> If trees did not shed their leaves, their soft vegetation would certainly freeze during winter time, damaging and, no doubt, killing the tree.
This is just plain wrong, and makes no sense. If the leaves froze and died during the winter, how is this different from the tree losing the leaves to begin with?
Trees lose their leaves to stop the process of drawing water up from the roots through their trunks. If water were to go through the freeze/thaw cycle inside the long "straws" of the tree trunk, the tree would be torn apart from the expansion/contraction cycle of the ice.
About 10 years ago, we had a freak snow storm in early October in the northeast us.
The trees that normally shed their leaves had not done so yet and huge numbers of them suffered serious breaks from the weight of the snow clinging to the leaves.
It was at that point that I realized the purpose of shedding leaves in the winter.
Prior to that I used to think, "Okay, so what if there is LESS sun in the winter time? Why bother shedding leaves when you can pick up some extra energy from winter sunlight? And you don't have to expend the energy rebuilding leaves in the spring.'
My suspicion is that the leaves fall primarily to avoid snow-induced
catastrophic breaks and related damage.
It would be exactly as funny and exactly as interesting, which is to say: not very.
This is right up there with noticing that sometimes the "b" in certain English words is completely silent! Haha isn't that totally irrational and crazy you guys??
Well, there are some languages that semi-regularly update their orthographies to better match their pronunciations.
And yes, the grammarians arbitrarily inserting random silent letter into middle of the words so those look more regular or match the (supposed) etymologies are annoying. English "doubt" never historically had "b" inside it either written or spoken: it was "dout", and it was pronounced like this. Same happened to French "doigt" — it used to be "doit" for as long as language itself was called French, but then some Latin-loving guy decided to stick "g" in so that it would be more obvious that the word descended from Latin "digitus".
I didn't find it particularly funny either. It's mostly predicated on this belief that somehow we "should" have optimized our date and time system and that it's silly that we're using an inconsistent, legacy system formed for many cultural reasons.
My analogy is that it's like writing a tweetstorm about how aliens landed on Earth to find that humans use different languages! And different writing systems! How quaint!
> I just don't get it. Governments around the world and spending trillions on this stuff so why is there no clear answer on this?
Why would there need to be a "clear answer" on something that quite obviously wouldn't work?
Everyone here has done a great job of explaining to you the complexity of your "simple" solution, but you don't seem to want to accept any of the explanations. You seem to think that your back-of-the-napkin calculation can just be magically turned into a major part of our transportation infrastructure.
Cars aren't television remotes. The batteries in the cars aren't your standard AA battery. The situation is far more complicated than you're making it out to be.
Give me a break, what I have seen is someone showed me this is already being done in China. So anything you say is an excuse that is dangerously preventing climate change prevention efforts. I literally saw a video of NIO doing this and arguments like yours "cars aren't television remotes" "it's too hard" are bullshit. The interstate freeway project was hard yet it was done with trillions of dollars spent because it had to. Since china is doing it the only thing hard is that it costs more but our tax dollars are set aside to subsidize this shit but home owning rich people can make electric cars work for them with chargers so everyone better find extra time and houses fast else you're shit out of luck.
Governments can force car companies to use stanrdized connections, every car has plenty of government regulated things like this.
I said ELI5 so you can explain to me why my back of napkin calculation does not work when seemingly endless subsidies and cost that is passed down to consumers are in the works. NIO is already doing this without a $300B subsidy...oh and get this: selling batteries is more profitable for companies! One car is one battery but when battery stations also buy batteries that is more profit. Tesla literally sells batteries to power grids because of profit.
"Who will spend tens of billions to do this" is the question and we have an answer now, but you don't seem to gey that it will be largely wasted because people will not buy electric cars if they have to wait in line every day to get a charge or filling up the charge can cause them to be late to places. An inconvenient solution is a dead solution, in a free market consumer satisfaction comes first.
For every story like this, I imagine there's (at least) one other where some green engineer set up a simulation with garbage assumptions, and argued that since the calculation was done by <insert advanced software package>, they must be right.
I could tell you many stories of witnessing otherwise smart engineers run the worst possible simulations I've ever seen, but argue that their results were correct simply because the computer generated them.
Your post is exactly why the engineers were dismissing "computer numbers".
I was certainly a very green engineer, but I had played around a lot with numerical simulations in college. I knew I could get better, faster, and more reliable results with a computer program than the calculators everyone else used.
My lead was right to be very skeptical, and I enjoyed the challenge he set up for me. I had no problem being asked to prove my results were correct.
There's no distinction between "computer numbers" and human numbers, either the model has a bad assumption or it's good enough, computer or no computer.
The point is that we shouldn't trust a model just because it is run on a computer, just as we should trust that hand written calculations may not have numerical mistakes.
You used the word literally four times in your post, and even twice in one sentence.
What's the fascination with this word? It seems to be used to add completely unneeded emphasis, rather than anything resembling its original definition.
My best guess is that I just did something wrong lol. Autocast seems to convert most of the model to fp16 anyways and that works great, so I'll just keep using that!
You're right. I guess if you can't tell the difference, that means everyone who claims to be able to tell the difference is lying!
I'm not particularly familiar with squirrels and something about that "photo" looks very off. If you showed it to me in a vacuum I'd just assume someone was trying to make a highly stylized version of something they had a photo reference for, but under no circumstances would I believe that's a real photo.
I'm not accusing anyone of lying, I'm suggesting that they might not have fully seen what this technology is capable of yet. I'm sure that I haven't. The whole point of the post we are discussing this under is the rate of progress in the space.
I'm saying I'm personally happy to pay for the subscription if I don't use it, and don't care if they move to a "refill" model. So my take is that not all the prime customers are scammed.
That being said it's been a while since I did the signup flow, maybe it's gotten way worse, do you have an example?
This is just plain wrong, and makes no sense. If the leaves froze and died during the winter, how is this different from the tree losing the leaves to begin with?
Trees lose their leaves to stop the process of drawing water up from the roots through their trunks. If water were to go through the freeze/thaw cycle inside the long "straws" of the tree trunk, the tree would be torn apart from the expansion/contraction cycle of the ice.