I cannot believe that America is dumb enough to hand the keys to its Space Program to this grifter, but there you go.

This is a good in-depth overview of some of the fundamentals that are currently deciding what happens with robotaxis.

I think fediverse people are wildly overestimating how much 99% of Reddit users care about this. The mod team on r/futurology (I'm one of them) set up a fediverse site just over a month ago (here you go - https://futurology.today/ ) It's been modestly successful so far, but the vast majority of subscribers seem to be coming from elsewhere in the fediverse, not migrants from Reddit.

This is despite the fact we've permanently stickied a post to the top of the sub. r/futurology has over 19 million subscribers, and yet the fediverse is only attracting a tiny trickle of them. I doubt most people on Reddit even know what the word fediverse means.

Good news for pigs. I'll be delighted to see factory farming disappear and be replaced by tech like this.

As sad as this topic is, this is a much better way to go than a prolonged miserable painful death where you suffer the last months of a terminal disease.

So the same people who have no problem about using other people's copyrighted work, are now crying when the Chinese do the same to them? Find me a nano-scale violin so I can play a really sad song.

You know why Trump really hates her?

Because as a bishop, she can move diagonally anywhere on the board, but as a Russian pawn, he can only move one square at a time.

Microsoft has cash reserves of $75 billion.

Microsoft - If you really want to convince us that nuclear power is part of the future, why can't you use some of your own money? Why does every single nuclear suggestion always rely on bailouts from taxpayers? Here's a thought, if you can't pay for it yourself - just pick the cheaper option that taxpayers don't have to pay for - you know renewables and grid storage? The stuff that everybody else, all over the world, is building near 99% of new electricity generation with.

Any time I hear claims that involve hitherto unknown laws of Physics I'm 99.99% sure I'm dealing with BS - but then again, some day someone will probably genuinely pull off such a discovery.

This is what is being banned.

• AI used for social scoring (e.g., building risk profiles based on a person’s behavior).
• AI that manipulates a person’s decisions subliminally or deceptively.
• AI that exploits vulnerabilities like age, disability, or socioeconomic status.
• AI that attempts to predict people committing crimes based on their appearance.
• AI that uses biometrics to infer a person’s characteristics, like their sexual orientation.
• AI that collects “real time” biometric data in public places for the purposes of law enforcement.
• AI that tries to infer people’s emotions at work or school.
• AI that creates — or expands — facial recognition databases by scraping images online or from security cameras.

Almost everything on this list is outlawing what an authoritarian regime would want. How long before the EU bans the American Big Tech AI, that it seems is toadying to Trump to enable it.

The Chinese automaker BYD reminds me of the famous phrase attributed to the sci-fi writer William Gibson - "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

Future EV cars will be cheap to own and run. Self-driving tech will lower insurance costs. You can charge them with your home solar setup if you want. They'll last far longer with lower maintenance costs thanks to simple electric engines with few moving parts. As their construction gets more roboticized it will lower their costs further. The batteries that make up a huge chunk of their current costs are falling in price too. CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker, is set to cut costs in half by mid 2024.

Some people still think gasoline and ICE cars have a long life ahead of them, and don't realize the industries behind both are dead men walking.

NASA really is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its lunar plans. Its SLS system is a disaster, but pork barrel politics means it can't ditch it. So it lives on, zombie-like, to suck the life and money out of better options.

Meanwhile, it's placed all its eggs in a SpaceX basket. That company is run by someone who routinely exaggerates timelines for delivery and fails to meet them. Guess what? It's happening again. A commenter on the OP article sums up what SpaceX has to do before humans can go back to the Moon.

• Re-light Starship engines
• Achieve stable orbit
• Dock with another Starship
• Transfer propellant
• Use transferred propellant
• Dock with Orion and/or Dragon
• Design a life support system for a volume much larger than Dragon
• Build life support system
• Test life support
• Achieve escape velocity for TLI
• Demo propulsive landing on Luna
• Demo takeoff from Luna after sitting idle
• Dock with Gateway (?) up and down

DeepSeek buzz puts tech stocks on track for $1.2 trillion drop

Just a few months ago many American commenters thought their country was 'years ahead' of China when it came to AI dominance. That narrative has been blown out of the water.

I wonder when this is going to seriously affect world oil demand? People used to think "Peak Oil" would be when supply was constrained, it turns out it will be when demand is constrained.

It's still early days for this tech. Right now its maximum output is 800W, which is not a lot. OP mentions this delivering 3kWh on a typical day, about 10% of a typical US household's consumption.

But it's the direction of travel that is interesting here. This will get better, and cheaper. Then systems like it will be able to deliver 25% of daily consumption, then half. All with affordable systems you can install and set up yourself.

Many people have nightmares about dystopian and apocalyptic futures. I would feel safer in a world where electricity production was decentralized and could survive major disasters.

Worth pointing out that covering parking lots with solar became the law this year in France. A study there says that if half France's parking lots were covered in solar panels their output would exceed all of France's nuclear power stations.

https://cleantechnica.com/...

Google's search page has got noticeably worse in recent years, for a long list of reasons - here's another indication it's going to get even worse. I find myself using Duckduckgo more and more - it has its problems, but they are not as bad.

The EU is to change the law to make social media owners and company executives personally liable with fines, or potential jail sentences, for failing to deal with misinformation that promotes violence. That's good, but teaching critical thinking is even more important.

AI is about to make the threat of misinformation orders of magnitude greater. It is now possible to fake images, video, and audio indistinguishable from reality. We need new ways to combat this, and relying on top-down approaches isn't enough. There's another likely consequence - expect lots of social media misinformation telling you how bad critical thinking is. The people who use misinformation don't want smart, informed people who can spot them lying.

One of the age-old problems with markets is their tendency to renterism and monopolies if left unchecked. Now we have an added problem. Software, given ever-accelerating power by AI, may come to accelerate the capture of more and more of the economy to these forces.

This legal action is an attempt to address that, but is it enough? A recent economics paper points out that although renterism ( defined as the capture of scarce assets by groups who do nothing productive with them, and merely extract rents) is growing in Western economies, little is being done about it.

We seem to be heading for an economic reckoning with AI & robots and work and human jobs, maybe this issue will be dealt with then.

If ever there was an industry that could do with some technological overhaul - its housing. 3D Printing threatens to do the job, and seems to have the right tools, but never takes off - will this be the one that does?

At $1,000 per module they offer solutions to homelessness in western countries.