Today's Reddit

I think I'm less worried about AI taking over than I am about cynical manipulative assholes who'll use it to fool otherwise decent people, getting them to do astonishingly appalling things to each other. 

And now they can talk
byu/Lord2troie inmidjourney

Electrifying The Hardhats

Progress is convincing the workin' guys that the cool new gear is all electric.

The fact that it's better for the future of their kids is, for now, secondary at best. What they care about right now - IMHO what they should care about - is whether or not the stuff works, and can it be a real benefit to them on the job?

SHIPPENSBURG, Pa. — On a 40-acre dirt and gravel lot, I climbed into the cabin of a 55,000-pound excavator. Construction crews use these hulking machines to dig trenches for laying pipes and wires or hollowing out building foundations. I took it out for a joyride.

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

When I switched on the motor, there was no ignition roar and no belch of diesel fumes from a tailpipe. This machine, powered by four batteries that each are big enough to run a small electric car, came to life silently.

The quiet didn’t last. The excavator’s giant treads trundled noisily over the gravel until I reached a good spot to dig. Then I grabbed hold of two joysticks and sank the bucket arm down into the dirt to scoop out as much earth as the claw could carry. I hit a big rock. The machine momentarily pitched forward, straining to loosen it from the ground — and then the electric motor heaved the boulder and a clod of dirt into the air in a puff of dust.

When they run on diesel, the biggest pieces of construction equipment can churn through 10 or more gallons of fuel per hour, emitting as much carbon and air pollution as several cars combined. Off-road equipment, including excavators, bulldozers, cranes and tractors, create about 3 percent of U.S. carbon emissions — roughly the same as the airline industry. Making these machines carbon-free would be almost as big a step toward halting climate change as taking all commercial planes out of the sky.

It won’t be easy. Electrifying off-road vehicles presents all the same challenges as replacing gas-powered cars with EVs, including worries about charging infrastructure, battery capacity and high upfront costs — plus the added challenge of digging, pushing and lifting heavy loads for hours at a time.

“They are more difficult because most of these vehicles don’t just propel themselves, they also do work,” said Kim Stelson, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Minnesota who studies off-road vehicles. “But if we want to solve the overall problem [of climate change], we have to solve this one.”

Despite the obstacles, electric machines are slowly starting to show up at farms and construction sites. John Deere plans to sell more than 20 models of electric and hybrid construction equipment and tractors by 2026. Construction giants Caterpillar and Komatsu are developing electric excavators and wheel loaders. Volvo Construction Equipment, which made the excavator I was driving, sells seven electric models. “Almost all the major companies are working on electric solutions,” Stelson said.

How are electric and diesel machines different?

Volvo’s electric machines are very similar to its diesel machines, with the exception that their engines have been swapped out for batteries. The 55,000-pound electric excavator, for instance, has 264 kilowatt-hours of battery storage — the same as nine Mini Cooper EVs, or a little more than one electric Hummer.

I drove both the electric and diesel versions of the machine, and the differences between them mirrored the differences between EVs and gas-powered cars. The electric machine idled silently and its controls were slightly more responsive than the diesel one, since its electric motor can deliver power faster than a combustion engine — similar to the way an EV can accelerate faster than a gas-powered car. But both machines pulled dirt out of the ground with the same power.

You can see the similarities on display on the assembly line at Volvo Construction Equipment’s North American headquarters in Shippensburg. Similar hulking, half-formed chassis move down the lines for both types of vehicles. But, halfway through, a huge hook hanging from the ceiling will either lower an engine or a battery pack into the machine for workers to install.

The electric machines are catching on slowly. Of the 60,000 pieces of construction equipment Volvo delivered to customers last year, 895 were electric according to the company’s annual report. The company said it aims to offer electric versions of more than a third of its models by 2030.

Where might you spot electric construction equipment?

Electric machines are good for a particular kind of job site. The machines need a place to charge — which could be the same level 1, 2 or 3 chargers that EVs plug into in buildings, parking lots or charging stations. And ideally, they wouldn’t have to move heavy loads for very long shifts.

“If you have a 24-hour, round-the-clock type of [work schedule], battery electrics aren’t very practical because you can’t stop to plug in for the four or five hours that it would take to recharge it,” said Ray Gallant, vice president of sustainability and productivity services at Volvo Construction Equipment.

Volvo says it often sells or leases electric machines for job sites where it pays to limit noise and air pollution. The Toronto Zoo used one of the company’s machines to avoid upsetting animals while repairing their enclosures. Cemeteries have bought excavators to quietly dig graves without disturbing mourners. Construction crews working on busy city streets use the machines to avoid annoying the neighbors or polluting their air.

At the Molly Pitcher dairy farm five miles down the road from Volvo Construction Equipment, farmers use an electric wheel loader to move feed, clean out barn floors and help lift and maintain pumps. The farmers say it’s better for the cattle to be around quieter machinery. Plus, they can charge the battery for free because the farm generates its own electricity using a device that converts manure into power.

“The more I can use that electricity, the more profitable we are,” said Keith Jones, the farm owner.

On other job sites where electric vehicles aren’t practical, construction crews can cut their emissions by running their machines on greener fuels, such as renewable diesel made from crops or used cooking oil. California now requires all off-road equipment to run on renewable diesel.

“There, you’re getting up to a 70 percent carbon benefit relative to running a diesel fuel, so that could be a really key intermediate step,” said Tom Durbin, a faculty researcher at the Center for Environmental Research and Technology at the University of California, Riverside.

One day, crews could upgrade to machines that run on pure hydrogen, a fuel that creates zero carbon emissions — but those mainly exist as prototypes today.

Today I Learned

Ten years ago, corn stalks were 13 feet tall.

Now they're about 5 feet - and each plant is putting out 3 times as many kernels.

3x

Hacking the genome of corn (aka: they GMO'd that motherfucker), makes for a plant that can put more of its energy into producing the food instead of making the stuff we can't eat.

