A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to. A circuit with a few lamps shared with a vacuum cleaner could easily end with you flipping a breaker or replacing a blown fuse.

When you look at the absolutely tiny lithium ion pack these robo-vacs come with, ...

Sitting on my kitchen table right now is a drone pack. It's 57,5Wh, smaller the batteries of most modern Roombas. It's 50C - thus it can output up to 2,9kW. And there's even higher packs available than that. Lithium ion cells can handle some truly high power outputs. It's *energy*, not *power*, that is their limitation. Run a pack at 50C and it'll be empty in a bit over a minute. That said, on hard floor surfaces there is absolutely no reason why you should be drawing more than 300-400W or so, and you can get by with well less than that. High powers are for like shag carpeting and the like. Also, the head matters more than the power (though of course contribute) - for a hard floor, for example, a fluffy roller head is ideal.

Pet hair has never been an issue for me with robots. My long hair always is. It's way longer than any pet's.

Yeah, my Roborock has rotating mops, and I can say with 100% certainty, I haven't lived in a cleaner house since I moved out of my OCD mother's place as a teen. You could eat off that floor.

Facts. I used to have a Roomba for years, but as I live in Europe, it was getting increasingly hard to deal with modern features (like the self-emptying base which needs 120V power). I reluctantly switched to a Roborock when my power converter died, and just, wow, they're light years ahead of iRobot. I think iRobot has been coasting on its name for a while now.

Like some Australian teens are now successfully (!) using to sign up to social media.

Lets face it, you cannot keep kids out of any mainstream social activity humans do. As soon as they are interested, they will find a way in. Trying to prevent them will only cause harm and have zero benefits.

While this is a very fuzzy statement and requires qualification, it probably close to what is happening. Whether it will actually work out that way remains to be seen. As soon as that task requires some mental flexibility or high reliability, LLM-type AI is already out, even if people may not realize that.

I do agree, there are other effects at work. LLMs are far too incapable to have caused these effects all by themselves. They are clearly being used as pretext in many cases.

That is not quite true. Quite a bit of the world does run at least in part on compassion. The uncivilized part certainly does not.

I do agree on that one. I have, so far, found two instances where Internet-trained LLMs are useful: Search when you only can describe the issue or describe a concept and looking for cooking recipes by description. Both instances of "better search". For the effort invested, those results are utterly pathetic.

If it were AGI, it clearly had enough information. Since it is not AGI and cannot think at all, it did not have enough information and it would have needed the actual solution as input.

Indeed. But, you know, I am beginning to think that most people (outside of the about 10-15% independent thinkers and the additional 5% or so that can be convinced using rational arguments) are actually incapable of rational thinking or actively chose not to do it. People that do not understand the difference between an implication and a correlation. People think that people that do some thing makes them responsible for something entirely different with no causation chain present, but they have this fuzzy association. MAGAs that are keyword-operated and cannot do anything beyond reacting to simple keyword-triggers. And all the people that can only do yes/no and do not understand that most things are in degrees and shades of grey.

For these people, who can essentially only do unreliable statistical correlation instead of actual reasoning, an LLM may indeed look like it has insight, because they do not understand what insight actually is. And that LLM has a far larger "knowledge"-base.

Well, we can argue whether useful idiots share the blame or not. It is a complex question with no easy answer.

I fully agree that the "I got mine and fuck you" people are complicit and malicious.

Indeed. But there are tons of natural idiots that may be even dumber than "AI" of the LLM-variant and they are in awe because they do not understand what is going on. And many of them are aggressive.

Well, Musk is a half-educated idiot that got lucky and now thinks, like so many idiots with some luck, that his skills are superior.

Did you notice where the summary said "Most of that growth — 73% — happened in red [Republican-leaning] states. Eight of the top 10 states for new installations fall into that category, including Texas, Indiana, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Utah, Kentucky, and Arkansas..."

Turns out that "We think solar is stupid but there's land here if you morons want to build it" is much less of an impediment to clean energy than "Oh we loooooove solar let's start the 10-year environment impact review process right away so we can get you your conditional permit."

It is very different in the bar. There you can have a debate, question and clarify. With a podcast, you cannot.