Tesla held an "AI Day" presentation on Friday night with the aim of showing off its technological prowess. What we saw were two humanoid robot prototypes Tesla calls "Optimus" that "probably costs less than $20,000" and made for "mass production in the millions of units" according to Elon Musk. One did a little walk and a dance, the other was wheeled out on a pedestal and waved. It will be used in Tesla's factories "within the next few months... or years". IEEE Spectrum reckons "there's very little to suggest that it disrupts robotics the way that SpaceX did for rockets or Tesla did for electric cars". Tesla also gave an update on their far more impressive "Dojo" supercomputer. It's probably one of the top 10 fastest computers in the world and its used to " auto-label train videos from its fleet and train its neural nets to build its self-driving system".
Text messages between Elon Musk and a cavalcade of billionaires entered as evidence in Twitter's lawsuit against him have been made public for us plebs to enjoy. There's discussions with people like Joe Rogan (asking Elon to "liberate Twitter from the censorship happy mob"), Marc Andreessen (chucks in a cheeky $400m instantly), Larry Ellison (who is "in for $2 billion"), Jason Calacanis (begging to be CEO of Twitter because its his "dream job"), his brother Kimbal Musk (floats the idea of a "blockchain-based payment-and-message system" that Elon was into at first, but then changed his mind 10 days later) and Jack Dorsey (rants about all the mistakes he made), just to name a few. Reading the messages, I had the same thought as The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel - "what is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be".
A study published in Scientific Reports has found that "every $1 in Bitcoin market value generated an average of 35 cents in global climate damages between 2016 and 2021". They did this by coming up with a cost per ton of carbon of US$100 - a rough middle ground between various estimates of US$51 to US$185 per ton devised by other studies and enacted by some governments. To put that 35c per dollar in context, "gasoline" generates 41 cents and beef production 33 cents. Undeniably, we get much more value out of gasoline and beef than we do out of Bitcoin, for a similar amount of damage to the environment. If a group of people decided to go around blowing up Bitcoin mining facilities I wouldn't be against it.
Matt Blaze has a rather comprehensive review of phone-sized Faraday bags. Bags you chuck a phone into to make sure no signal gets in or out, even when turned off. He's got fancy measuring devices and everything. His tests reveal that biscuit tins and aluminum foil do make life difficult for radio signals, but aren't as good as a proper bag designed for radio signal prevention. Something to keep in mind should you ever come across the need for such a thing.
📻 More Than A Woman - The Lazy Eyes
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