I have both Altium and Kicad experience. Can you explain further how you are setting up the AI to interface with KiCad? Is your AI having keyboard/mouse access or are you doing it only through API? Not familiar with Claude interface.
I have had good success with Claude Code combined with https://github.com/mixelpixx/Konnect. I still need to do routing manually but it is quite useful for reviews of the design and even of the final PCB.
I have it convert Altium files to Kicad and then it uses the Kicad api to control things. If you give it encouragement it should be able to convert back to Altium by parsing the format and building a tool. Supposedly I have this built though I have not validated it. You can also ask it how it would do this and it will have ideas.
How is it inefficient? This is the whole point of government: how much economic activity is happening over 56k? Virtually none. You could make the same argument for paving the street and repairing the sidewalk in front of your house. Chances are the property taxes from the average single family home don't cover just the basic street repairs, let alone all the other services your local government provides. Yet we do it, because it turns out that having a happy, well-served population by way of redistributing wealth through services is a generally good thing.
If we assume $20k to run the fiber, you could do starlink for a long time. There are internet options other than fiber. Unless there is no other options in France than fiber.
What if France got a contract with starlink? Brought the cost down of that.
Yeah, I'd absolutely _love_ that my tax money goes to funding a US company. What could go wrong with depending on a hostile country for someone as basic as Internet ?
If I found out my government blew 20k to slobber on Musk's balls instead of using that money to create work for our own people, I'd personally go blow up that antenna.
Why should Starlink get that business? Why shouldn't France run its own fiber that it controls that isn't dependent on a US-based corporation?
And you said it yourself: Starlink already exists. They don't need a subsidy. You bring the cost of Starlink down by forcing them to compete on the merits of their own service, not by throwing money at them.
Why do you assume $20k as the cost to run the fiber?
The cost is the contractor's hours to get up a ladder on each electricity pole from the closest PON splitter to the customer's home, plus the fiber itself which is peanuts at volume.
Everything else (permits, pole rent, etc) is accounting money that can be negotiated. If there's a strategic national program to fiber up the whole country, this could be exempted on a pen's stroke, or depreciated in many decades.
But it's not inefficient if this fixes a chicken-egg problem: overcrowded big city and underpopulated rural area sucks.
Nobody can/wants to go in rural area if they can't make a living there. A fiber speed Internet unlocks lifestyle for many.
It's the same as investing in say a high speed railway between major cities A and B and adding a middle-of-nowhere stop C midway. That C then can flourish to become a medium/major city... So while the initial investment looked like a waste, it's beneficial to provide a better life for people living in both A,B, and C.
You can bring internet to these other places other than by running a 1km fiber cable, which may be more efficient. Think about it, run. A cable super long to one house or use a dish?
Unless there is truly no other options in france
Unless France is going to launch the satellites themselves (which is also very expensive), you become dependent on another party, which is much worse.
I don't know how it works in France, but in many European countries phone/DSL lines and fiber is highly regulated. Even if it is run by a company, they usually have to provide fair access to other providers so that there is competition. For instance, we have a XGS-PON connection to home (used to be AON) and I can probably choose at least from ten ISPs. This is nice, because they try to compete on prices and bandwidth (e.g. the company that owns the network we are on offers 4Gbit symmetric max, but a competitor offers 8Gbit over the same fiber).
Much harder to accomplish that with satellite internet and foreign companies.
You keep saying Starlink may be more efficient without providing any actual evidence that it is.
Also ignoring the political implications of a country spending tax money to buy services from a highly political company from a country whose politics and world influence are in flux right now.
Starlink is good because it is easy to deploy quickly. But the entire constellation and service will be dead within 5 years without constant launches of new satellites.
Forget efficiency. That sounds like a very poor investment of tax dollars to me. The fiber laid will provide lower latency and higher bandwidth connections for the next 40 years.
Good governance is sometimes taking the money/income from dense areas (cities) and investing it in rural areas. Also, similar to how copper lasted many decades, a fiber network is a one time large investment cost and then you reap the benefits for decades.
Not everything has to be a capitalist 'minimize cost, maximize profits' game.
I would prefer that people post their own works to their own websites, but that's a pipe dream. As far as X is concerned, I would prefer that it behave more like 2010 Twitter and less like 2020 Twitter, but I can deal with the differences. I'm ambivalent about anyone posting on X over the Fediverse, Bluesky, Medium, Substack, here, Reddit or whatever else; it's all bad. I'll log in wherever I need to, except maybe Facebook and TikTok.
Never heard of it, so just googled, but it's not obvious why these would be more preferable to annuities. As you get older above about 75, people tend to spend a lot less in general (assuming they don't need care support), so getting more money when you're unlikely to spend it anyway seems pointless.
I'd speculate that the regular payments on annuities would therefore be higher than tontines because insurance companies would be able to factor in average life expectancy to the pricing more easily, rather than having to budget for possibly all the money continuing to be paid out to just one remaining person who happened to beat the odds and live well beyond 100 instead of the average around mid-80s.
I would change it to "the expected natural life of the author" which is their birthday + 85 years. Regardless of whether they actually are still alive past that date.
This can't work: life expectancy (of humans) can differ more than 30 years around the world, plus there are significant differences between men and women, and corporations - which often own copyright on work for hire - can live in perpetuity.
$8000 also seems pretty cheap for 2PB of traffic? Looking at google cloud storage egress rates, $0.02/GiB (which is on the lower end, since it depends on destination) would be about $40k for 2PB.