Hey There, Elmo

• Handles well
• People look at it
• It's fun to kick 
• Cool that Tesla had the balls to make something this stupid

Adam Something

We Are The Stupid Country

Can't wait to see just how stupider we get with this shit.

Yes - it's a robot dog with a flamethrower - The Thermonator

Today's Nerdy Thing

IBM 5150

$1565.00 retail

2 floppy drives (5¼") One for the system, and one for the apps

Memory: 256KB

Fuck, I'm old.

It's Already Here

There's still a great big bunch of buggy whip and wagon wheel executives (ie: the schmucks who run the Dirty Fuels Cartel) trying very hard to tell us the EV is just not good enough, that it'll take generations before we get the market to where it needs to be, and in the meantime, just relax and keep artificially propping up an industry that should've died 25 years ago.

ELECTRIC CARS ARE ALREADY UPENDING AMERICA

After years of promise, a massive shift is under way.

One day in late November, I cradled a red Samsung flip phone in my hands as if it was a ruby gemstone. To me, it was just as precious. Deep inside an overstuffed dresser in my childhood bedroom, I had spotted the glint of my first-ever cellphone, a Samsung SGH-A707 purchased in the waning days of the George W. Bush presidency. The device, no bigger than a credit card, had long ago succumbed to the spider web of cracks on its screen. For a moment, I was brought back to life before the smartphone, clicking the phone’s plastic keys for the first time in more than a decade.

This device, and every other phone like it, of course, was made obsolete by the touchscreen slabs now in all of our pockets. Perhaps you have heard that we are now on the cusp of another iPhone moment—the rise of a new technology that changes the world. No, not that one. Despite the post-ChatGPT frenzy, artificial intelligence has so far been defined more by speculative hype than actual substance. Does anyone really want “AI-powered” smoothies, sports commentary, or roller skates? Assuming the bots don’t wipe out humanity, maybe AI will take the jobs of high-school teachers, coders, lawyers, fast-food workers, customer-service agents, writers, and graphic designers—but right now, ChatGPT is telling me that Cybertruck has 11 letters. There’s a long way to go.

Meanwhile, electric cars are already upending America. In 2023, our battery-powered future became so much more real—a boom in sales and new models is finally starting to push us into the post-gas age. Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the same number sold from 2016 to 2021 total. “This was the year that EVs went from experiments, or technological demonstrations, and became mature vehicles,” Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, told me. They are beginning to transform not just the automotive industry, but also the very meaning of a car itself.

If the story of American EVs has long hinged on one company—Tesla—then this was the year that these cars became untethered from Elon Musk’s brand. “We’re at a point where EVs aren’t necessarily exclusively for the upper, upper, upper class,” Robby DeGraff, an analyst at the market-research firm AutoPacific, told me. If you wanted an electric car five years ago, you could choose from among various Tesla models, the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan Leaf—and that was really it. Now EVs come in more makes and models than Baskin-Robbins ice-cream flavors. We have more luxury sedans to vie with Tesla, but also cheaper five-seaters, SUVs, Hummers, pickup trucks, and … however you might categorize the Cybertruck. Nearly 40 new EVs have debuted since the start of 2022, and they are far more advanced than their ancestors. For $40,000, the Hyundai Ioniq 6, released this year, can get you 360 miles on a single charge; in 2018, for only a slightly lower cost, a Nissan Leaf couldn’t go half that distance.

All of these EVs are genuinely great for the planet, spewing zero carbon from their tailpipes, but that’s only a small part of what makes them different. In the EV age, cars are no longer just cars. They are computers. Stripping out a gas engine, transmission, and 100-plus moving parts turns a vehicle into something more digital than analog—sort of like how typing on an iPhone keyboard is different than on my clackety old Samsung flip phone. “It’s the software that is really the heart of an EV,” DeGraff said—it runs the motors, calculates how many miles are left on a charge, optimizes the brakes, and much more.

Just like with other gadgets that bug you about software updates, all of this firmware can be updated over Wi-Fi while a car charges overnight. Rivian has updated its software to add a “Sand Mode” that can enhance its cars’ driving ability on dusty terrain. Many new cars are getting stuffed with technology—a new gas-powered Mercedes-Benz E-Class comes with TikTok integration and a selfie stick—but EVs are capable of more significant updates. A gas car is never going to meaningfully get more miles per gallon, but one such update from Tesla in 2020 increased the range on its Model X car from 328 to 351 miles after the company found ways to wring more efficiency out of its internal parts. And because EVs all drive basically the same, tech is a bigger part of the sell. Instead of idly passing the time while an EV recharges, you can now use a car’s infotainment system to Zoom into a meeting, play Grand Theft Auto, and stream Amazon Prime.

The million-plus new EVs on the road are ushering in a fundamental, maybe existential, change in how to even think about cars—no longer as machines, but as gadgets that plug in and charge like all the others in our life. The wonderful things about computers are coming to cars, and so are the terrible ones: apps that crash. Subscription hell. Cyberattacks. There are new problems to contend with too: In Tesla’s case, its “Autopilot” software has been implicated in fatal crashes. (It was the subject of a massive recall earlier this month that required an over-the-air update.) You now might scroll on your phone in bed, commute in your EV, and log into your work laptop, all of which are powered by processors that are constantly bugging you to update them.

If cars are gadgets now, then carmakers are also now tech companies. An industry that has spent a century perfecting the internal combustion engine must now manufacture lithium-ion batteries and write the code to govern them. Imagine if a dentist had to pivot from filling cavities to performing open-heart surgery, and that’s roughly what’s going on here. “The transition to EVs is completely changing everything,” Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. “It’s changing the people that automotive companies have to hire and their skills. It’s changing their suppliers, their factories, how they assemble and build them. And lots of automakers are struggling with that.”

