Could they please add a voice that doesn't sound like an overly enthusiastic valley girl? The current voices are excessively happy and enthusiastic. I don't want my computer to sound emotionless, but how about concise, serious and business like?

Using an app is far easier. We have the "Twint" system. In a shop you scan a QR code off the card reader and click ok. For a private transfer, you select a person from your contacts, enter an amount, and click ok. Transfers are immediate - there is no danger equivalent to a check bouncing.

Also important: Electronic transfers are "send only" - no one can withdraw money from your account. Nor do they have any way to tamper with the amount transferred (whereas checks are easy to mess with).

US bank security is laughable. First, the fact that paper checks are still used. Second, that just having the numbers off the bottom of a check allows someone to *withdraw* money from an account.

I saw the latter when I came to the US to close down my mother's affairs. Call a company to cancel an account - they ask for the bank info, so they can take whatever they want...WTF, no?!

I still have one US account, because I receive the odd paper check from US companies. Why can't they just deposit the money into the account, instead of sending international letters? Bizarre.

This. UBI is a fantasy. Capitalism is the one system that has consistently worked to raise people out of poverty. Capitalism (properly regulated) provides people with an incentive to find and perform productive work.The weakness of capitalism is regulatory capture: governments must regulate the excesses, but money flows to politicians' pockets, and regulations are not enforced.

People are not going to be out of work. Old jobs may disappear, but new ones will appear. Just like previous disruptions over the past few hundred years, AI will raise our standard of living by making people more productive. It is no longer the case that 90% or more of the population scrapes away at agriculture, to barey put enough food on the table. People no longer work 60-80 hours per week in factories. Each major disruption has improved life, and AI will be no different.

then all the farmers plowing with horses will be out of work. If word processors take jobs, then all the typists will need UBI. Etc.

An LLM is just a tool. We've been developing better tools for hundreds of years. Some jobs disappear, other jobs appear. People need to get a grip.

The car manufacturers will produce whatever they can make money selling. EVs are significantly more expensive than equivalent gasoline-powered cars. If you hold your head just right, and you can charge from home, you can sort of pretend that the savings in fuel costs justifies the higher purchase price.

The higher prices mean that most of the people who are going to buy EVs already have. Everyone else will wait until the prices drop, or until they have no other choice. Anyone who cannot charge at home (renters, condo owners, etc.), will find an EV to be a serious inconvenience, and will never buy an EV until something changes.

I just want to play music. The Sonos app is overcomplicated, slow to start, periodically forgets that my speakers exist, and requires an internet connection to work. I could go on...

What it doesn't do, is make me ever want to buy another Sonos product.

Seriously, this makes no sense. If the song is publicly available, it will be listened to, by literally anyone who wants to. Budding musicians will learn from listening to songs, they will also learn to play them. They may even use them, consciously or not, as the basis for their own compositions. Moreover, with the millions and millions of songs out there, many are very similar. There are only so many riffs in the world.

If companies don't want a song listened to, it should not be available to the public. If a song is available, it will be listened to. By people and by AI.

Companies like Microsoft achieve "carbon neutrality" by buying green-washing certificates. They would already be greener if they would stop funding such stupid scams.

Meanwhile: growing new businesses requires energy. Energy is, in fact, the lifeblood of civilization. I see absolutely no problem with using energy to provide new services. If you want to be green, you need to work on the other side of the equation.

Just as an example: A huge new Ikea store just opened up near us. They put solar cells on their roof, nice. But why didn't they put a roof of solar cells over their huge parking lot? This should have - needs to - make economic sense. The power companies fight to make the resale of solar energy unprofitable, because it cuts into their margins. This is where government regulation could be a serious force for good: Ensure that there are monetary incentives to produce green energy and to provide energy storage. Then Microsoft can run their data centers without green-washing.

These satellite swarms provide great services, but I wonder: on a practical level, how many of them can co-exist? At some point, it will be come difficult or impossible to coordinate all the different orbits.

Any space experts want to offer an opinion?

The natural consequence of "publish or perish". Rather than evaluating the actual quality of faculty members, universities resorted to a simple metric. Inevitably, people optimized for that metric.

Also, there are just far too many graduate programs and graduate students. Masters programs are lucrative for universities. I am familiar with one program where the standards are deliberately lower than the equivalent undergraduate program. Lots of students, lots of tuition, why not? The "research" that goes on is laughable at best, but plenty of papers get published...somewhere. Meanwhile, PhD students make for cheap labor. I know of one professor who ensures his students get their doctorate, as long as they quietly handle his lectures and grading. Again, papers get published, but let's not look to closely at the content.

Peer review was a great concept, when most researchers were dedicated and competent. Unfortunately, in many areas we have passed a critical point where most researchers have advanced by published poor research, and they apply the same standards to any reviewing they do. Add in the lack of incentive to replicate results, and here we are: widespread academic fraud. Fit your data to the desired curve. Write your conclusion and cherry-pick data to support it. As a last resort, p-hack until you get some fascinating, but entirely coincidental result.

If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Sure, it can probably run on-device, but the unstated implication is that it won't send your phone conversations to the cloud. Which you can believe...exactly as much as you want to.

No, Google, you do not have permission to eavesdrop on my phone conversations.