Technical Thread

[lens]

Dec 23, 2023 19:13:41 GMT alec said:

lens - good points.

One big question though, which I think is yet to be resolved, and which does have consequences for how we view this technology, will be who is held responsible if there is an accident? 

I said i thought a legislative framework was well underway, worth noting this:

www.teslarati.com/self-driving-vehicles-uk-2026-minister/

"United Kingdom (UK) Transport Minister Mark Harper noted on Wednesday that legislation surrounding automated vehicles (AVs) is currently making its way through parliament, and he expects there to be a legal framework in place for the emerging technology by the end of next year..............

The legislation was announced in November, and crucially, the country is looking to hold automakers legally liable for accidents rather than holding drivers accountable. By doing so, country officials have emphasized that the laws are expected to protect consumers and help promote safety in the new industry."

[leftieliberal]

Battery breakthrough reported from Harvard www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/battery-breakthrough-electric-cars-price-b2483771.html

The Harvard team’s postage stamp-sized battery retained 80 per cent capacity after 6,000 cycles, and showed good performance at low temperatures.
The ability to charge the battery in a matter of minutes also means that it has very high power density, increasing the possibilities for its use.

“It’s not just electrical vehicles, it could be electric planes which need a lot of power to take off,” he added.

Dr Li began working on solid-state batteries in earnest when he started at Harvard in 2015 after stints at MIT, Cal Tech, Penn State, and Nanjing University in China. “I had several dozen projects in parallel but after a couple of years, I realized the potential of solid-state battery, and I focused more on it,” he said.

In 2021, he and Harvard colleagues created a company, Adden Energy, to license and scale up the technology. A US car company has already tested their solid-state battery and found it to have the same positive results as in their internal testing, Dr Li said.

Even if charged daily, 6,000 cycles is close on 20 years lifetime, so we are talking about a battery that could have the life of a car.

[leftieliberal]

How a malicious backdoor nearly got into distros of Linux. An interesting story of how a single Microsoft developer spotted that his Linux system was running slowly and traced it back. Also a moral that keeping your computer operating system up to date isn't necessarily the best policy.

[athena]

A bit offbeat for this thread, but I heard my first cuckoo of the year last week, which prompted me to discover the BTO's cuckoo tracking project. They fit male cuckoos with miniature solar-powered platform transmitter terminals that transmit location and temperature data to the Argos satellite system, operating on a 10/48 hr transmi/charge schedule. The location data aren't as precise as GPS - accurate to bout 500m - because the method is different (exploits the Doppler shift). Incredibly impressive - some of the devices have transmitted for years. At ~4g they're still not quite small or light enough to fit to the females, but hopefully that'll come.

The project has revealed that the cuckoos' migration route is not the one that had been assumed. It involves a stopover in West Africa to refuel on the spring flush of insects that follows the arrival of the rains. The cuckoos can't advance the timing of their migration, because the timing of the rains isn't being affected by climate change, so they are getting out of sync with the breeding cycle of host species that overwinter in the UK. Lots of migratory birds are especially vulnerable to climate change because of this kind of unevenness.

[leftieliberal]

Want to recognise if something has been written by ChatGPT? Look out for these words: explore, captivate, tapestry, leverage, embrace, resonate, dynamic, testament, delve, elevate. These are the 10 most overused words: aiphrasefinder.com/common-chatgpt-words/ 

EDIT In case anyone is wondering how this came about Alex Hern's Techscape newsletter in The Guardian gives more of the background. I saw it earlier before it was up on the web site and followed the links to his sources.

[leftieliberal]

An interesting use of randomisation to estimate the number of unique objects. Say you have a stream of data, e.g. the words in Shakespeare's play "Hamlet" (spoiler there are 3967). You could just go through the play writing down the first word, comparing the second word to the first word and writing it down if it was different, then comparing the third word to the first two words and writing it down if it was different and so on, but this requires a large amount of space (equal to the number of words) and comparisons (of the order of the square of the number of words). Using the randomisation approach you can use a much smaller memory (say 100 locations) and in a single pass get an estimate of the number of words. With a smaller memory there are also fewer comparisons so the algorithm runs faster. For 100 locations and five cycles through the data they found an average of 3955 words (note that the cycles could be done in parallel), which is remarkably accurate.