Take the batteries. To manufacture battery cells powerful enough for a car is so phenomenally expensive and arduous that Toyota is pumping nearly $14 billion into a single battery plant in North Carolina. To create software-enabled cars, you need software engineers, and car companies cannot get enough of them. (Perhaps no other industry has benefited the most from Silicon Valley’s year of layoffs.) At the very low end, estimates Sam Abuelsamid, a transportation analyst at Guidehouse Insights, upwards of 10,000 “software engineers, interface designers, networking engineers, data center experts and silicon engineers have been hired by automakers and suppliers in recent years.” The tech wars can sometimes verge on farce: One former Apple executive runs Ford’s customer-software team, while another runs GM’s.

At every level, the auto industry is facing the type of headache-inducing questions about job losses and employment that still feels many years away with AI. “There’s a new skill set we’re going to need, and I don’t think I can teach everyone—it will take too much time,” Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, said in May. “So there is going to be disruption in this transition.” Job cuts are already happening, and more may come—even after the massive autoworker strike this year that largely hinged on electrification. Such a big financial investment is needed to electrify the car industry that from July to September, Ford lost $60,000 for every EV it sold. Or peel back one more onion layer to car dealerships: Tesla, Rivian, and other EV companies are selling directly to consumers, cutting them out. EVs also require little service compared with gas vehicles, a reality that has upset many dealers, who could lose their biggest source of profit. None of this is the future. It is happening right now.

But if EVs are having an “iPhone moment,” we are still in the days when a few early adopters had the clunky, OG version. Most cars you see are a decade old; for all these EV sales, just 1 percent of cars on the road are all-electric. Even if we hit President Joe Biden’s EV target of 50 percent of sales by 2030, the sheer life span of cars will mean that gas vehicles will still greatly outnumber electric ones by then. Gas stations are not closing. Parking garages are not buckling under the weight of EVs and their hefty batteries. Electric cars remain too expensive, and they are limited by janky public chargers that are too slow, assuming they work at all. If you don’t have a house where you can install your own plug, EVs are still mostly just unrealistic. Most alarming might be the politics that surround them: Donald Trump and lots of other Republicans are vowing to stymie their growth. Carmakers are not even hiding that next year’s election might lead them to reconsider their EV plans.

Even so, the transition is not slowing down. Next year, America should hit 1.9 million EV sales, Corey Cantor, an EV analyst at BloombergNEF, told me. Another burst of models is coming: A retro-futuristic Volkswagen van! A Cadillac Escalade with a 55-inch touchscreen! A tiny Fiat 500e for just $30,000! And yes, they are succumbing a bit to hype themselves. In June, Mercedes’s infotainment screen got an optional update. Now you can talk to it through a chatbot.

Saw It Coming

The bad guys are out there. The bad guys are always fucking out there.

AT&T's TouchTone phone becomes the dominant telecomm gizmo in the early 70s, and within 3 or 4 years, there's an army of teenagers stealing long distance service, and then eavesdropping on conversations, and 2 or 3 years after that, we've got some serious crooks trying to rob banks with this spiffy new tech shit.

Human wisdom is always at least a generation behind its technological capabilities.

Bigots use AI to make Nazi memes on 4chan. Verified users post them on X.

The ecosystem for explicitly racist and antisemitic memes starts on a fringe site, but ends up in the mainstream through Elon Musk’s platform.

It looks like a poster for a new Pixar movie. But the film’s title is “Dancing Israelis.” Billing the film as “a Mossad/CIA production,” the poster depicts a caricatured stereotype of a dancing Jewish man whose boot is knocking down the World Trade Center towers — a reference to antisemitic 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Posted to X on Oct. 27 by a verified user with about 220,000 followers who bills himself as an “America-first patriot,” the image garnered about 190,000 views, including 8,000 likes and 1,500 reshares. Content moderators at X took no action against the tweet, and the user posted it again on Nov. 16, racking up an additional 194,000 views. Both tweets remained on the site as of Wednesday, even after researchers flagged them as hate posts using the social network’s reporting system.

An antisemitic post on Elon Musk’s X is not exactly news. But new research finds the site has emerged as a conduit to mainstream exposure for a fresh wave of automated hate memes, generated using cutting-edge AI image tools by trolls on the notorious online forum 4chan. The research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), shared with and verified by The Washington Post, finds that a campaign by 4chan members to spread “AI Jew memes” in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack resulted in 43 different images reaching a combined 2.2 million views on X between Oct. 5 and Nov. 16, according to the site’s publicly displayed metrics.

Examples of widely viewed posts include a depiction of U.S. Army soldiers kneeling before a Jewish man on a throne; Taylor Swift in a Nazi officer’s uniform sliding a Jewish man into an oven; and a Jewish man pulling the strings on a puppet of a Black man. The latter may be a reference to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which was cited as motivation by the 18-year-old white man who slaughtered 10 Black people at a Buffalo, N.Y, grocery store in May 2022, and which Musk seemed to endorse in a tweet last month.

More than half of the posts were made by verified accounts, whose owners pay X a monthly fee for special status and whose posts are prioritized in users’ feeds by the site’s algorithms. The verified user who tweeted the image of U.S. Army soldiers bowing to a Jewish ruler, with a tweet claiming that Jews seek to enslave the world, ran for U.S. Senate in Utah as a Republican in 2018 and has 86,000 followers on X.

The proliferation of machine-generated bigotry, which 4chan users created using AI tools such as Microsoft’s Image Creator, calls into question recent claims by Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino that the company is cracking down on antisemitic content amid a pullback by major advertisers. In a Nov. 14 blog post, X said it had expanded its automated moderation of antisemitic content and provided its moderators with “a refresher course on antisemitism.”

