although map editing sucks and it often gets lost and can't properly reset its position. It needs to be rescued pretty often which is a major fail.

That's very distinctly not my experience. What version do you have?

The Sam Altman types, and the Thiel/Musk types especially, want technofeudalism with them on top. For some of them the "good of society" factors in but it is always after this.

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.

The instruction to "eliminate political bias" is in fact an instruction to require political bias. No government AI will be allowed to think thoughts that Trump doesn't approve of!

Well, I'll have to admit, I didn't have "learning that someone on Slashdot believes that the Cold War was a myth" on my bingo card for today.

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

Sure thing bub.

Rivians main plant is in Illinois and it is more likely they would test the vehicles there not in California.

USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.

They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.

What on Earth are you talking about? Nobody is trying to make other countries poor and dangerous. People come to the US from these countries because even jobs that are tough and underpaid by US standards are vastly better than what is available at home. Creating a formal system just eliminates the worst aspects of it: the lawlessness, the sneaking across the border in often dangerous conditions (swimming across rivers, traveling through deserts), "coyotes" smuggling people in terrible conditions, and so forth. The current US system is the dumbest way you could possibly handle it: people wanting to work, US employers wanting them, the US economy benefitting from it... but still making it illegal, chaotic, dangerous, and unregulated for those involved.

Also, point of note: it's unlikely you'd actually grow plants and humans in interconnected habitats anyway. You might pump some gases from one to the next, but: agriculture takes up lots of area / volume. If you're talking Mars rather than Venus, then you're talking large pressure vessels, which is a lot of mass, proportional to the pressure differential. Which is expensive. But plants tolerate living at much lower pressures than humans (and there's potential to engineer / breed them to tolerate even lower - the main problems are that they mistake low pressure for drought, and that's a response we can manipulate). So it makes much more sense to grow them in large, low-pressure structures with a mostly-CO2 / some O2 / no N2 atmosphere, rather than at human-comfortable pressure levels.

That said, you don't want human workers having to work in pressure suits, so ideally you'd use a sliding tray system (we use them on Earth to save space in greenhouses) or similar, except that you'd move the plants through an airlock into a human-comfortable area for any non-mechanized work. Obviously, mechanized systems can operate at any pressure level, and also obviously, some work would still need to be done in pressure suits every now and again (maintenance, cleaning, etc).

None of this applies to a floating Venus habitat, where in your typical Landis design your crew - and potentially agriculture - are just living in your lifting envelope, at normal pressures. The envelope is massive, so you have no shortage of space for agriculture, all well-illuminated from all angles if the envelope is transparent. The challenges there are different - how to support them, humidity management, water supply, falling debris, etc.