There is a methodical issue with that study that the authors acknowledge.
> How can higher demand lead to lower prices? … a bump in demand can allow for higher utilization of the existing generation … Provided the bump does not violate capacity constraints
I.e. data centers reduce electricity prices, as long as you don’t build new generation to support them. Whereas data centers, nationally are projected to increase energy use between 325 to 580 TWh annually by 2028 [1]. There is no way you are going to meet that without building new generation assets to meet that demand.
Coordinated opposition campaigns against misinformed and dangerous legislation has been effective in stopping bad laws [1]. After a website blackout, including a Wikipedia shutdown, lawmakers in Washington decided not to proceed with the Stop Online Privacy Act in 2012.
From your linked Wikipedia articles many corporations including Google were part of that opposite campaign. Exactly the type of people donating untold millions to our legislatures. Had nothing to do with any kind of grassroots pressure.
There were proposals to do this, using encrypted containers of data that would let users authorize apps to use just the data they needed, but the idea got tied to Web3, which got some intense public blowback between the Crypto and NFT hype cycles.
I think the only problem may be how it's phrased. I don't mind technology checking if I'm alive and awake while operating a two tonne ballistic bullet in publicml.
I do mind, however, if the data is not immediately discarded, once it does its real-time safety purpose.
Just because it's a camera based system doesn't mean it will be surveillance.
Except in mid to high end luxury cars, automakers will probably design the sensor to be completely self-contained and merely provide a "driver present, attentive" or "driver distracted" or "no driver." In high end cars they'll use it to switch driver profiles, like what Lucid already does.
Both you and that author need to go look at the massive amount of data that has been getting collected in cars, including location data, for close to two decades in any vehicle that even had the option for telematics and GPS navigation.
Also the issue is not so much the camera system, but the "OS" the car is running. A ton of vehicles now have Google's Android OS running on them and that is also a privacy dumpster fire in and of itsel.
Also, a nationwide network of license plate reading cameras is far more of a privacy threat, too.
You can do that just be aware that you will eventually be spending more than just buying a new car just to keep the current one in good repair. Car collectors get around this because they use have a different car as the daily driver, and their collected car is repaired and only used in parades and such.
You are also turning away a lot of the advances in electric vehicles. Paying for gas in your old car, could be more than payments on a brand new electric car. (that would require a lot of driving.)
$24K buys you an astonishing amount of maintenance! Unless you're talking doing a restoration on a collectible car, it's basically impossible to spend that much.
I like old cars so I know. I drive one car from the 70s, one from the 80s, two from the 90s, one from the 00s and one from 2010s (pre-screen era). All those cars put together I haven't spent $20K in maintenance over the last decade.
If a new car makes you happy and you can afford the depreciation, get one. But if the criteria is saving money, get an old car and maintain it forever.
Car collectors are not the same thing as drivers of old cars. Collectors don't want to put miles on their collectables because they want the cars to maintain (or increase) their value. It's not a question of cost. Older cars are simpler, particularly pre-electronic ignition, and easier to repair.
Just as a random example, you can get a rebuilt automatic transmission for a '69 Ford Mustang for about $350 on ebay. The cheapest transmission (not rebuilt, just taken from a wreck) you'll find for a 2020 Mustang is about $540.
Parts availability can be a problem, but especially if you drive a once popular model and are willing to do work yourself, the mileage you can get out of junkyard parts is significant.
Are they though? Have there been any major breakthroughs in the engineering that make a 2026 car more structurally secure than one from 2011? I thought the main improvements were made in software, like lane assist and whatever else. But my assumption is that you need to go back considerably more than 15 years ago to see vehicles that are meaningfully less structurally safe.
And let’s not forget: fertilizer. About half the world’s population is fed with foods produced from the Haber-Bosch process, which makes nitrogen fertilizer [1]. This relies on hydrogen inputs primarily from natural gas. The fact that we’re burning this resource that our highly populated planet depends on is suicidal.
“The output constitutes many terabytes of data and requires a high-performance computing system to run,” co-author Pawlok Dass, a SICCS research associate, said in the release.”
The largest zip file I see on the zenodo link is 404 MB in size, I’d be surprised if it unzips into anything more than a few gigabytes.
I'd be happy for someone to find more data. I just followed the links: the article links to the release [1] which contains the same quotes. That release links to the paper, published yesterday [2]. The paper contains a section "Data availability" which links to the dataset [3], and it also explains in detail what is inside, unambiguously referring to that dataset. The gizmodo article also directly links [2], so there isn't much room for ambiguity there.
I think the clue is in the sentence "this map is actually a high-level visualization of the data Vulcan provides". The source data is terabytes of data, they boiled it down to a couple of maps with 1 square kilometer resolution. Maybe the next data releases will contain more.
I don't have a clue how we go from this dataset to "down to every city block, road segment and individual factory or power plant". I guess some refineries can be measured in square kilometers, and it's a pretty good resolution for looking at highways, but other than that it seems like an exaggeration.
As a project manager, it sounds like you're making excuses. Just give me a number, trust your gut!
