Profile pic is from Jason Box, depicting a projection of Arctic warming to the year 2100 based on current trends.

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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • Than gasoline or diesel? No, they don’t. Wikipedia has a large chart on their article for energy density of various sources. Some things are harder to directly compare with each other, but diesel has 38 MJ/L, with jet fuel/kerosene and gasoline at 36/35. Adding ethanol dilutes the energy output some, while pure ethanol is 24. It’s still a potent source (but with its own costs and effects that need to be included in the net equation). Chemically petroleum simply has more bonds to break and get energy from.




  • I recently was searching for evidence of web existence of a site, and of course Wayback was my first thought. So I put in the address, and couldn’t find anything relevant (a redirection error was the best hit I got). Then I realized, duh… What I was looking for was in the late 90s, maybe 2000, and the notion of preserving the web hadn’t become a thing yet. So this is what happens without such efforts, things are really lost to memory and maybe snippets of references here and there if lucky.





  • There’s different levels of computerized control though. Would fuel injection and other modern efficiency and safety systems be possible without a main computer? I wouldn’t trade my days with simple mechanical cars and carburetors from the learning experience, but I also wouldn’t go back if I had a choice.

    The line crossed was being connected to work, not computers themselves. I agree that the modern car market is a minefield in whether or not there’s anything you could get that isn’t dependent in some way on being online. Buy used, there’s still stuff out there that will give long life, has been tested by the first owners, and doesn’t have the manufacturer’s grip on it.







  • Yes, and no. It’s not all fake, there’s stuff going on, it’s just not what they’re selling it to be, and highly pushed into places it needs to stay away from, for safety and for inability. My takeaway on him being surprised as how people aren’t impressed isn’t the LLM factor of what it can do (well or not), it’s that HE isn’t aware that other LLMs are doing better than Microsoft’s version. He really is deep if he doesn’t know what the competition has. That’s why there’s a lackluster interest (as well as burnout of AI “solutions” for every damn thing, often worse than just doing it like before).

    My coworkers use Co-Pilot. When they have downtime, just for amusement, just to see how badly it mangles things it ought to be good at doing. Never mind the fringes where an LLM isn’t suited at all.