But the researchers said that of 66 posts they reported as hate speech on Dec. 7, X appeared to have taken action on just three as of Monday. Two of those three had their visibility limited, while one was taken down. The Post independently verified that the 63 others remained publicly available on X as of Wednesday, without any indication that the company had taken action on them. Most appeared to violate X’s hateful conduct policy.

Several of the same AI-generated images also have been posted to other major platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and Facebook, the researchers noted. But the CCDH said it focused on X because the site’s cutbacks on moderation under Musk have made it a particularly hospitable environment for explicitly hateful content to reach a wider audience. The Post’s own review of the 4chan archives suggested that X has been a favored platform for sharing the antisemitic images, though not the only platform.

X’s business is reeling after some of its largest advertisers pulled their ads last month. The backlash came in response to Musk’s antisemitic tweet and a report from another nonprofit, Media Matters for America, that showed posts pushing Nazi propaganda were running alongside major brands’ ads on the site.

Among the companies to pull its spending was Disney, whose brand features prominently in many of the AI-generated hate memes now circulating on X. Speaking at a conference organized by the New York Times last month, Musk unleashed a profane rant against advertisers who paused their spending on X, accusing them of “blackmail” and saying they’re going to “kill the company.” He mentioned Disney’s CEO by name.

This is the growing list of companies pulling ads from X

The most widely shared post in the CCDH’s research was a tweet that read “Pixar’s Nazi Germany,” with a montage of four AI-generated scenes from an imaginary animated movie, depicting smiling Nazis running concentration camps and leading Jewish children and adults into gas chambers (Pixar is owned by Disney). It was one of the few posts in the study that had been labeled by X’s content moderators, with a note that read, “Visibility limited: this Post (sic) may violate X’s rules against Hateful Conduct.” Even so, as of Wednesday, it had been viewed more than half a million times, according to X’s metrics.

Another verified X account has posted dozens of the AI hate memes, including faux Pixar movie posters that feature Adolf Hitler as a protagonist, without any apparent sanction from the platform.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has sued both Media Matters for America and the Center for Countering Digital Hate over their research of hate speech on X. After the latest wave of criticism over antisemitism, Musk announced strict new policies against certain pro-Palestinian slogans. And he visited Israel to declare his support for the country, broadcasting his friendly meeting with the country’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yaccarino, who was appointed CEO by Musk in May, said in a November tweet that X has been “extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination.” The company did not respond to an email asking whether the antisemitic AI memes violate its policies.

4chan is an anonymous online messaging board that has long served as a hub for offensive and extremist content. When Musk bought Twitter last fall, 4chan trolls celebrated by flooding the site with racist slurs. Early in October of this year, members of 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” message board began teaching and encouraging one another to generate racist and antisemitic right-wing memes using AI image tools, as first reported by the tech blog 404 Media.

The 4chan posts described ways to evade measures intended to prevent people from generating offensive content. Those included a “quick method” using Microsoft’s Image Creator, formerly called Bing Image Creator, which is built around OpenAI’s Dall-E 3 software and viewed as having flimsier restrictions on sensitive content.

“If you add words you think will trip the censor, space them out from the part of the prompt you are working on,” one 4chan post advised, describing how to craft text prompts that would yield successful results. “Example: rabbi at the beginning, big nose at the end.”

After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the focus among 4chan users on antisemitic content seemed to sharpen. Numerous “AI Jew memes” threads emerged with various sub-themes, such as the “Second Holocaust edition” and the “Ovens Run All Day edition.”

Microsoft’s director of communications, Caitlin Roulston, said in a statement, “When these reports surface, we take the appropriate steps to address them, as we’ve done in the past. … As with any new technology, some are trying to use it in unintended ways, and any repeated attempts to produce content that goes against our policy guidelines may result in loss of access to the service.” Microsoft did not say how many people have been denied access to its imaging program because they violated its rules.

The ability to generate extremist imagery using digital tools isn’t new. Programs such as Adobe Photoshop have long allowed people to manipulate images without moderating the content they can produce from it.

But the ability to create complex images from scratch in seconds, whether in the form of a Pixar movie poster or a photorealistic war image, with only a few lines of text is different. And the ability of overt hate accounts to be verified and amplified on X has made spreading such messages easier than ever, said Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s CEO. “Clearly the cost of producing and disseminating extremist material has never been lower.”

Sara Aniano, disinformation analyst at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said AI seems to be ushering in “the next phase of meme culture.”

The goal of extremists in sharing AI hate memes to mainstream social media platforms is to “redpill” ordinary people, meaning to lead them down a path of radicalization and conspiracism, Aniano added. “You can always expect this rhetoric to be in fringe spaces. but they love it when it escapes those spaces.”

Not all of the AI memes flourishing on X are antisemitic. Ashlea Simon, chair of the United Kingdom’s far-right Britain First party, has taken to posting apparently AI-generated images that target Muslim migrants, suggesting that they want to rape white women and “replace our peoples.”

The party and some of its leaders, boosted by Donald Trump on Twitter in 2017, had been banned from Twitter for hate speech under the previous ownership. But Musk reinstated them soon after buying the company, then gave the party its gold “official organization” verification label in April.

While Musk has said he’s personally against antisemitism, he has at times defended the presence of antisemitic content on X. “Free speech does at times mean that someone you don’t like is saying something you don’t like,” he said in his conversation with Netanyahu in September. “If you don’t have that, then it’s not free speech.”

Ahmed said the problem is that social media platforms, without careful moderation, tend to amplify extreme and offensive viewpoints, because they treat people’s shocked and outraged responses as a signal of engagement.

“If you’re Jewish, or if you’re Muslim, and every day you open up X and you see new images at the top of your timeline that depict you as a bloodsucking monster, it makes you feel like maybe these platforms, but also society more broadly, might be against you,” he said.

On Climate And Stuff

How fast do you have to buy EVs and heat pumps to avoid the worst effects of climate change?

Judging by the surging sales of green technology, U.S. households appear to be on the verge of a low-carbon future. Millions of Americans are buying electric vehicles, heat pumps and induction ranges.

