For many years, hypermilers have known many ways to do just that. The problem is that these ways are being ignored. I find this most exasperating. All this whining about range, but as soon as you improve the aerodynamics and thus the range, you get even louder whining about the supposed ugliness of the looks. The early 2000s Honda Insight is the most recent car I know of that has "skirts", wheel well covers. Dimples like on golf balls also help, and you don't want them all over, only on trailing edges. The Corbin Sparrow, an obscure electric vehicle, is the only one I know of that used dimples along the trailing edges. I suggested that truck trailers could use dimples, and this one idiot I knew even complained about that being ugly, as if he cared about the looks of grey boxes.

Worst of all on the aero is the refusal to cover the underside. Most people don't like driving around without a hood, but it's okay to have all this machinery and support hanging from the underside, in the open and creating more drag.

Another "duh" to save fuel is weight reduction. Weight snowballs, too. More weight means the car needs a bigger engine, which adds more weight, which forces the engine bay to get heavier to support that weight, which of course adds still more weight. One line that's nice to be on the good side, is light enough to not need power steering.

Seriously? You have neighbors open carrying in the hopes that they can scare you or worse? Well, I would be scared. Apart from their hostile intentions, I wouldn't trust them to handle firearms safely. Is there nothing you can do about it? No rules against what they're doing? Can you sue them for, I don't know, creating a threatening environment? Harassment, maybe? Perhaps they have been in trouble with the law in the past, and for that reason have no right to bear arms.

The hype, and fear, over current AI is wildly overblown. Perhaps there are too many stories of computers magically acquiring sentience somehow, for instance, in the Terminator movies. I suspect we've grossly underestimated what it takes to achieve real, general intelligence.

Being able to play chess better than any person, ever, is not enough, not even close. All that chess computers have really shown us is that chess is amenable to brute force computation. Ought to have known that all along. Some scientists really hoped that the ability to play chess would translate into or perhaps derive from general intelligence.

Driving a car is another task that's been touted as AI. Not only is the way they do it not intelligent, they can't even do it reliably. They don't understand that they are driving a car, they only respond to visual stimuli. They go wrong in ways that a human would never go wrong.

And finally, these LLMs. LLMs are not in the least intelligent. They merely bandy words, they don't understand them.

The way OpenAI is behaving is so typical of these kinds of businesses. Exaggerate the capabilities of their products to the point of lying, as Tesla did with the self-driving they sell. Try to silence employees, to keep those lies from being exposed. As to the "serious risks", these are not risks that AI is going to get loose, no, these are risks that potential customers are going to believe the hype, and get hurt when the stuff can't perform at the level of expectations the sellers sold everyone on. Again, Tesla's self-driving is a case in point. When Tesla's AI misses, sometimes people die.

They've known since the 1970s

And this further establishes that corporations are soulless, wantonly careless of harm in the pursuit of profit. Lot of historic examples. Big Tobacco, insecticides and herbicides such as DDT, the Radium Girls, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and more recently the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh. The mining industry is notorious for killing their own workers as well as innocent bystanders and dumping huge messes on public lands for everyone to clean up. Problematic plastics include the bisphenols, not just A, but also S, and the phthalates. We're also learning that micro and nanoplastics are now in our bodies. Time and time again, we learn that the manufacturers did know of the problems, and chose to bury and deny.

The worst of all may prove to be Big Oil. The many oil spills they've caused through their recklessness may well be a footnote to the CO2 they've helped dump into our air. When someone cries that the world may end, usually they can be ignored. But this one could be a civilization killer. If Global Warming gets so bad that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets collapse, it will cause massive change we are not ready to handle. It won't be just Big Oil that gets blamed, it'll also be the nations that allowed it, and the very system of capitalism. It most certainly will be a casus belli. It will disrupt food production. Billions of starving people is a recipe for disaster. The pressures pushing us all into war may be irresistible, and then our civilization and our very survival will be in doubt. And sea level rise may not be the worst calamity. Ocean acidification is another bad problem. Some of the worst case scenarios, which I sincerely hope are highly unlikely, are that this starts the Earth on a runaway greenhouse warming trend that ends up killing all life, oceans all boiled away.

