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Europe and Japan are great at the former, the latter no chance.

Europe and Japan should be totally capable of producing super inexpensive batteries. They just don't, at the moment.


How? By building entirely automated factories, they way they do for medicine production?


If you have Republican senators or a Republican House rep, call their offices and tell them what you think of this.


They're all complicit in this. They'll do nothing. And Susan Collins will be very "concerned".


Yes! This will be the time they finally push back on Trump.


Midterms are coming up next year. If they are afraid their association with Trump might take them down, they'll crack.

Honestly I suspect fear of Trump is really their only motivation right now.


So long as most of these states have party primaries, particularly closed party primaries, it doesn't really matter because anyone insufficiently pro-Trump is getting primaried hard.


They still have to face competition in the general though. If Republican voters are disgusted enough, they might vote for a Democrat, but they are more likely to stay home and just not vote. Which could be enough for them to lose their seats.


> If Republican voters are disgusted enough

If Republican voters were capable of being disgusted enough, it would have happened by now.


Here's a proposal for an amendment restricting the pardon power: https://cohen.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congress...

Here's the proposed text:

SECTION 1. The President shall not have the power to grant pardons and reprieves to—

  (1) the President’s self;

  (2) any person, up to a third degree relation, of the President, or a spouse thereof;

  (3) any current or former member of the President’s administration;

  (4) any person who worked on the President’s presidential campaign as a paid employee;

  (5) any person or entity for an offense that was motivated by a direct and significant personal or pecuniary interest of any of the foregoing persons; or

  (6) any person or entity for an offense that was at the direction of, or in coordination with, the President.
Any pardon issued for a corrupt purpose shall be invalid.

SECTION 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.


Even if this law passes, it will face a problem of violating the constitution: ArtII.S2.C1.3.1


It wouldn't be an ordinary law, it would be a constitutional amendment, so that wouldn't be an issue. It's probably not going to happen, though. Amending the U.S. constitution is incredibly difficult.


~200,000 m/s is unfathomably fast.

It's about 110,000 fathoms per second.


Or if you prefer leagues, at that speed it would still take 9 minutes to reach the depth in Jules Verne's book.


The title refers to the distance the _Nautilus_ traveled while submerged, not the depth it reached.


Until I realized this, the title was quite confusing. If “20,000 leagues” were referring to depth, it would be enough to go all the way through the Earth, exit the other side, and then make it a quarter of the way to the moon.


Yeah he really needed a comma.

20,000 Leagues, Under the Sea

I think it reads cleaner.


Here's the Nature article that the university press release links to: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08234-x


Reminds me very much of much of the frontier science Ashton Forbes (the crazy zero-point energy guy) has been exposing on Twitter. For example:

"There is a very deep connection between magnetism and zero-point energy. So yeah, go ahead and build a magnetic motor. It's possible to draw this energy just using spins of electrons and permanent magnets." https://x.com/JustXAshton/status/1830621589848928459

Unfortunately I can't find some of the more relevant posts I have seen recently. But maybe someone else on HN also follows this guy.

Also: Magnet 900,000 times stronger than Earth reveals directional mass particles https://www.yahoo.com/news/magnet-900-000-times-stronger-140...


Just because energy is there doesn't mean you can use it. You can only use changes in energy, like a battery discharging or a log burning. Zero point energy is the resting energy of empty space, and the only theoretical scenarios where it changes involve the laws of physics being changed and the universe being destroyed. In a sense it's the tension of having laws of nature. I sincerely hope it's not on the menu of consumable fuels.

It's also worth mentioning that quasiparticles are bursts of energy that move through materials. For example a soundwave is a burst of quasiparticles, and the quietest possible sound is one quasiparticle, a phonon. I think this disclaimer should accompany all of the press releases about new particles discovered in condensed matter (solids, basically).


It seemed odd to me that the article gave the authors' email addresses but no link to the actual article!


Thanks. I’ll take that over an over-hyped press release from a university PR person.


Turns out the Google AI's 15-day forecasts are for the weather in Mountain View.

Which I can forecast 15 days out, too.