But those numbers belie a starkly different present. Just about 3 percent of Americans, for example, reported owning an induction stove in 2022.

That’s close to the share of the U.S. population that owned a cellphone in the late 1980s, a few years after the first models came out. It took more than two decades for wireless technology to eclipse home landlines.

Time is tighter for the climate. To meet net-zero emissions targets, and avoid the worst effects of warming, most households will need to embrace a new suite of low-carbon technologies by 2050, says the electrification nonprofit Rewiring America.

To make it happen, they’re betting on the “S-curve.”

Virtually every major technology over the past two centuries has followed the same swooping S from virtual obscurity to near-ubiquitous adoption. Economists can now predict this basic shape with surprising accuracy, though the exact nature of the curve or slope change varies by product.

Some technologies that spread across the U.S. in the early 20th century took several decades to become ubiquitous.

But more recent innovations were adopted more quickly.

Experts say green technologies such as electric cars and rooftop solar panels could follow a similar pattern of rapid adoption even if they require you to spend tens of thousands of dollars upfront.

Not all new technologies make it big: Segway, Palm personal device, 3D television. But those that start ascending this curve tend to transform societies.

How fast Americans reach that point with green technologies is up to early adopters, about 15 to 20 percent of the population. They set the stage for this exponential growth by trying products before others do.

Take the thousands of die-hards who leased the first modern electric car, the EV1, released by General Motors in 1996. It had a 74-mile range at a time when drivers had virtually nowhere to charge except their garage.

“They are a special group of people that are willing to go through the pain of an early product,” says Carolina Milanesi, president of the technology research firm Creative Strategies, “and they take pride in that.”

Then mainstream customers, roughly 60 percent of the public, only embrace the technology once it matures into familiar, established products, well after its arrival, fueling years of sustained and exponential growth.

The final stage is dominated by “laggards,” those least willing to adopt the new technology, such as flip-phone owners in the age of smartphones.

How fast will you adopt the clean technologies needed to decarbonize America’s homes and driveways?

Rewiring America modeled the S-curve that products must follow to meet the Biden administration’s zero-emissions targets by 2050.

Americans are on track to meet those goals, but reaching higher levels of adoption will require overcoming barriers such as high costs and a limited number of available models.

“We have every reason to believe electrification technologies are following the same S-shaped curve that other technologies have followed in the past,” says Cora Wyent, Rewiring America’s director of research. “We haven’t missed the boat on any of them.”

The steepness of the slope depends on how many households have already adopted the technologies, and what percentage could reasonably adopt it by mid-century. The calculations assume Americans replace these technologies roughly every 15 years.

Here’s a look at where we are and where we need to be over the next couple of decades, and the role for early adopters.

Heat pump HVAC

(space heating and cooling)

Heat pumps are no longer reliant on early adopters despite being early in the cycle, suggesting Americans are well on track to meet net-zero goals by 2050. As far as clean technologies go, it’s the one most popular among Americans so far.

U.S. households installed 4 million new heat pumps last year, about half of new sales of residential heating systems, eclipsing gas furnaces for the first time.

Since several regions of the country have been installing them for years, 16 percent of U.S. homes already use electric heat pumps for space heating.

Heat pumps, in many parts of the country, are already cheaper to install and operate than fossil-fuel-powered furnaces, saving up to about $1,000 annually over conventional furnaces, while slashing emissions by several tons per year. Layer on generous new incentives from state, local and federal programs, and many units can pay for themselves over their lifetimes.

“Heat pumps make economic sense for many U.S. consumers,” says Erich Muehlegger, a professor of economics at the University of California at Davis. “The main driver is not people who want to be the first one on the block to own a heat pump, but someone who needs to replace something and sees heat pumps as a nice opportunity.”

The biggest barrier may be awareness: In a 2020 survey, the home electrification and insulation company Sealed found half of the respondents had no idea what heat pumps were.

Electric Vehicles

Electric cars are racing up the adoption curve. The United States has already surpassed the possible “tipping point” of around 5 to 10 percent of new sales, when researchers say growth accelerates.

Though most EV owners are still early adopters, early mainstream buyers are likely to switch to EVs in the coming years as the technology gets cheaper and more convenient.

In the first half of 2023, EVs accounted for 8 percent of all passenger vehicles sold in the United States, according to BloombergNEF, a clean-energy research group.

Still, the vast majority of the more than 280 million cars on U.S. roads run on fossil fuels, and just 4 percent are electric.

A skeptical public and spotty changes in infrastructure are acting as a drag. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found nearly half of adults say they still prefer owning a gas-powered car or truck. Only a third or so say EVs are better for day-to-day driving.

“As the EV market pushes into higher and higher levels of adoption, it bumps into groups that are going to have to make meaningful sacrifices,” says Muehlegger. “The technological adoption of EVs is not going to occur smoothly since it’s occurring at the same time all these other pieces of the transportation network are falling into place.”

A more likely scenario may be that regional, urban markets take off early, while areas with fewer charging stations and incentives lag.

Home solar panels

Five percent of U.S. homes have solar panels on their roofs, most of them in California.

Not all roofs are suitable for solar panels, and other options such as utility and community solar exist, so Rewiring America is targeting well under full adoption — 65 percent, or 80 million homes — by mid-century.

This will be a gradual transition that won’t fully pick up speed until later this decade. But with solar panel and battery prices set to fall, and as new incentives for building owners kick in, we will probably see a massive surge in installations.

Home solar installations have risen steadily, adding a record 6.4 gigawatts in 2022, enough to power about 1 million homes, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. A 2022 January Pew Research Center survey found 39 percent of homeowners had seriously considered installing solar panels in the past year.

Cooking

Most Americans already cook with electricity. That means fewer of them need to transition into a new, cleaner cooking technology, so Rewiring America is predicting a relatively flat S-curve.