Don't dismiss these possibilities as Chicken Little screaming that the sky is falling. None of us living now may live to see who called this correctly. Even if the predictions of doom turn out to be wrong, it's one hell of a chance to take, and for what? So that a few rich liars can get a little richer.

If you knew anything about hypermiling, you'd know that manufacturers are very far from squeezing "every bit of fuel efficiency out of the vehicle". On efficiency, a whole bunch of low hanging fruit still hasn't been picked. For instance, just look at the underside of pretty much every car in existence. It should be smooth, for better aerodynamics. It's not. The average user wouldn't think of doing without a hood, but never gives the underside of the vehicle a thought. Another even easier aerodynamic enhancement is vortex generators on the trailing edges, like the dimples in a golf ball. But people think that's ugly.

USian cars in particular also suffer from unnecessary weight from oversized engines, and weighty safety features of dubious value, and these things snowball a bit. For instance, because of all the extra weight, the car needs powerful power steering, which adds even more weight. In the US, a 2 liter engine is regarded as kinda shrimpy. In South America, 2L is a big engine,

One area they have improved on is lower RPMs. Into the 1980s, with an automatic being only a 3 speed, it was common for high gear not to be high enough, causing the engine to burn more fuel to run at higher RPMs than necessary. This also caused more wear on the engine. But the manufacturers liked that, as it meant more business for them. With those automatics came that abominable torque converter that threw away 20% of the power output of the engine, until manufacturers finally started adding a mechanical connection. Those fruits have been picked, but it took too much arm twisting and too long to do it, thanks to manufacturers fighting such improvements every step of the way.

Always good to hear from those with actual experience. My own experience is limited to a 2011 Nissan Leaf I bought used, to learn for myself the pitfalls of EV ownership. I am decent at hypermiling, and have pushed that Leaf up to 4.1 miles per kWh (.244 kWh/mile), but this is almost all on city streets, rarely exceeding 40 mph. I doubt it can manage .270 kWh/mile if I go 70 mph. Teslas are, if not #1 in efficiency, among the top 5. I can confirm what I've read elsewhere, that for the Leaf (and probably all cars) there is significant increase in range (about 20%) from slowing to 30 mph instead of going 40 mph. That basic technique for extending range has on at least one occasion made the difference between running out of charge before I made it home, and making it home.

194 miles of usable range? Okay, so on a long trip, let's say you manage 200 miles between charges. 200 miles at 70 mph, then sit for half an hour to fast charge to 80%. (Assuming that finding a charging station is not a problem, which may be too much of an assumption.) That works out to 3 hours 21 minutes to cover 200 miles. So, 10 hours and 3 minutes to cover 600 miles. A typical gas burner goes 300 miles between refuelings, and refueling takes perhaps 10 minutes. At the same 70 mph speed, the gas burner needs just under 9 hours to cover that same 600 miles.

Okay, so the Tesla can do a road trip, but it's a little slower. If it is 150 miles between rechargings, then the Tesla would need an additional charging session to cover that 600 miles, making it 10 and a half hours. That's closing in on the straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak. The trip that can barely be done in one day in a gas burner, but can't be done in one day in a Tesla, is a problem. Having to spend an extra night in a motel room is a deal breaker.

One of the biggest lies EV manufacturers tell is giving out unrealistic range figures. Yeah, that Tesla can go 330 miles, if you start with a full charge, don't drive too fast, don't use the A/C, and you completely drain the batteries. But the usable range of an EV is roughly half the maximum range.

Why? You're not going to run it completely out of charge any more than you'd run a gas burner completely empty, you want to keep a reserve, say 10%. Fast charging can't be done beyond 80% full. So already, the usable range is just 70%. The A/C can knock as much as 20% off the range. And finally, traveling at well over 100 kph can knock another 20% off.

That was one of the first things I encountered when I bought a used Leaf. I thought people paid for a charge just like paying for gas: with a credit card. I had no reason to suppose it wouldn't be like that, and so I didn't check. And so the first time I tried to recharge at a ChargePoint station, it was a disaster.