There's a little cautionary story I like to tell about predictions and probabilities

There is a man living near a volcano. He has put up a sign outside his house for travelers, proudly declaring: "Will not erupt today. Accuracy: 100%."

One night, after thirty years of this, the volcano erupts for a few hours at night, oozing magma on its opposite side.

The next morning, the man is grateful that his house is fine, but feels a pang of sadness as he replaces the famous sign with a new one: "Will not erupt today. Accuracy rate: 99.99%."


Alternatively if he predicted the probability of eruption every day as 0.01%, he’d be a perfect forecaster!





Yes, most people can predict weather in the dessert. But why do you claim this is what happened here? Or was it a joke? Because people took it serious.

Neither the article, nor the linked paper state that. But they have all the details on precision and condition.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08252-9


It was a joke about how silly valley based companies will claim the moon and back and then design a car that doesn’t know dumping snow in the boot is bad.


The work was done by DeepMind, which is in the UK. Weather in the UK is quite variable and difficult to predict (which is why the English are always talking about it).


English weather depends on wind direction:

  south-west: mild, wet
  north-west: cool, wet
  north-east: cold, dry
  south-east: hot, dry
If you also use a simple barometer, to get pressure level (say, 4 bands) and pressure change direction (rising/falling), you can be 95% accurate.

Final finesse:

  Red sky at night shepherd's delight
  Red sky in the morning shepherd's warning


Here's the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08252-9

It was trained on global data, and makes global forecasts.


Wait, we're actually reading the article now instead of making jokes?


Unfortunately I think a lot of people seem to have taken Ankaios' joke as an actual claim about the research.

(ex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42388734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42387291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385397)


Lemme guess:

Night and morning low clouds, burning off in the afternoon.

Source: lived in Los Angeles for a dozen years, saw the weather forecast a few times


Nope. An excerpt from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08252-9:

>Figure 2 shows some of the forecast samples of GenCast for Typhoon Hagibis, shortly before it made landfall in Japan on 12 October 2019. Figure 2b–e,g,h–k,m shows that GenCast forecasts are sharp and have spherical harmonic power spectra that closely match the ERA5 ground truth at both 1- and 15-day lead times


Seriously. Let's see an accurate forecast for Cleveland, Ohio. Even local forecasters can barely get the next day correct on any sort of consistent basis.


And Apple Maps at launch worked great... in Cupertino.


I can beat you. I can forecast it for 16 days.


haha, one of the few times my gut reaction to something on HN was dead on.

"The easiest job in the world is the weatherperson in San Diego... And now, Ryan, what's the weather going to be like today?'

'uh, nice. back to you!'"


San Diego weather forecasting is the meteorological equivalent of being on cruise control


> 80% of the time, the WeatherMan is right every time!


Thanks Ollie


Well, I guess now democracy dies in anticipation of darkness.


Things that go trump in the night.


They're currently discussing how difficult it was to design a credit card reader for the Robotaxi that would reliably fail whenever it detects cash in the passenger's wallet.


Is this a joke? Do they prefer the taxis get paid in cash?


Every Taxi driver in NYC has a credit card machine that is broken unless you show them you don't have cash.


I was in NYC last month and paid fine with card, and the driver clearly saw cash in my wallet?


I dont know how true it is now but I can tell you once upon a time they preferred cash and yes their machine frequently seemed to be broken or had some issue. My experiences were a long time ago before the rise of Uber and Lyft


I take cabs in NYC often and that never happens.


This is complete and utter bullshit. Whatever your personal experience, I have ridden taxis hundreds of times over the course of 2 decades and not once has a cab demanded I pay cash. I exclusively used credit cards and have been since roughly 2009


It's a running joke but also still true in many cities in America. Cab drivers really do prefer to be paid in cash.


Non-software-developer humans often use things called "lamps" to illuminate spaces at night. Unfortunately, illumination inhibits effective nighttime coding.


> humans often use things called "lamps" to illuminate spaces at night

I call those "monitors."


That's a bug. We should fix that.


Is "Moon Policy" anywhere near the ballot box? Particularly for senators?

It is in Huntsville.

I suggest you read up on former Senator Richard Shelby.


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