About 39 percent still rely on gas and propane stoves. Induction stoves are the leading contender to electrify them, but so far they’re only in about 3 percent of households.

It will take a while for Americans to get to the 43 percent of homes Rewiring America estimates should make the switch by 2035 to meet climate goals. To get there, the nonprofit estimates an additional 1.8 million induction stoves above the current pace of sales in the next three years to keep the technology on track. By 2032, it estimates, sales must soar five times above the current trajectory.

The S-curve for induction stoves is relatively flat since so many homes already have electric stoves. It plateaus around 43 percent of homes by 2035, ensuring almost all homes switch out gas and propane well before mid-century.


Fortunately, induction stoves are having a moment. A record number of models are being rolled out by brands from GE to Viking at lower price points, although they remain more expensive on average.

Water heating

Just 1 percent of U.S. homes have installed heat pump water heaters, which deliver hot water with ultra-efficient heat pumps, making them one of the least-common climate technologies in U.S. homes.

Even well into next decade, only a sliver of households will have one, according to Rewiring America’s estimates. To meet climate goals, then, heat pump water heater sales will have to dramatically ramp up from 2030 to 2040.

Only about 140,000 units were sold last year, less than 2 percent of total water heater sales, according to the latest Environmental Protection Agency data.

Few homes have these appliances installed. Since heat pumps are much more efficient than both electric-resistance water heaters and natural gas, they are expected to fully displace all other kinds of water-heating technology.

Sales are growing fast, roughly doubling since 2017. Early adopters have the biggest role to play here, says Wyent. “Very few people know they exist,” she says. “They have the longest way to go. That’s an exciting place for early adopters to play a role.”

The biggest reason to switch is saving money. The appliances are as much as four times more efficient than comparable gas water heaters, saving one ton of CO2 annually on average, reports the nonprofit New Buildings Institute. The appliances cost about $117 annually to operate for a family of four compared to $200 for a gas water heater or $550 for electric resistance.

Gas-fired water heaters, now around half of all water heater sales, may have already begun their terminal decline.

Are we on track?

Early adopters may be driving growth of electrification technologies, but without a concerted effort behind them — incentives, tax credits, public education and workforce training for installation — the process will move too slowly.

Economics, policy and technology are finally pushing in the same direction. The Inflation Reduction Act and state and local incentives are expected to bring down the costs of climate technologies by about 40 percent, according to an analysis by market intelligence firm Sightline Climate. When it comes to clean-energy options, people have never had better products, lower prices or more generous incentives.

“Are we on track?” asks Doyne Farmer, director of the complexity economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. “We’re more on track than people realize. … The thing about exponential [growth] is it’s small, it’s small, it’s small, and then suddenly it gets very big.”

In the early 1980s, AT&T asked consultants from McKinsey to estimate how many wireless customers it might have at the turn of the century, according to a report in the Economist.

Their answer — 900,000 subscribers — turned out to be the number of new customers joining mobile phone services every three days by 2020.

Putting Things Together

I'm not sure any single idea can flourish all by its little ol' lonesome - at least it's extremely rare that anything stands alone. I can't think of anything anyway, and of course, if I can't think of it, then it must not exist, right?

So there's probably something, but my default position is that nothing in nature exists exclusive of everything else in nature. It's all evolutionary. Everything comes from (and so is part of) everything else.

Ooh. See what I did there? I got all zen and shit.

Anyway, same goes for anything people come up with. Everything goes with everything else.

So I get a little freaky when somebody takes one thing and marries it up with something else, either to create a new thing, or to prove that a technology thingie and a nature thingie can be put together in a way that benefits everything.

Hops for beer flourish under solar panels. They’re not the only crop thriving in the shade.

He grows hops, used to make beer, and in recent years has also been generating electricity, with solar panels sprawled across 1.3 hectares (32 acres) of his land in the small hop-making town of Au in der Hallertau, an hour north of Munich in southern Germany.

The pilot project — a collaboration between Wimmer and local solar technology company Hallertauer Handelshaus — was set up in the fall of last year. The electricity made at this farm can power around 250 households, and the hops get shade they’ll need more often as climate change turbocharges summer heat.

Solar panels atop crops has been gaining traction in recent years as incentives and demand for clean energy skyrocket. Researchers look into making the best use of agricultural land, and farmers seek ways to shield their crops from blistering heat, keep in moisture and potentially increase yields. The team in Germany says its effort is the first agrivoltaic project that’s solely focused on hops, but projects have sprouted around the world in several countries for a variety of grains, fruits and vegetables.

Beer-making hops can suffer if exposed to too much sun, said Bernhard Gruber, who’s managing the project’s solar component — and since there were already solar installations on the farm, it made sense to give them a second purpose by mounting them on poles above the crops.

In addition to shielding plants from solar stress, the shade could mean “water from precipitation lasts longer, leaving more in the soil” and that “the hops stay healthier and are less susceptible to diseases,” Gruber said. A scientific analysis of the benefits for the plants will be concluded in October.

The farm is working with researchers to understand how to get the balance right, so the hops get enough shade and sunlight for the best harvests each year.

In the U.K., where weather is also getting hotter and more variable, a team of researchers is looking at how to retrofit solar panels onto greenhouses or polytunnels — frames covered in plastic where crops grow underneath — with semi-transparent or transparent installations.

“You can get your renewables from the land that you do have covered and you don’t need to do these massive solar arrays on good agricultural land, which is what you’ve tended to see around to date,” said Elinor Thompson, a reader at Greenwich University who’s leading the research.

Thompson, a plant biologist, and her team are working with a fruit farm in Kent in southern England to make sure the plants also get the best out of solar structures.

“Nobody can afford to lose crop, especially in current conditions,” she said. “We are assuming that British summers are going to get hotter, we have a problem with water shortages, we need to be efficient in all parts of agriculture.”

