The random chat thread for throwing out things that don't matter

Posted by: @mrsponz

Yes. that solid state glass battery sounds pretty amazing. Tesla, Toyota and even General Motors are currently looking into it. One of the rumors about the new mid-engine Corvette was that it was designed to be electric. That makes sense from an engineering / design standpoint.  They won't need to do too much re-designing once the new battery is perfected. Hmm, maybe that is why there is no manual transmission option. Kinda smart on the GM end. Now if Toyota is holding back on a new MR2, pending this new solid state battery, I'd be all over that. It could make the old original Tesla Roadster seem like a golf cart in comparison.

I heard that rumor also. It would be the new Chevy volt.  GM would have messed this up royally and its good they stuck to the basics of what they are good at. 

 I have seen the battery tech article on Youtube about a month ago and I found it pretty amazing. I know Panasonic was working on the next generation of lithium ion batteries but apparently they came to an impasse.  

 Once they get 5G and this battery tech it will change the world we live in radically in our evolution but this time it will be about robots.  Our future is not going to be about electric cars, its going to be about our extinction as we will face an existential crisis. 

 We have been stuck in a funk where progress is rehashing the 80s and it sucks.  Probably the worst time to be a kid. 

Just to be clear, I was not making fun of the man's name itself, just noting that it sounded like a joke name (and in roughly the same context as the sketch I alluded to).

John B. Goodenough is a giant in his field. I regret that he does not have another 100 years to continue his work.

Totally unrelated, and staying in the scattered and random nature of the thread, but speaking of "giants": have ya seen this guy Trevor Lawrence? I dont watch a lot of sports, but I have begun to love watching that guy do his thing. His style really has created a whole new dimension to the game. Defense has a new problem that nobody really plans much for up 'til now. If he were to put on another 40 lbs of muscle, he would be terrifying.

Posted by: @dev

Posted by: @mrsponz

Yes. that solid state glass battery sounds pretty amazing. Tesla, Toyota and even General Motors are currently looking into it....

 ...

Once they get 5G and this battery tech it will change the world we live in radically in our evolution but this time it will be about robots.  Our future is not going to be about electric cars, its going to be about our extinction as we will face an existential crisis. 

@Dev,

IMO, we are already in the midst of a tech-driven existential crisis. We have created devices and networks that, for whatever reason, have been very efficiently bringing out and reinforcing the very worst of our antisocial tendencies.

Robots will "destroy" us by their existence and ability to supplant human labor. Agree with Yang's neo-Robin Hood solutions or not -- he didn't invent these concepts and he doesn't top my list because of implementation details, but many of his points are still valid-- we will shortly have billions of mouths to feed, still, but jobs will become increasingly scarce.

Not everyone is an artist nor skilled at things that are both profitable/valuable and out of the grasp of automation. AI will exacerbate this significantly. Art and music are still out of the reach of AI, but other tech has made all that work so easy to steal that many artists still struggle far more than necessary just to get paid at all.

There will be quite a socioeconomic upheaval when all manufacturing and most professional service work becomes automated.  This economic strain will easily rival or exceed the new levels of social nastiness and general irresponsibility we see being enabled by smartphones and [anti-]social media, semi-autonomous vehicles, easy-this-easy-that-easy-everything that just causes mental atrophy and a general bias toward mediocrity and antipathy.

The overlords will still blow smoke and spew lies to keep us all set upon each other (the Mexican factory robots took your job, it's punishment from God because we allow gays to live, and other such hate-core asshattery), while they quietly add new stories and wings to their fortresses.

Maybe it would be better to have the robots go Skynet and kill us all with the quickness rather than have to watch ourselves do it to each other for the next few generations, or to see ourselves stop just short of that and return to some tech-driven Feudalism (did Feudalism ever really die, or did it just get a brand makeover?), which is what the Yang robot-rebate really is. An instant Skynet extinction may be more merciful than some other tech-driven global crisis, and they abound, that is still ultimately caused by people and their selfish, shitty "reasons". But tech and robots are still just tools in the end.

Robots don't kill people; people kill people. The existential crisis is now.

I hate hearing myself sound so pessimistic, but the facts of this decade's social decline are hard for me to ignore, and right now it looks like a lot of people pride themselves on just how hateful and stubborn they can be just so they can be the alpha-douche in their little social circles.

I truly believe, however, that these same tools have the capacity to solve most of humanity's external problems and let the species take the next steps. All we have to do, really, is figure out how to stop hating each other and cutting each other's throats for what are overwhelmingly very stupid and selfish reasons.

Wow, doom and gloom!

