I believe they have overestimated the cost of using 3.5" floppies, probably to make themselves look better by comparison.

They give the cost as $211,172, but that's the cost to buy a 1 TiB pack of floppies. Their own storage cost is per-month, so to get the equivalent cost for floppies you need to also divide by the expected useful lifetime of a floppy disk. I did a web search for "floppy disk lifetime" and the internet [1] told me "I’ve seen numbers saying the lifespan of floppy disks is three to five years. But I’ve also seen numbers that claim they can last ten to twenty years or even indefinitely."

If you assume floppy disks have an expected lifetime of 5 years, you can amortise the cost across that time, bringing the cost per TiB-month down to a nice reasonable $3,520.

[1] https://blog.storagecraft.com/data-storage-lifespan/

I would typically plan for 60 km between swaps, which includes a healthy error margin (I owned a Gogoro 2+ when I lived in Taiwan a year ago). Gogoro advertises 110 km but that is at 25 kph which is unrealistically slow.

60 km actually goes quite far in Taiwan, which isn’t a very big place compared to eg the United States. Gogoro has an extensive network and you only range limited in rural areas like the east coast or the central mountains.

"Contextual adaptation" is what they want, but that doesn't mean it's coming in the near future. However, this does mean that funding for research on it will be available.

As I've said for years, the big lack in AI is in the "common sense" and unstructured manipulation area. Nobody can build something with squirrel levels of manipulation and agility, even in simulation. Robot manipulation in unstructured situations is still very poor. The people trying to simulate C. elegans at the neuron level can't get that to work, despite a full wiring diagram and years of effort.

Something very low level is not understood. There's a Nobel Prize waiting for whomever figures that out.

Considering these 'deep space' images that capture these myriad of little galaxies so far away.... The number of galaxies that must be out there is inconceivable to me.

Spitballing.

Might there be some space/time mechanism at play whereby we're actually seeing the same handful or so of galaxies? Like maybe some lensing thing.

Or weirder, we're actually seeing right around the universe itself — as though seeing the back of your head in a mirror if you look far enough. Not a topologist, but seems a toroidal universe would have a property like this: look far enough and you see the back of your head. So perhaps the same galaxies seen from multiple angles at the same time appear to be a greater number of galaxies than there actually are.

The covid tests mailed to me by the US government are made in China. I'm sure the government contracted it to a US supplier who bought the tests from China...but come on . 2 years in and we aren't producing even Covid tests?

Why can't the US government mandate hospitals need to purchase a percentage of their supplies from US manufacturers in order to receive medicaid/Medicare. It can be 10, 20%, low enough to keep costs down by importing the bulk from China, but high enough to maintain a base that can be ramped up.

The article was informative and inline with other media news sources posted on hn. I've never heard a newspaper described as weak before, what strength should they possess that they lack.

Arguably the more important outcome than monetary damages is that the offending program is ceased. From the press release -

> Amazon will shut down the “Sold by Amazon” program nationwide.

So in principle the problem has been stopped. Now whether Amazon will make a new "Buy from Amazon" program in 5 seconds that will have slightly modified details is to be seen...