Having shade where it’s useful and monitoring the effects of different arrangements of solar panels on a variety of crops will help the world prepare for a more climate-variable future, Thompson said.

In East Africa, which has suffered from a long and punishing drought that scientists said was worsened by human-caused climate change, solar panels can also help keep moisture in plants and soil and reduce the amount of water needed, said Richard Randle-Boggis, a research associate at the University of Sheffield who’s developing two agrivoltaic systems in Kenya and Tanzania.

Randle-Boggis said the systems can be used for “climate change resilience and a way of improving the growing environment for crops, while also providing low carbon electricity.” He said that some of the crops under the partial shade of solar panels are using around 16% less irrigation.

The solar-covered farms saw increased yields for maize, Swiss chard and beans, and while growers experienced lower yields for onions and sweet peppers, they still had the added benefit of clean electricity generation.

But crop yields can also “vary depending on the weather conditions because we’re seeing the climate changing,” said Randle-Boggis, although he added he was “really surprised and impressed with some of the results that we’re seeing” for solar-covered crops.

“Maize is grown by about 50% of farmers in Tanzania. Maize is also a sun loving plant. So the fact that we had an 11% yield increase in maize ... is a phenomenal result,” he said.

And Randle-Boggis said these projects can continue to be replicated around the world for many different crops, as long as systems are “designed with the local context in mind.”

A future with more crops under solar is Gruber’s hope for beer-making hops, too.

“At the end of the year we will set up another solar park over hops,” which will have about 10 times the electricity-generating potential as the current project, Gruber said.

But that’s still just the beginning.

“We’re getting lots of inquires from hop farmers,” he said, “even from abroad.”

Congratulations to all the

beer-drinkers

and Greenies -

we got us a big fat 'W'

Today's Nerds

Early this year, the James Webb Space Telescope glitched, and shut down its Near Infrared Imager gizmo - and it stayed down for two weeks.

The nerds figured out the most likely cause was that it got zapped by some kind of high energy particle put out by a super nova - or some such.

And how did these amazingly talented and high-value tech wizards fix it?

Yup - they turned it off, and then turned it back on again.

God love the ÜberNerds.

More AI

There won't be any conscious toasters. No matter how cute and cuddly the engineers can get it to seem like it is, your technology will not be a living thing. Ever. Anything we build is - and will always remain - an inanimate and unfeeling thing. A gizmo. A gadget.

In the end:

• your house is a well-ordered pile of sticks and rocks
• your car is a well-ordered pile of steel and plastic
• your laptop is a well-ordered pile of silicon and underpaid nerd sweat
• Artificial Intelligence is a clever attempt to imitate thought

There is no Blue Fairy to turn your wooden puppet into a real boy.

Machinery simply cannot achieve sentience.

That, of course, is a bold statement. I usually hold back on the absolutes because no probability is ever either 0 or 100. But until we produce something that is a living thinking being, and not a facsimile, it's aways going to be what the name implies - artificial.

And we already know how to make real live things - we call it reproduction - breeding - birth - goal-oriented copulation - fucking with purpose.

Anyway.

Opinion

The wizards of AI can’t give it a brain, or heart, or consciousness

ChatGPT is a fascinating piece of software based on artificial intelligence and built by a company called OpenAI. Chat’s specialty is reading and writing the English language, which is no easy task. Specify a topic and Chat will produce a short essay in any form you like, including rhymed verse. If research is needed along the way, Chat turns straight to the internet, which is swarming with information — some of it even true.

This is clever and impressive software, and might be useful to many people. Several first-rate software builders have told me recently how well Chat draws and, separately, how well it composes new software. A new Chat-written app might produce a video game, a browser or whatever else you’ve specified as the new software’s task.

ChatGPT has been celebrated most of all, however, for its ability to converse and write essays in good, clear English. So, how well does Chat do at this difficult, ambitious task? A task that, pre-Chat, only human beings have been able to handle?

Not well. There are several reasons why not.

This software — like all other software — is unconscious. Of course, building conscious software wasn’t the goal of this project— which is a good thing, because it can’t be done. To speak of a “conscious computer” (except metaphorically) is nonsense, like speaking of a “conscious toaster.” Both objects are machines designed and built by humans, capable of being assembled or disassembled — but not of living or dying. Long and interesting philosophical arguments have been made on these points, but none changes the common-sense conclusion. Those who put their trust in unconscious writers, assistants or colleagues ought to be careful.

Being unconscious, Chat feels nothing. It can’t feel. Therefore, it can’t understand English, or human beings, or anything at all. How is it supposed to understand the words “I feel happy” when it has never felt anything, and never will? “Understand” is not even a word that applies to machines. To say that “a computer understands” is like saying that your car is losing its sense of humor or mooning over an old girlfriend.

Consciousness seems to be inseparable from the physical body. And because we are conscious, we can feel and have emotions — physical emotions and feelings, which might (unpredictably) change our entire worldview and state of mind. Real physical emotions are required, not a data-processing analog. We must feel our emotions directly, not become aware of them as if we were reading a watch. We don’t say, “How do I feel? Let me check.” We experience our feelings, whether we want to or not.

Many impressive ChatGPT conversations have been posted online, and they speak for themselves. Sometimes Chat can actually chat. But if you challenge its assertions, it has no intuitions about whether you are wrong or bluffing. It’s eager to concede the point and backpedal. If you ask it to explain something again, because you didn’t understand the first time, it has no feeling for what might have confused you. It tends to repeat what it said before, with the phrases juggled and slightly changed. Chat is like a person who is barely paying attention, which is understandable because — being unconscious — Chat is definitely not paying attention. It couldn’t possibly be paying attention.

