I recently switched to Firefox, for a number of reasons that really aren't relevant to this post, but his arguments (at least in the summary) don't hold water in my experience.

(1) Pocket: One of the first things I remove when customizing FF. I've not seen anyone suggest it, and seen a fair amount of dislike for it.

(2) Memory Use: Perhaps valid prior to 2000, but c'mon, every system I've worked with (both at home and at work) have a minimum of 16GB of RAM, the days of a 4GB system with a spinner drive are long long gone. Pop on some, quite required actually, ad-blockers, and use isn't any worse than Chromium or Safari browsers.

(3) Failing to load websites: Name one. In point of fact, since Chrome and Edge are built under the same structure, I often use FF to troubleshoot website weirdness to see where the problem really is. Sure, experience of one here, but I've not seen any site (from private, individual user, to public corp to gov't) mis-load under FF.

(4) Personal data for sale: Okay, I'll give him that, if he can prove it's happening.

(5) Low browser marketshare: So? Does FF stop working because it's got a small number? Quick, better let Linux know this!

This guy sounds like he's whinging just to put out some clickbait article. Not buying it.

> Every roadblock you have mentioned is merely a prejudiced perspective that needs to be overcome

I'm very certain that physical compatibility is more than "prejudiced perspective." Fuck man it took twelve years to decide on a connector standard in North America and that doesn't even impact the size and shape of the vehicle like a battery format would.

> Battery swapping *IS* the way forward until the tech changes

You know that even among vehicles that are swap-capable, the most common form of recharging is like, still plugging in same as non-swap-capable vehicles, right? Swapping is just one solution to an edge case.
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> unlikely to be insurable

This is in China.

But if you want to make it US/EU-centric, I just need to point out that we have zero problems putting stockpiles of flammable and explosive materials right next to commercial and even residential zoning.

> Or are all those videos of EV fires that can't be extinguished fake news?

Yes, because they absolutely can be extinguished. There are published procedures for extinguishing EV battery fires (spoiler alert: It involves water, and not even all that much water if done properly) and safely handling them after they are out. You have a lot of ignorant people saying what you are saying without evidence, when there is lots of evidence to the contrary.

> I do know they managed to ignite the worry in me.

Ignorance tends to have that effect on people, yes. My sympathies but the situation can be fixed through learning.

No, EV batteries do not "make their own oxygen."
No, EV batteries can not burn underwater.
No, putting water on an EV battery fire will not cause the lithium to burn/explode.

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Weird, I've had the opposite experience: stable as fuck. The machine I'm typing this on was 1st installed with Kubuntu in... 2003 I think. It's gone through every non-LTS upgrade. I've changed the system HD several times, cloning it to bigger ones, then cloning it to SSD. I've also changed the machine thrice: from a powerful tower, I've split it to a headless server and a laptop which got updated once more. There were a few hitches (KDE4 to 5 was a pain in the ass for 2 years, Kmail was a bug ridden piece of shit) but never had to reinstall from scratch. I even went Kubuntu -> Neon and then back to Kubuntu for a few years with command line magic.

Like everything else in the USA that's fucked up, 40$/mo is about average for basic cell service.
No including taxes etc, of course.

> You just said there's no infrastructure needed, and then describe putting up thousands of buildings around the place.

You're ignoring the context; "you STILL need to build charging infrastructure anyway" - you do not, at least no more than any other business would need infrastructure which is already local and existing. Contrast to "charging infrastructure" which invokes mental images of huge cabinets of electrical equipment and rows of kiosks all out in the middle of nowhere.

> That's a lot of investment for no current customers

Nio has sold over 750K vehicles and they've only been in business like, seven years? They have customers. I use Nio specifically because they are the only company that's doing this on any scale worth discussing of course.

And I guess it needs to be pointed out after all; You can still charge the cars "normally" using L1/L2/DCFC systems, including home charging. You don't NEED to swap the battery every time...
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> Convolutional neural networks are NOT "behind nearly all generative AI models today", as Benn Jordan so casually states. LLMs overwhelmingly use transformer architectures which do not use convolution.

Correct, but the generative models being discussed are music and visual, not language. Would you like to guess what kind of neural network is most common in those applications? (Hint: if you actually watched the video, he explains that the processing of audio is mostly done using visual/spacial algorithms by converting to and from spectrograms)

> Benn Jordan is a musician, not a technologist

Correct, though because he is a musician he has a big stake in the issue of AI use and training/theft. Again, if you watch the video, he's working with actual researchers and is taking the role of a science communicator rather than a principal developer.

> Embedding information in audio streams has been proven for decades to always be audible

You did not watch the video. You also clearly didn't bother to do any lateral reading.

