The total voltage or amperage of the battery pack does not mean anything for the battery cells. You can put more cells in series and get a higher voltage at lower current, or more in parallel and get a higher current at a lower voltage. But all individual cells will run at the same voltage in either configuration (iirc between 3 and 4V), and the current per cell will also be the same for a given load regardless of the situation.

The main thing a higher battery pack voltage accomplishes is that the cables connected to the battery don’t need to be as thick, as the required thickness of a cable depends only on current, not voltage.

I’ve heard a teacher using that as a test to see which students are using AI: If the student turn in a report full of em-dashes, then the teacher would put them in front of a laptop running Word and asks “can you please show me how you type those long dashes that you used all over your report?”

If they can’t do it, then their report is considered AI-generated or plagiarism (which are considered equivalent by the school). If they could do it they would get the benefit of the doubt, but when I heard it he hadn’t had a single student pass that test yet.

It’s a better and likely far more accurate test than those complete bullshit “AI detectors”.

Unfortunately not likely going to happen since AI is used more and more to write software, and AI doesn’t tend to write very efficient software.

Yeah, it’s not a miracle drug, but it does allow you to diet on easy mode. What you’re supposed to do while on the drug is switching to healthier food and healthier eating habits. The drug should make that easier as it should remove the cravings that you’d normally get from switching to less calorie dense meals, and if you’re eventually used to healthier meals then it should be easier to keep that up once you’re off the drug.

But you do have to actively build those healthier eating habits while on the drug to get that lasting effect. It offers an easier way to switch to a healthier lifestyle, but if you don’t actually make that switch then the effect will indeed just wear off immediately once you stop taking the drug.

Around here public chargers are ridiculously overpriced so even if you use slow chargers you end up paying more per km for a plug-in hybrid than if you only put fuel in it. And if you want to use a fash charger then it’s of course even more expensive. You only get cheaper costs per km if you can charge at home.

I think the concept behind plug-in hybrids is great: The battery of an EV is by far the most expensive part, and also by far the most polling part to produce. So making a car that acts like an EV with a battery only just big enough for your daily commute, with a back-up power system for when you need to go further and to avoid range anxiety makes a lot of sense. But unfortunately they are held back from reaching their potential by lacking charging infrastructure and too high electricity costs.

Alternatieve method tot know thing from future: wait.

I’ve also experimented with this. In my experience, getting the NPCs to behave the way you want with just a prompt is hard and inconsistent, and quickly falls apart when the conversation gets longer.

I’ve gotten much better results by starting from a small model and fine-tuning it on lore-accurate conversations (you can use your conversations with larger models as training materials for that). In theory you can improve it further with RLHF, but I haven’t tried that myself yet.

The downside of this is of course that you’re limited to open-weight models for which you have enough compute resources available to fine-tune them. If you don’t have a good GPU then the free Google Collab sessions can give you access to a GPU with 15GB of VRAM. The free version has a daily limit on GPU time though so set up your training code to regularly save checkpoints so that you can continue the training on another day if you run out. Using LoRa instead of doing a full fine-tune can also reduce the memory and computational resources required for the fine-tune (or in other words, allows you to use a larger and better model with your available resources).

I am typing this on a 5 year old Android phone. It has 128GB of memory and 8GB of RAM, very decent cameras, a beautiful OLED screen and a processor that is more than fast enough for everything I do with it. And even now the battery still lasts two days with normal use. It cost me about €300 at the time.

Unfortunately the Android version is getting so far behind that some apps are starting to get a few issues, so I have been checking out some black Friday deals for new phones, but they look very disappointing.

In the current market it seems like I’d have to pay about €500 to effectively just get a side-grade. All €300 offerings look like just a straight up downgrade in any way apart from the more recent android version.

So I think I’ll hold on to this one a while longer. Hardware-wise it’s still in perfect condition, and if software support really becomes an issue then perhaps I’ll try out a custom ROM.

The main reason is tech debt and proprietary software. Most companies have decades of software infrastructure all built on Microsoft based systems. Transitioning all that stuff to Linux is a massive investment, especially taking into account the downtime it’ll cause combined with the temporary decrease in productivity when everyone has to get trained and build up experience with the new platform.

And then you have to deal with proprietary software. A lot of niche corporate or industrial hardware only supports Windows. And you probably have to regularly interact with customers who use Windows and share files with you that can only be opened in Windows only proprietary software.

Linux also frequently struggles with a lot of weird driver issues and other weird quirks, causing an increased burden on the IT department.

Basically you’re looking at a massive investment in the short term, for significantly reduced productivity in the long run. And all that mostly to save a bit of hardware costs, which are only a fraction of the operating costs for most companies. Just sticking with Windows ends up being the more economical choice for most companies.

For me it’s mostly for text and content with fine lines where the difference is the most obvious. I use a 1440p monitor at work and a 4k one at home. Text is noticeably sharper and easier to read on my 4k monitor and remains readable at smaller font sizes.

In this case it’s somewhat different.

We have seen almost these exact formations on earth, where they are created by microbiological lifeforms which could survive in the condition of how we expect ancient Mars was like when this sediment was formed.

