It seems that EVs and ICEs are sufficiently different that traditional car companies don't really enjoy nearly the encumbrancy advantage they once had.
The top EV manufacturer started as a battery company. The second place EV company started as an EV company.
Various ICE manufacturers have spent decades innovating and refining ICEs and building logistics chains optimized for ICEs.
The big problem that the high end ICE manufacturers have is that the things that made them special in the ICE market don't apply as well in the EV market.
You can potentially justify 6 figure price tags if you're in the luxury market. Hire famous designers, pay for premium materials, and leverage your brand name. If you want to sell cars for 6 figures based on performance, they actually need to perform significantly better. There are a bunch of much cheaper EVs that have better performance.
Just jacking up the price and relying on conspicuous consumption is how you get the Fyre Festival.
I view all three of these more as good advice than demands. As I see it, people ignore this advice at their own peril.
It would certainly be nice if we could craft some system that removes the need for such advice but until then, I'll try to follow it.
I see this as the same dilemma that comes up around personal physical safety. In a just society, nobody should have to change their behavior to protect themselves from criminals. In the real world, people who ignore this advice, are more likely to get mugged.
I like this. It's an inversion of the old addage, "a poor craftsman blames his tools" and the corollary, "use the right tool for the job" (because a good craftsman chooses the appropriate tool).
You don't get to bang on a screw and blame the hammer.
Reading between the lines of the article it seems advanced but not too surprising.
I assume that at night when it "withdrew to a covered location" there was opportunity for maintenance, battery swaps, etc.
The article says that it successfully carried out "multiple calls for fire." That sounds like over those 45 days there were multiple missions to provide suppressive fire. They're not explicit about what that means but it sounds like, "if you see anything moving in this arc, take a few shots at them". Presumably there's some AI to prevent it from wasting ammo on really dumb decoys.
A "simple" mobile automated turret has been around for a while. The novelty they would be demonstrating is essentially battlefield robustness. They aren't claiming that this machine can operate completely autonomously for 6 weeks but the incremental pieces are still hard.
I don't understand how it doesn't just get hit by a drone? Is it because the Russian drone pilots all operate from out of theatre and the loss of starlink disabled this?
As I said elsewhere, Deepseek injects Chinese characters into responses. Anecdotally, that seems to happen when the context gets longer. That suggests that they're primarily trained in Chinese and I would expect them to use fewer tokens for Chinese than English.
Deepseek will regularly spit out Chinese (汉字）during English sessions. They generally seem to be syntactically related but it makes me think that there's some overhead of using English with an engine that's primarily trained in Chinese.
There's certainly an interesting question here, even if Tokenstree doesn't provide a solution or even define the problem well.
The broader questions are still interesting.
If an AI is trained more on language A than language B but has some training in translating B to A, what is the overhead of that translation?
If the abilities are combined in the same model, how much lower is the overhead than doing it as separate operations?
ie is f(a) < f(b) < f(t(B,A) ? where a and b are in A and B and f() and t() are the costs of processing a prompt and the cost of translating a prompt.
Then there's the additional question of what happens with character based languages. It's not obvious how it would make sense to assign multiple tokens to a single character but there's the question of how much information in character based vs phonic based words and what the information content of sentences with either one is.
I love the idea, in principal, but I think it's impossible in practice.
A good strategist makes the outcomes of individual battles predictable. That makes it terrible for unit players.
I used to play Planetside 2 with a very organized group. Winning was fun at first but you were ultimately a cog in a well oiled machine so it got old fast. It probably got old even faster for the other players who were just trying to play a regular fps.
The top EV manufacturer started as a battery company. The second place EV company started as an EV company.
Various ICE manufacturers have spent decades innovating and refining ICEs and building logistics chains optimized for ICEs.
The big problem that the high end ICE manufacturers have is that the things that made them special in the ICE market don't apply as well in the EV market.
You can potentially justify 6 figure price tags if you're in the luxury market. Hire famous designers, pay for premium materials, and leverage your brand name. If you want to sell cars for 6 figures based on performance, they actually need to perform significantly better. There are a bunch of much cheaper EVs that have better performance.
Just jacking up the price and relying on conspicuous consumption is how you get the Fyre Festival.
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