Here's a thought - It's pointless to look out further in the future than your lifespan, so concentrate on using your time the way you'd like.  Governments and corporations run the show and shepherd the world direction and unfortunately do not give a shit.  So what you are left with is a lifespan in which you must figure out how to meet your basic needs and if you want how to achieve more.  You can't predict nor influence the far future, and even if you could - you won't be around to experience it.   

Not necessarily only doom and gloom. An inflection point. People are perfectly capable of healthy growth, they just have to want it.

Im only looking at quality of life.  Sure on  the index scale of being fed and free of diseases are going to be better but for what.  If the overall metal health is not good around you because of an  internet addition and some form of mass dementia it can and will stop you from your pursuit of happiness with the time you have on this earth especially when you remember how it use to be.  Its like you arrive at a party where drinks are served and by the time it gets to be 10pm you are asked to leave. 

 I struggled with this thinking that its the old man inside me bitching about the new generation but its not that at all when you see children who never lived during a better time period regressing towards it also. John Hughes was not that great of a director. 

 Its baffling to see that the number one song  was the remake of  Toto's  Africa. When the original came out it was just a good song among many.  

 Sure we cant predict the future good or bad but at present its not getting better its only getting worse and with more tech I think potentially dangerous especially when real sports people are being replaced by gamers.    

Wait till Biggus Dickus hears of this...

I have a month update on my robot vacuum.  This thing has been woking great. The only time I had it stuck is when a charge cord was on the ground.  It wound up on the roller brush, stopped working to save the motor and sent me a alert to my phone letting me know the roller is stuck.  Once I pulled out the cord it finished its task and returned to home base.   I have seen the robot stuck under a table with tight chair legs everywhere and very little room to escape but it did find its way out inching its self tightly between the legs until it was free.  It goes into the tightest of corners instead of giving up making sure every square inch it can access is vacuumed which is not possible using a traditional vacuum because they are too big. 

So the question is, is it a replacement for my Dysons vacuum and the answer is yes. I did not initially think so but the suction and agitator is powerful enough.  

 I think they finally cracked it and you will see these vacuums replace uprights.  I can see better built ones replacing  maid services for offices as they get better. 

There's a guy in my neighborhood with a Landroid automatic mower.... I would imagine he probably has an automatic vacuum as well.

All I have to say is SKYNET.

Posted by: @pwnzor

There's a guy in my neighborhood with a Landroid automatic mower.... I would imagine he probably has an automatic vacuum as well.

 

All I have to say is SKYNET.

I came close to getting the Landroid.  After a ton of research I realize its not for me. Its basically like the stupid vacuum that bumps into everything  and sometimes gets stuck by going over the boundary wire. 

 I Robot is coming out with their smart robotic mower next month at CES that doesn't require a boundary wire and works using the same technology the newer vacs use and will mow in back and forth lines where you can set virtual boundaries for garden beds and no go areas. If the price is right I might go for it or just wait until next year once the copy cats mass produce them. 

I came back from my first CES. 18 hour work days or so for five days, just a couple hours of sleep a night. It was rough. And also incredible. I saw so many cool things. And also a pillow with a cat's tail that wags. Yeah...

Pioneer killed it with their CES booth. A restored 1971 Land Cruiser with a new 10" floating head unit, and two Scion iQs modded kinda ricely. Perfectly. 

That Pioneer unit looks like an iPad.  

Interesting heater core location in that Land Cruiser. Probably the only one in existence that can be worked on without spending hours tearing up a dashboard. 

I wanted to see what the hype was about so I picked up one of these for a song because photographers everywhere are going nuts for Fujifilim cameras and some are migrating away from Nikon and Canon or just making it part of their arsenal since its lens adaptor friendly.     I was actually suppose to receive a  well used camera which I didn't mind but what I got seems like a demo model  where it appeared to have never been used. Deal of the century as you win some and lose some in photography.  

 What makes Fujifilm great you might ask. They are making a real photographers camera that are intuitive with inspiring ergonomics.  Their Xtrans sensor technology is able to simulate film like warmth. Also if you are an adaptor of manual focus lens they have focus features that makes it easy to focus with its OLED viewfinder including split screen prism like simulation. 

  Photography is dead these days and Olympus is going under and Nikon is in real trouble. It is possible that these companies might actually revert back to being actual camera focused, who knows. 

Anyway don't let the size of this camera fool you as its  being used as a working photographers camera and in some cases it has  more flexibility than some of the top of the line stuff. The only difference the professional models give you is extreme reliability and durability.  Apart from that the image output of the Fuji line of cameras are just as good if not better than  any top of the line camera excluding medium format.