We have been able to reproduce similar patterns in the lab, but only in conditions with much higher temperatures or with much higher acidity than what we’d expect Mars to have been like back then.

So the possible options are:

1. Ancient Mars was how we expect it to have been, and these patterns were formed by ancient microbiological, Martian lifeforms.

2. These patterns were formed by a known chemical process, and ancient Mars was much hotter or more acidic (or both) than we expected based on all other research.

3. These patterns were formed by a currently unknown chemical process that does not require the high temperature of acidity that the known processes require.

So in this case it’s not just wishful thinking. The hypothesis of this being formed by microbiological life is the hypothesis that best fits with what we currently know about the conditions in which the sediment was formed (which doesn’t fully prove that it’s true, but does give it credibility). And even if options 2 or 3 will end up being the right explanation, then we’ll still at least learn something interesting from this.

I just searched, and the Wikipedia page on USB contains some basic information. If the connector is facing towards you and the clips to secure the cable are facing down, then the pins are numbered 1-5 from left to right. Pin 4 is the “ID” pin which is used to detect if the A or B type connector is inserted, and pin 5 is the ground. In an A type connector those two pins are bridged, so you’d want to short those two pins together if you want the device you plug it in to see your type B cable as if it has a type A connector (the connector is a slightly different shape, but that doesn’t matter, it’ll still fit and the ID pin is the only method used to detect the connector type).

If you short the pins together by inserting something conductive inside the connector then you’ll likely also short them to the case, but that shouldn’t matter as the case is internally almost always connected to the ground too.

If you take the route of soldering two cables together, I looked into it a bit more and it’s apparently a bigger mess than I anticipated. Hardware manufacturers have always treated the USB specs as more of a suggestion than as fixed standards, and apparently this is by far the worst when it comes to micro USB. Most phones and tablets with micro USB which support OTG use the type B receptacle instead of the AB receptacle, even though according to the standards only the AB receptacle is allowed for a device that can act as the host. The majority of micro USB OTG cables are then designed for such devices and use a type B connector for the host side. So if you use an OTG cable to harvest the micro-A connector from, make sure you get a standards-compliant cable. You can see the difference by the shape: for the proper micro-A connector the metal casing on the outside is rectangular in shape, while for the much more common micro-B connector it is roughly trapezoidal. According to the standards the plastic inside the connector should also be white for a type A connector (and black for type B), but those colours are probably the most often violated part of the standards.

I know that you can make a USB mini B connection appear as an USB mini A, because I have seen someone do that. He just made a small ball of aluminium foil and shoved it into the connector. The pins that need to be shorted are next to eachother and at the side (but I don’t remember if it was the left or right side), so it was still doable to get it in the right place. Micro USB is internally very similar, so it should be possible there too, but the inside is quite a bit smaller so it’ll be a lot harder.

In your case it might be easier to solder 2 cables together. It is a bit annoying to solder USB cables together because the cables are shielded, but there are only 4 internal wires and the data rates are low enough that it doesn’t really matter if the shielding is imperfect. USB OTG cables should have an A type connector, and they are generally relatively cheap and easy to obtain. To get the USB-C connector, use a cable that has a USB 2 type of connector on the other side (regular, mini or micro), to make sure that the cable only has the USB 2 wires (USB 3 cables have extra wires in them, which aren’t really feasible to extend).

A micro USB-AB port has an extra electrical contact which is shorted together with another pin (probably with ground, but I don’t remember) when a USB-A connector is inserted, but left unconnected when a USB-A connector is inserted. Some USB driver chips require this extra pin to be shorted to enter host/master mode.

This is done because to have USB communication one device needs to be the master, and the other the slave. Micro and mini USB cables handle this by having an A type connector on one side and a B type on the other side, and whichever device sees the A side will act as the master.

In OP’s case the firmware is probably expecting the device to act as the master, but with a B type connector inserted it’s unable to do so.

Natural hydrogen deposits do exist, but they’ve only been mapped out quite recently and it is still unknown if it can be extracted in a safe and economically viable manner.

There are probably more remakes/remasters that do use AI upscaling for background assets than those that don’t.

I think the problem is that, while the model isn’t actually reasoning, it’s very good at convincing people it actually is.

I see current LLMs kinda like an RPG character build with all ability points put into Charisma. It’s actually not that good at most tasks, but it’s so good at convincing people that they start to think it’s actually doing a great job.

Oh sure I’m “reading airline propaganda”.

If you want to claim any counter-argument is some evil company’s propaganda, then please go back to your echo chamber and I am no longer interested in discussing with you. Goodbye.

During long-haul flights (which is the case for trans-atlantic flights), planes average about 100g CO2 per passenger-kilometer.

Ocean-worthy passenger ships are frequently in excess of 200g CO2 per passenger-kilometer for basic passenger transport vessels. Cruise ships are much worse even, frequently emitting >400g CO2 per passenger-kilometer.

So, how would boats be better for crossing the Atlantic?

Passenger boats are far worse for the environment than passenger planes.