We have a fundamental failure to communicate, what we're doing. The game project managers and finance believe we're all playing is a regression towards the mean, where everything is additive and rounds up to nice consistent formulaic sums. Whereas software development follows power law distributions. A good piece of software can deliver 10x, 100x, or 1000x the cost to produce it (ex: distribution, cost of delivering another copy of software is near 0 once written). You don't get that sort of upside with many other investments. Finance is happy with an NPV 8% above what they invest in. This means that when software people talk, everything they say sounds foreign, and everyone assumes it's because of jargon. It's not. The fish don't know they're swimming in water. When the fisherman comes, everyone is caught off guard.
So we get what the author talks about
> The estimates stopped being estimates. They became safety railings against being held accountable for unreasonable expectations.
We. Pad. Like. Crazy. Yes this is inefficient. Some project managers recognize this. We get theory of constraints. But rather than cull the layers of hierarchy that lead to the padding in the first place, all the blame for failure goes back to developers. Get hit on the head enough and you will stop acting in good faith and pad to save your ability to feed and cloth yourself.
Padding ties up capital, it reduces credibility, it delays deployment, it adds costs through delay. It is bad for organizations. However, it is a great solution if you're a worker in a bureaucratic environment that can tolerate large costs, but is intolerant of 1-day of schedule slips. It's a great solution for complacent management, who are confused about the game they're playing and wants to report that they're "on track", which means "not late".
The agile solution of incremental value delivery is a compromise, and can produce good outcomes for functional changes. But agile has unacceptable failure modes when working on infrastructure and satisfying system constraints. Agile can work okay for programmers, but it's not a solution for engineers. Acknowledging, owning, and managing risk is more scalable, but you have to have leaders who acknowledge that they exist and have the maturity to take on that responsibility.
> Padding ties up capital, it reduces credibility, it delays deployment, it adds costs through delay.
Well done timelines are a negotiation between the stakeholders and engineers. The stakeholders need something done for the business, the engineers give a timeline. If that timeline works for everyone, great. If it doesn't, then the stakeholders will ask if it can be done in a faster time.
A timeline that lands on time, or early, is good. The point of timelines is that teams outside of engineering are resourcing their projects based on your timelines. They may have made outside commitments to customers, they may be lining up marketing, they may have embargoed PR, it may be delivered by someone at a conference, etc.
A project running late can be catastrophic. Bad customer relations, wasted marketing spend, pulling back stories from PR, delays for dependent teams, etc.
You pad to make sure your timelines aren't overly optimistic, because we're all bad at estimating, and it's possible our dependencies are too. By padding, when it comes time to negotiate for shorter timelines, you also have some wiggle room.
Bureaucratic environments tend to be larger companies and they care about schedule slips, because they have more teams being impacted, and those teams are handling larger numbers of overall projects. Schedule slips can lead to cascading failures.
This is very fascinating and a photogenic demonstration of what is possible via gene editing. My hope is that this research leads to cures of genetic diseases that have previously been incurable.
I doubt the efficacy of creating mammoth like creatures, or elephants that have mammoth traits. We’re talking about recreating an ice age creature that, ostensibly we hunted into extinction. But with climate change and a warming planet, even if we were successful in recreating mammoths, where would such a creature live? James Hansen, who testified to congress in 1988 and informed the public about climate change, recently said that the Paris goal of keeping warming under 2 degrees Centigrade is pretty much dead. At 2 degrees we’ll be seeing ice free arctics at-least once per decade. With that future, there’s simply not going to be any habitat for these creatures to live in.
So... Mammoths are elephants. Asian elephants are more closely related to mammoths than African elephants. They were likely genetically compatible. You could probably achieve a passable mammoth phenotype with selective breeding.
Also, Proboscideans existed in many climate zones through various climactic periods. They're not narrow specialists.
Mammoths just happen to capture the imagination, representing the ice age. Megafaunal extinction. Ancient hunters. Rewilding. Etc.
There's still an enormous number of edits they need to make. I don't remember the exact number they said but I believe it was in the several hundred to low thousands range. Meanwhile the rest of the world is mostly focusing on "an edit". It's not impossible, but it'll be quite an undertaking.
Enormous number of edits needed to achieve what specifically? Hairiness?
OOH... any hairy elephant they produce will be "mammoth enough" for most. Elephant + Hairy = Mammoth. It won't be the same species/subspecies as extinct mammoths, but it'll be a mammoth.
OTOH, any number of edits will be insufficient for others. It won't be the extinct species, just an artificial hybrid.
IMO... this is one that's best left as a fantasy. The moment there a little herd of resurrected mammals exist in a zoo as real life animals is the moment the mystique will dissipate.
Of course they capture the imagination... I mean... imagine wooly mammoths roaming the boulevards of Paris... or having wings and perching on top on the Eiffel Tower... sadly no cure for cancer in sight.
I was jesting, but only so. I think we are going to see weird DNA experiments in the wild, because people will do it for shits and giggle (or social media engagement).
> How can higher demand lead to lower prices? … a bump in demand can allow for higher utilization of the existing generation … Provided the bump does not violate capacity constraints
I.e. data centers reduce electricity prices, as long as you don’t build new generation to support them. Whereas data centers, nationally are projected to increase energy use between 325 to 580 TWh annually by 2028 [1]. There is no way you are going to meet that without building new generation assets to meet that demand.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-eval...