Its lack of consciousness, and its consequent lack of intuition or feeling, limits Chat’s ability to judge the quality of its own work. Here is Chat explaining how to make a success of your job. “By establishing trust and rapport, you will create a support network … ”

Stop right there, Chat. Phrases such as “trust and rapport” and “support network” are cliches. If Chat catches on (and it’s already catching), look for a deluge of bad prose in a nation that is already half-choked on it.

Chat once again: “Today, spoons are an essential part of our daily lives, and are used in a wide variety of settings, from the kitchen to the dining room.”

Why not, “Today, we need spoons in the kitchen, the dining room and in many other places”? Chat depends on canned phrases and writes like a bureaucrat: It is formal and officious. Naturally, an unconscious machine has no ear for language.

The strangest thing of all about Chat is that some intelligent people are actually afraid of it. Some demand a worldwide pause in AI research, although they know nothing about the field. This is ridiculous. Somehow, they believe, Chat might jump out of its computer and go rampaging across the globe. As a seasoned professional, I believe this to be unlikely. Chat, in my judgment, will stay quietly enclosed in its own computer and its own network — and behave itself.

In short, I would relax, at least for the time being. AI technology has been around since the 1950s, yet Chat isn’t remotely smart enough to do much damage. But if you are too scared to relax, try smashing your computer to little pieces and tossing them in the trash. Vanquishing Chat might be the least of your rewards.

A Tech Bro Fantasy

I'm growing increasingly concerned about what feels like a metric fuck ton of people switching off reality in favor of one comforting bullshit dream or another.

I do it quite a bit myself, actually. Mine is usually "Mike Wins Lottery Jackpot!"

Or, just as often, it's imagining and rehearsing my killer slap-backs as my ex-wife tries a little tough-love-chastisement about "You really need get over it already, dude".

But all that strikes me as being pretty normal, lame, and harmless. What I'm worrying about is that the fantasy we're indulging in is double-edged:

• AI is going to make a whole world of nothing but ice cold sweet tea and oven-fresh macaroons
• AI is going to turn it all into a hell scape of unimaginable horror.

Adam Conover

But here's the thing: AI is nothing without human input. I can think up something new and unique on my own and for myself. AI can't.

It's not the machinery we have to fear - it's the machinery in the hands of the bad guys. As always.

This Is A Good Thing?

Today's Glorious Nerds

Galaxies dancing

Pillars Of Creation

Ring Nebula

Neptune

95% of our universe is made up of something we can't see or feel or hear. But it's there - we call it dark matter, or dark energy - because it has to be there, because there's no such thing as 'nothing'. Empty space is not empty.

This needs to be seen as a significant moment. It feels like we're at a weird place in our evolution - like hominins in Africa a few million years ago. We're up on our hind legs, and our little simian brains are developing pretty well, but while we may have given it a name, we still have no fucking clue what the wind is.

One question:

How can a galaxy be more than 33 billion light years away in a universe that's 14 billion years old?

You make my head hurt, nerds - but in a good way - so keep doin' that.

One other question:

Why can't we concentrate on this kinda thing, and stop with all that other shit like war and conquest and domination?

Lovin' The Nerds

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a micro-robot the size of a single biological cell.

This innovative micro-robot utilises both electricity and magnetic fields for navigation and is capable of identifying, capturing, and transporting individual cells. The micro-robot demonstrates remarkable precision in capturing single red blood cells, cancer cells, and bacteria without the need for tagging. Although tests have been conducted outside the human body, researchers hope to expand to in vivo testing for future applications.

Combining electrical and magnetic propulsion

The hybrid micro-robot, measuring only 10 microns in size, is inspired by bacteria and sperm cells, and is capable of both autonomous and controlled movement within the body. While electrical propulsion enables selective cargo loading, transport, and release, as well as cell deformation, the magnetic propulsion system offers precise steering and functionality across a wide range of temperatures and conductivity levels.

According to Gilad Yossifon, the corresponding author of the study, micro-robots which relied solely on electrical guiding mechanisms were ineffective in certain environments where the electric drive was less effective. This is where the complementary magnetic mechanism comes into play, allowing the micro-robot to overcome the limitations faced by its electrically powered counterparts.

Enhanced cell identification and capture

The hybrid micro-robot demonstrates an advanced ability to distinguish healthy cells from drug-damaged cells and dying cells undergoing natural apoptosis. This technology allows the micro-robot to capture non-labelled cells by sensing their status, making it the first study to use micro-robot-based sensing of label-free apoptotic cells.

Yossifon explains that their new development significantly advances the technology in two main aspects: hybrid propulsion and navigation. By combining both electric and magnetic propulsion systems, the micro-robot is better equipped to identify, capture, and transport single cells without the need for tagging, either for local testing or retrieval and transport to an external instrument.

Opening doors to multiple applications

This innovative hybrid micro-robot has the potential to support a wide range of medical applications, such as medical diagnosis at the single-cell level, introducing drugs or genes into cells, genetic editing, and targeted drug delivery within the body[. Additionally, it could contribute to environmental efforts by removing polluting particles, assisting in drug development, and creating a “laboratory on a particle” for further research and analysis.

The tests conducted so far have been outside the human body, but researchers are hopeful that in vivo testing will eventually become possible, unlocking even more potential for this groundbreaking technology. The study, detailing the development and capabilities of this hybrid micro-robot, was published in Advanced Science.

It's Not What We Think It Is

... or more accurately: It's not what they've been telling us to think it is.

Marketing is an astounding thing - it can do so much.

Except it can't - not really.

Ask any Russian grunt sleeping in the Ukrainian mud right now, how all that Kremlin hype is translating to battlefield success.

Anyway, artificial intelligence in real-world terms is bullshit.

I don't think we don't have to worry about it, but computers achieving consciousness, and then moving to enslave all of humankind is a low-probability thing. What we have to worry about is billionaire plutocrats who are using our infatuation with high tech shit like AI - and our willingness to be dazzled - in order to distract us from a plan to enslave us that they've been running for 50,000 years.