this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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He want's to make it
aww man
I respect his solar commitement, but listening to him it's obvious he's a libertarian Elon-Bro... my immediate reaction is "oh no... it's stupid."
And the concept isn't new, solar boats have been a thing for ages now and most of them are (like @OwOarchist@pawb.social suggested) catamarans or trimarans.
Can we please avoid using abelist slurs in this community?
Heard and edited.
AI is completely irrelevant to his project, I really don't know why he mentioned that. The solar/battery/motor setup looks like off-the-shelf from victron — we can see a screenshot of the app at some point.
I'd like to second Povoq's request and ask that we're more mindful of the words we choose and their impact please.
Oh, it's OK, he specifically addressed how to get good AI results. He commanded Chat-GPT to give him good info. If you just ask nicely it won't work, you have to be forceful. Forget boat building, he should clearly be teaching classes on using LLMs.
Honestly not a terrible use of ai. I imagine it's pretty good at spotting things in a sparse environment like the middle of the ocean.
Wouldn’t that just be a regular software that uses ML for just image detection?
I suspect voice control + a small LLM for tool uses qualifies it as "AI"
Which is terrible imo cause they were never considered intelligence before, just tools that barely worked
Quite frankly, in the last two years, I've accepted the AI term because that's pretty close to what we expected sci-fi AI to be.
Something that you talk to that understands from the context what you mean and that calls the appropriate tool is exactly things like Jarvis, like HAL 9000.
That’s a fair point, we also called video game enemy algorithm AI.
But no one calls that AI, I think the key indicator is a statistical model instead of a human coded script
Yes and no. "AI" has been a marketing term over a decade now, it's a vague statement which is pretty much mandatory to get funding.
In theory, I agree with you, automated navigation of boats seems like a good fit for machine learning.
Technically over a decade, but feels like that's an understatement.
In the 1940s some people called a machine to play NIM as "Artificial Intelligence". People talked about opponent AI in checkers games before most of us were born.
Certainly by the 80s using "AI" to describe the manipulations of enemy characters was all-in.
That's why AI means everything and nothing. In games, computer controllwd characters are called AI, although they are straightforward algorithms. It's a catch-all term.
In early 2000s, at least in the academia, we used AI to refer to neural networks, although it wasn't a strict term. Then anything machine learning (including regression models) were called AI, now LLMs and chatbots are called AI while other type of models are pretty much ignored. A boat navigation system could use a neural network but almost definitely not a language model at its core.
AI can be fine, I cringed at the mention of Starlink, even though that's a case where it makes sense.
There's currently not really an alternative to Starlink for this type of use sadly. If speed isn't a concern then there are, but for typical internet usage there really isn't.
Sadly true