I’ve already had to get my windshield on my new #Prius fixed because it got a small crack from a rock while driving on the freeway.
The guy who fixed it told me I better get used to it. The car is really low to the ground and because the windshield is super slanted, it has a much larger surface area — which means more area to get hit by road debris.
@marioguzman Ah, the vagaries of low cars in a world of gigantic SUVs. I have a couple of cars that are low, and I am very aware of flying debris when driving them, especially on highways. I’m especially aware of dump trucks, which have cost me two windshields so far. I now strategically use tall cars to shield me from dump truck debris.
In any case, I recommend putting paint protection film over the front and top of the car at least (I just PPF the whole thing). In the end, I consider the windshield a consumable item and replace it every few years.
I’m looking forward to a day when diamond surfaces can be made as cheaply as Gorilla Glass, and diamond jewelry as cheap as cubic zirconia.
Aluminum was once incredibly expensive to mine too, and now they’re ubiquitous and cheap, thanks to the invention of the Bayer process in the late 1800s.
I hope diamond goes the same way. At least it will stop the inhumane treatment of diamond mine workers.
“Scientists grow diamonds from scratch in 15 minutes thanks to groundbreaking new process”
@pjakobs I’m not a diamond expert, but my understanding is that industrial diamonds are still expensive to make, mainly because they need high pressures, and large particles are still very costly.
The breakthrough in this paper is that they can now do the same process at atmospheric pressure, which opens up the process to way more producers at lower prices.
The path to affordable jewelry-sized chunks is still a ways out, I think, but we are moving in that direction.
De Beers can eat shit and die, as far as I’m concerned. The sooner, the better.
It’s hard to convey how impossible these numbers are for a publicly traded company. Alarm bells should be ringing at the SEC.
Imagine if you were running a lemonade stand, and you sold 77 cents worth of lemonade—and to generate that 77 cents in revenue, you spent $327. https://mastodon.social/@sjvn/112479834471695251
@JamesGleick I think there are two explanations, and they are not necessarily contradictory:
They are in an expansionary stage, and they are spending as much money as possible to gain as much audience as quickly as possible.
They are soaking the investors while the going is good. Funnel money to friendly contractors and suppliers who will route benefits back to them through external means. Launder the money while the going is good, because the going won’t be good for much longer.
@datarama I think that’s a thought trap. Nothing is pointless, even if it ends up stolen. You still gain the experience of making it. That’s something nobody can take away.
@Aaron Yes, and it cuts both ways: the term “answers” from AI is also a sugar-coat. AI neither “answers” nor “hallucinates” anything. An “answer” is what we call useful output, and a “hallucination” is what we call unuseful output. The output itself is qualitatively the same in both cases.
@loko I think you’ll end up substituting one form of bias for another. Bias is one of those things that is very contextual, and require thinking through meaning, knowledge, and intent—all things that LLMs are incapable of processing.
Matt Farrah of The Smoking Tire gave an honest and (therefore) devastatingly negative review of the #Cybertruck. Good on him. Every point he makes is spot-on (except maybe the chuckle-inducing post-Apocalypse truck argument).
Presenting scientific consensus as “fact” is harmful, because it means that it will be harder to change that “fact” when more data is available.
Scientists are humans, but what makes their consensus trustworthy is their commitment to a process of forming testable hypotheses, gathering data, getting rid of confounding noise, and publishing their results. Thence, a model of reality is constructed, and a consensus—a belief—is agreed upon.
But NEW DATA MUST RESULT IN REVISED MODELS. That is good, and that defines progress.
Labeling consensus as “fact” undermines the idea that MODELS WILL CHANGE as more data come in. A “fact” is an immutable truth, and a reporting a change in scientific “facts” over time will undermine trust in scientists much more than the phrase “scientists believe”.
The problem with the phrase “scientists believe” is not the “believe” part. It’s the “scientists” part, which has lost public credibility.