Had to use my smartphone at a nearby restaurant that had WiFi (because charging stations sure as heck don't provide any WiFi and I have limited minutes and bytes on the cellular network) to set up an account with ChargePoint, then my credit card to fund it, then my phone again to activate the charging station. And then, the charging station refused to work, claiming that my car was "not ready"! Was there some problem with my car? I didn't know. I called the number on the charging station for assistance, and got nowhere. All this took over an hour, and by then, the occupant of the nearby free charging station had left. So I drove over to that station and it worked fine. Got a charge while I waited another hour.

The charging network is so unreliable and fragmentary, I strongly advise that owners do all their charging at home. Use the electric only if it has the range to do the round trip without recharging. It's a pain in the rear to set up half a dozen accounts to be sure you can use any charging station no matter who owns it.

There is one EV specific maintenance item: tires. Electric motors can be very hard on tires. Wear them out in a quarter of their expected range. I enjoyed how grippy the EV car felt when accelerating. The things dig in and GO! But now I realize that grippy feel is the feel of the tires being worn out extra fast.

There are things the driver can do about it. First, if the vehicle has one, use Eco mode. I understand there are new tires coming on the market that are formulated to withstand the torque of EV motors, so that's another option.

Why do wars happen? In a word, scarcity, and the understanding that forcefully reducing population will reduce demand.

Therefore, military robots will be killer robots, and civilians will be the softest targets. They won't "need to follow the law of war". Whoever thinks that is dreaming. Those robots absolutely will target civilians. And, hell yes, things could easily get completely out of hand.

We've lived with nuclear bombs for 3/4ths of a century now, and so far have not started a nuclear war. We're going to have to do the same with fully autonomous robot soldiers.

Does this mean home owners will have a chance to buy rooftop solar at a somewhat reasonable price? Maybe, sellers will actually provide some prices up front, instead of keeping it all in the dark, insisting they have to tailor the installation to the individual roof and monthly electric bill before they can provide a quote? Wouldn't surprise me if they want to see the electric bill to get an idea what the homeowner can afford, and ratchet up their quote accordingly.

I agree that Reddit has a lot of problems, and one is giving mods way too much power. Got myself banned just for messaging a mod with a brag that I was going to change the world. No profanity, no insults. Banned anyway. I complained to the senior mod of that subreddit, and he agreed that banning me was too harsh, not justified.

Turned out the ban was a temporary one. But I was not then that familiar with reddit, and had no idea that a "ban" wasn't necessarily permanent. That's some bad terminology, and definitely adds to reddit's bad reputation. If it's not permanent, it ought to be called a "time out" or a "cool down". But even if the name was changed, I find the practice offensive regardless. Treats sincere contributers like children. It's demeaning.

Another problem with reddit is the huge number of perfectly fine posts by "[deleted]". And who knows how many decent posts have been deleted by a mod, for not conforming enough to the high standards they claim they demand of posts. I've had several of my posts deleted for that reason. That never happens on Slashdot. Over at reddit, they're way too delete and ban happy.

But reddit has a lot of interesting subreddits. Tough to avoid.

I'm one of the Slashdot participants who shifted to SoylentNews. Still posted occasionally here. With SN leaving us, I will be back here a lot more.

Good catch. I didn't notice that author screwing tidbit.

The whole idea reeks of publisher propaganda. How glibly they talk of reselling, of things that are not scarce. Trying to hoard knowledge. Trying to control, for profit, access to knowledge that they had little to nothing to do with discovering. Imply that college students would all be thieves of knowledge, though the purpose of college is the passing on of knowledge. We consider that a big part of education, and it is they who are committing highway robbery with their rent seeking schemes. The students are already asked too much, when they are pushed to sell their futures by getting student loans, to pay tuition now. These publishers wish to and sometimes actually try to delete knowledge in the possession of others, the better to sell it again. The blase way they discuss this massive shafting of the public and harm of the public interest. And act as if tech hasn't changed a thing in publishing in the past 50 years.