I don't think that's the right lens to view this in. Germany in particular is a very difficult market to provide customer service in, given that German-language skills outside of the high-wage DACH region is non-existent, when you compare it to the English speaking market that often relies on the acceptably-accented Phillipine region. If you want to provide customer service in Germany, it's not simply that firms aren't willing to pay enough to hire customer support staff, it's that the pool of people who could work in this field just don't exist in large enough numbers.

By introducing agentic AI to solve some number of support questions you offer patients service that you just otherwise simply couldn't.

Completely understood, but the point is that it's at CBP or UK Border Force or Bundespolizei, and it's in the security camera system at the airport, too.

If you've been a visitor to Australia recently, you'll be all too familiar with the process of using your phone to scan your face plus passport data.

When you enter the airport, you walk past signs notifying you of extensive surveillance camera use.

Domestic flights in the US make extensive use of facial scanning, and both US and EU border agencies digitally scan your face to identify you (Global Entry in the US even means you theoretically don't need your passport to enter the country).

So why should we pretend like face scanning isn't happening? I can understand the idea that at some point, I won't need a boarding pass nor identification to get onto a plane, and at this point, it appears to not cost me any privacy that I've already lost over the last 25 years.

While there's no arguing with the physics here, don't forget the economics either. The price of electricity in Denmark on a cloudy, windless early evening can easily be 10 or more times the price in Newfoundland. Then start factoring in that a plane carrying hydrogen is significantly lighter than a plane carrying batteries.

While you might be using 10x as much electricity at the point of generation, you're paying a lot less for it, and you're using it more efficiently.

The government of Chile published a pretty clear national strategy to address this very issue [1]. And with Chile being on the Pacific Ocean, and these seaplanes most likely being used in islands in the Pacific, it's not hard to imagine a relatively simple solution to the infrastructure issue.

1: https://energia.gob.cl/sites/default/files/national_green_hy...

In theory GitLab could decide to ignore the DMCA, as you suggest, but that would mean removing all US servers, firing all US staff and cancelling all contracts with US customers (including those that GitLab has with the US government itself). Even in that instance, you would just move the copyright lawsuit to Dutch courts.

I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece. Each method of more traditional power production has different capabilities for ramping up and down, in descending order: gas, hydro, coal, nuclear. Now we have renewables entering the market, which so far have more or less had to be matched with gas peaker plants for scaling up and down. Batteries are obviously putting downward pressure on peak energy generation.

Furthermore, we've had the classic paradigm of electricity demand, where if I put a load onto the grid, like turning on my oven or flipping a light switch, it must function. Now we have electric cars, heat pumps, hot water heaters, and even in parts of Scandinavia washing machines, which schedule themselves to run during off-peak times.

Where we find ourselves now is market forces working themselves out, with investors buying into battery storage, and homeowners switching to time-of-use billing for their energy bills to take advantage of cheap electricity at night when charging their cars.

In energy politics we obviously still hear the term base load, but it's now nothing more than rhetoric of an outdated era.

So yes, spam is a serious concern. WhatsApp spam exists as well, but since there's a central authority, unlike with SMS, it's a lot harder to avoid being shutdown.

Are all three phases even being sent to the electric cars? The J1772 only supports a single phase.

Is that at all relevant for the North American market, where no one would be using three phase power to charge their car? And is it even relevant to the CCS part of the standard, when really what CCS adds on top of IEC 62196 is the ability to use DC charging, at which point phases are irrelevant.

The whole point of connectors is, firstly, how much power they can deliver (both NACS and CCS1 appear equally capable), then, how affordable they are to make and how easy they are to use.

Affordability is objective, NACS is simply cheaper to make. Less materials go into it, and that's a win. Furthermore, it doesn't require a massive charging port (see how Tesla had to work around CCS2 for the Model S/Y in Europe because their charging port cover is too small), so there's further benefits here.

Ease of use is less objective, but for anyone who has used both, clearly NACS is much, much better. It's lighter, less chonky, simpler (you don't have to remove a cover over the DC plugs). I think the consensus here is just clear.

So what, then, is an objective argument FOR using CCS1 over NACS? I really don't see one. The only argument I can see is that we lose some mild amount of harmony with CCS2 connectors that the rest of the world is going to use, but with the differences between CCS1 and CCS2 that exist anyway, that might be a moot point.

However, given that the usefulness of chatbots depends more on the model being used, what I would find a lot more useful is a ranking of the various models that are available. Currently I'm having to rely on comments on the internet to find out if Alpaca 7B or LlaMA 65B is genuinely productive to use. As new models come out, I'd love it if I knew how well it tells jokes, answers complicated questions, or generates code.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33609360

Points: 20

# Comments: 11

Even more than that, I'll bet a lot of people who are connecting a media PC to their living room TV also have another PC somewhere in the house. With a long HDMI cable, you can connect an existing PC to the TV, thus saving the entire expense of a new PC. This is particularly interesting for gaming, since a good gaming PC is a lot more expensive than even some of the longest HDMI cables.

That assumes every household fully recharges that F-150 each day, meaning they drive at least 300 miles per day. Instead, I think it's generally assumed that a household might drive that much in a week instead, which appears to the grid like bringing 2x houses online. Hence the estimates that electric vehicles are going to double the amount of electricity that we need to generate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4135487/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28394643/