> it reflects a flawed mentality that says that destroying the work of others should be the goal

Destroying who's work, exactly? The AI companies? If someone is stealing your work, I don't see why anyone should defend or facilitate that behavior. If they want to train their AI on my work, they can negotiate a licensing deal for the non-poisoned versions. (And if your argument against that is it would be too expensive or laborious to get permission from all the authors and artists whose work is used to train AI, then you may as well just admit in plain language that your favorite hobby horse requires IP theft to exist...)

> Sure, if you're technically illiterate you'd believe that.

Man you sure do love being wrong don't you? If it wasn't a problem there wouldn't be so much research into solving the problem.
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There is almost no infrastructure required for this; It's a single building about the size of a small service center or car wash. In there is all the charging infrastructure you need, too.

The problems with battery swap are nothing related to what you mentioned. The real hurdles to mass adoption are questions about battery ownership, standardization, and to a lesser extend vehicle integration.

Since an EV is useless without a battery, laws in some countries (like the US) make selling an EV without a battery basically impossible. Even if you lease the battery separately. It would be akin to selling a new car without an engine; since it's not in a functional state, it can't be sold as a road-worthy vehicle. Countries like China don't have this hurdle so manufacturers like Nio and BYD have been rolling out that kind of business model - Nio alone has thousands of swap stations.

Standardization also generally means you are vendor locked. The battery pack needs to be physically and electrically compatible with your vehicle. It's not impossible but it's very unlikely that the industry will develop such standards especially when it puts hard constraints on the shape and size of the whole vehicle that needs to be build around the pack. Again, not a problem for single manufacturers but if you buy a Nio you will only ever be able to use battery swapping at Nio locations.

Finally integration; To reduce costs some manufacturers (read: Tesla) tightly integrate the battery pack into the structure of the vehicle making it impossible swap without a multi-day ordeal. Imagine trying to battery swap the Model Y where the top of the battery casing has the front seats and center console bolted to it, because it's also the floor of the cabin.

> With that factored in, what are you paying per swap? 3-4x what normal recharging would cost?

From what I understand, Nio charges a flat fee of 180 renminbi, or about US$25, per swap. I'm aware of some schemes that also charge based on battery SoC but I don't think Nio specifically uses that business model. Remember; under this system you do not own the battery, you're basically renting it. This also makes the car cheaper up front.

> Besides, battery tech is improving daily. Increasingly seeing mentions of 5-6min recharge times.

I have not seen any credible demonstrations of "5-6 min recharge times" though I've seen plenty of sensationalist tech news headlines about the possibility of such... relatedly, a battery swap does take about 5 minutes.

And the fact that battery tech is constantly improving is an argument in favor of the swap model, since you can potentially upgrade to a better battery automatically at no cost or inconvenience.
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Adversarial noise isn't "noise" like static or random junk. It's specially crafted to make the model see things that aren't visible to humans, to alter their behavior.

Benn Jordan created a pretty good video about audio-specific implementation. Examples include perfectly normal sounding audio clips tricking digital assistants into thinking they're getting voice commands and having music completely misidentified. The practical application means an artist can apply adversarial noise to their work and have it sound perfectly normal to a human audience, but any generative model that tries to train on it will end up producing inappropriate and useless output.

There are also methods to do similar with images. Text may be a bit harder but it's still possible with websites through embedding or invisible text and similar tactics.
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Adversarial Noise. Poison AI learning through crafted content.

Yes, this will (has already?) become an arms race as AI developers figure out ways to avoid traps, but it can make operating LLMs and image/audio models less economical and less safe to operate.
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> How many countries have deep decarbonized their electric grids with just solar and wind energy?

China's carbon emissions have dropped 1.5% so far this year, versus last year, despite total energy demand growing by about 10TWh in the same period. Maybe not "deep" or whatever but they are investing heavily in decarbonizing, and succeeding, while still growing quite quickly.

None of that was new nuclear power by the way; All of the plants they said they were gonna built between 2020 and 2035 are either still under construction or planning stages. Assuming they meet their goals and build all of them they will have added 500GW to their production... and another 3000 GW just in solar if they maintain the pace they were putting it online in 2024. A testament to how slow and expensive nuclear power actually is for addressing the problem.
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(And more than 3000 GW of wind at current pace)

I wrote the software for the 2 camera testers (one for integration of the CCDs, one for production) but... I don't remember ! I finished the soft 2 years ago. Anyway, it's B&W and probably 16 bits, but I'm not sure, I'd have to dig in the specs I have somewhere. The filter changer is some kind of crazy robot contraption because the filters are 2 meters in diameter, fragile as fuck and so expensive there's no duplicate. The camera CCD took years to assemble from individual CCDs.

What a time to be alive...

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Cookbooks won't hallucinate and instruct the barista to make that latte with lithium grease instead of milk.

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Does this affect KDE running on X11 with Kubuntu in any way ? Last I tried Wayland didn't support VNC so that's a complete no-no for me. I don't care much about Gnome (besides liking that there's some competition), but KDE has always been nice on Ubuntu (except for the painful KDE4->KDE5 transition years [decades?] ago).