There is such a clear bright line - there is literally no steering wheel - that it is absolutely undeniable that you have zero control over the vehicle.

This actually would work under the same theory of existing drunk-driving law. People can get ticketed for drunk driving for sleeping in their cars. Even if the cops never see you driving, you can get charged for drunk driving if they find you in a position where you could drunk drive. So if you have your keys on you while sleeping drunk in a parked car, you can get charged with DD. But not having a steering wheel at all would be the equivalent of not having the keys to a vehicle - you are literally incapable of operating it. And if you are not capable of operating it, you cannot be criminally liable for any crime relating to its operation.

In many cities, nighttime noise level is limited by decibel level. But even low-level noise is allowed if below some level. So you could have some extremely quiet speakers gently wafting spooky sounds while you do this. Or if that’s a bridge too far, whose to say you don’t personally just like listening to Gregorian chants and quiet levels while you work?

Life pro tip for those nocturnal. Even those nocturnal folks need to mow their lawns. For modestly sized lawns, a scythe can be a great option! It’s also perfectly legal to mow your lawn with a scythe at three in the morning, dressed in a long black hooded robe.

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

I think we should indict Sam Altman on two sets of charges:

1. A set of securities fraud charges.

2. 8 billion counts of criminal reckless endangerment.

He’s out on podcasts constantly saying the OpenAI is near superintelligent AGI and that there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to control it, and that human survival is at risk. How is gambling with human extinction not a massive act of planetary-scale criminal reckless endangerment?

So either he is putting the entire planet at risk, or he is lying through his teeth about how far along OpenAI is. If he’s telling the truth, he’s endangering us all. If he’s lying, then he’s committing securities fraud in an attempt to defraud shareholders. Either way, he should be in prison. I say we indict him for both simultaneously and let the courts sort it out.

I too am disturbed by the noted decline in Austin Powers references among high school students.

Letting cars into cities was a mistake from the beginning. Cars should be required to park on parking lots or garages at the edge of the city. The only large motorized vehicles allowed within cities should be trains, buses driven by professional drivers, and delivery vehicles limited by governors to the speed of a bicycle. The only forms of motorized personal transit allowed should be e-bikes and scooters that can travel no faster than a human-powered bicycle is capable of traveling. Cars should be used only for getting between towns and cities, not for traveling within them.

I think those just need to move to have their own independent sites instead of basing their operations on social media. Ultimately what they’re doing is entirely legal, but it’s way too easy for some asshat billionaire to pull some strings to get them pulled from a platform.

Well, first, I’m not a guy. But two, if anyone ever makes a comment like that, I just say, "look…my work involves cutting, grinding, smashing, burning, and straining wood specimens until they break and buckle. If you really want to associate that with certain body parts, be my guest. But…it sounds quite painful.*

The solution is to subscribe to these services. Then create a website that offers real-time tracking information, freely to the public, of the most wealthy and powerful people in the country. Every Congressperson should have their location shown freely available to all in real time. You could call it “wheresmyrep.org” or similar. Literally all of them tracked like animals in real time, freely shown for any and all to see. Let them live in the fish bowl they’ve created for us all.

The key is that, watt for watt, new solar right now costs about a quarter what new fission does. The cost difference has gotten that ridiculous. There are other options as well of course. We can use that superabundant power in the summer to split water and make lots of hydrogen, and use that for power in the winter. We can even use it to pull CO2 from the air, convert it to synthetic fuels like synthetic methane, and just run our old natural gas plants for power in the winter.

And we’re easily headed to a world where watt for watt, solar is 1/10th the cost of new fission. At that point, even at high latitudes, it makes more sense to use solar power even in winter. I mean sure, if you’re at such extreme latitudes that you have months of total darkness, then solar will have a problem there. Maybe small modular reactors make sense for those niche applications. But even then, those areas are probably better relying on synthetic fuels made from solar power plants at lower latitudes. Or even better, those higher latitudes also get very long days during the summer months, so they can make their own hydrogen during the summer and run their grids off tanks of that in the winter. Or, if nothing else, we can always just run some long power cables north-to-south.

Quit huffing paint. The future is solar. Fission, like fossil fuels, is a dead-end technology.

I didn’t know that was a thing. Thanks! I’m honestly surprised some MBA bean counter hasn’t replaced those with a chip of some sort by now. Really cool!

Any mechanical regulation process that used to be handled by actual machine parts. Think of the centrifugal governor, this beautiful and elegant mechanical device just for regulating the speed of a steam engine. Sure, a computer chip could do it a lot better today, and we’re not even building steam engines quite like those anymore. But still, mechanically controlled things are just genuinely a lot cooler.

Or hell, even for computing, take a look at the elaborate mechanical computers that were used to calculate firing solutions on old battleships. Again, silicon computers perform objectively better in nearly every way, but there’s something objectively cool about solving an set of equations on an elaborate arrangement of clockwork.

I suppose it really depends on your perspective. If you’re that uncontacted tribe, you see birds all the time. The idea of a creature being able to fly is pretty mundane. Humans can’t naturally fly like birds, but neither can they naturally wield knives as long and sharp as tiger claws. But flying is ultimately just duplicating something already found in nature.

But the ability to instantly and effortlessly summon fire? The closest thing in nature is the bombardier beetle, and that shoots boiling acid. Impressive, but it’s not true fire. There are no creatures in nature that can just summon fire on command. From a natural perspective, instantly creating fire is a lot more impressive than a flying machine.

Sure. But again, it’s a distributed platform. And it does tend to be less subject to zero-thought zero tolerance policies built to appease advertisers. If you start posting death threats to politicians, you’ll get banned (and probably visited by law enforcement.) But I never posted anything like that. I never threatened anyone. I never advocated vigilante violence. I never posted anything that I couldn’t, completely legally, write on a big sign and literally walk around in front of the White House fence advocating for.

Technically, the deal is: we don’t have seasonal energy storage.

Thankfully, we are actually solving this problem by just making solar panels comically cheap. We are going to solve seasonal swings in power demand by just spamming the ever-loving-hell out of solar panels. Solar is so vastly cheaper than nuclear that this is the better option.

If the panels are cheap enough, you can build enough of them to meet your needs even on a cloudy winter day. Then the rest of the year you have dirt-cheap energy. In turn, a lot of power-intensive industries can move to a seasonal model to take advantage of the nearly-free energy during the warmer months. We have a crop growing season, why not a steel smelting season, or an AI model training season?

I’m pretty sure that guy just masturbates every night to Our Friend the Atom.

Like, what if they wont sell to us anymore, what’s the human cost of human life?

Come on, you’re smarter than that. Are you seriously asking, “what happens if China cuts off our supply of solar panels?” Are you a troll, or just dense?

Think about it. Just think about that for one god-damned second. Solar panels last for DECADES. And even after decades they still retain 75-80% of their original capacity. We move everything to solar, and then China cuts us off from new panels. So then…oh no…we can’t get any replacement panels. Clearly the whole nation will collapse!

Of course not. Unless you’re Mr. Burns, you’re not blockading the fucking Sun. This isn’t oil, or natural gas, or uranium someone can blockade or embargo. If the US gets cut off from new Chinese solar panels, we have literally DECADES to ramp up our own production until things really become a problem.