I'm not an economist, but...

Oil producers have a $/barrel below which it's uneconomical to get oil out of the ground. E.g. the Saudis can pump oil out at $2.80/barrel according to a Yahoo article I just googled up. (It's not quite that simple: production cost is one thing, but countries that fund themselves by oil production have other expenditures that need to be covered by the sale of their oil, so the market $/barrel they need to cover their budget requirements is much higher... but you get the idea.)

As demand falls, that puts downward pressure on price, but as prices fall those producers with a higher $/barrel will exit the market, so supply will fall too, which puts an upward pressure on price. There's also Jevons Paradox, whereby efficiencies which mean less oil is needed will actually mean more rather than less oil is used.

So I don't think oil will ever be dirt cheap, there will be some equilibrium price which is lower than it is today but not crazy low.

Wasn't Joker a DC movie? I think that's the only superhero movie I'd ever watch a second time.

I wonder if Ice T has gone into hiding since finding out what they've done with Cube.

Stevia also not great, at least in rats:

https://diabetesjournals.org/d...

although an earlier study reckons it doesn't particularly affect diabetes-related indicators in (a tiny sample of) obese humans

https://diabetesjournals.org/d...

Is it actually true that theybtrick the body into the wrong reaction?

They trick the tongue, sure, by tickling its sweetness receptors, but apart from our brain's pleasure centres does that trigger anything substantive in the body? Presumably nothing in your digestive system will mistake sweetener for sugar unless it is structurally sugar-like? (and I don't know whether sweeteners are)

So an AV recording of my interaction with my doctor will be donated to Amazon? Sign me up!

When you're lost and need to consult a map, how do you find your way back home to the maps on your desktop computer?

Snarking aside, I agree it is largely possible to live your life without apps, and I try to do so as much as possible. But for things like bus arrival times, maps when I'm lost, QR codes for events that only give you a QR code ticket, etc, I use a browser on my phone, or an app as a last resort. PWAs would be a nice in-between for those - essentially a browser bookmark on my desktop (home screen) that has some offline functionality.

Having said that... the tide is against us, I'm afraid, and just as some shops no longer accept cash, increasingly aspects of life will simply be inaccessible without a smartphone.

pr0nbot> This statement is false. Is that right?
TruthGPT> Please wait...
[signal lost]

Maybe this is the holy grail of TTD... Give it all your unit tests and ask it to write the code that passes all the tests.

It will ofc produce overfitted garbage code, but will your colleagues find out before you've been promoted?

I know there are plenty of people who don't like the BBC because it's too-left (if you're a GB News type) or too-right (if you're a Momentum type), but I think they'd be almost perfectly placed to run a social network.

They're a public institution, but not government-controlled, trusted by the majority of people, and they're digitial types who have experience of doing things at scale.

I say almost because they have a brand to protect and that would lead them to tend to moderate too heavily. However, they could be given the mandate to operate the network in the public interest by the government.

If you object ideologically to public institutions running anything important then I guess you'll hate this idea but that's ok, you could stay on Facebook, Mastodon etc.

Whoever runs the network, I think the vast majority of social media problems I perceive would be solved if:

* you could verify your account so the operator knows you're you
* you could still have pseudo-anonymous personas, i.e. anonymous to other users but known to the operator
* you could still have a truly anonymous account
* as a user you could block non-verified anonymous accounts in general, or all anonymous accounts

("The operator" here could be an identity operator rather than the social network operator. There could be many such operators, e.g. national operators in a multinational social network, as long as they are bound by the same local laws.)

All the death threats, rape threats etc would then either be actually traceable by the police via the identity operators, or made from truly anonymous accounts which 99% of people would block en masse.

You'd still have anonymous illegal activity on the network that would have to be dealt with the hard way, but that's no worse than current networks.

There I was in the old rub a dub dub 'avin a pig's ear when who should I see but ol' 'arry, 'im with the big barnet what used to be a bottle stopper. So I goes over for a bit of a natter, 'e tells me 'e's only gone and got 'imself cut and carried, even 'as a coupla dustbin lids and a basin of gravy on the way. Good on yer 'arry I says, but I reckon it's yer round. Get off, sling yer 'ook 'e says. Alright alright, wind yer neck in says I, and it's back to the lads at the bar. Same ol' 'arry, I tells em. Utter booter site.

I wonder how they prove it will work infinitely. Presumably there's no combination of more than one of these tiles that repeats periodically either.

What is 'trustworthy' in this context?

The launch announcement seems to define it as

"AI that has agency, accountability, transparency and openness at its core ... Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being."

To some extent I can understand what transparency and openness might mean (public availability of the training data, models and algorithms, and at a technical level, perhaps AI that can explain why it gives the answers it gives).

"Don't misinform" could mean that the training data has been fact-checked, or somehow assigned truthiness values, and that the AI is somehow able to indicate the truthiness of its outputs.

The other goals I don't really understand. If I ask it for the best way to kill myself, does it answering that truthfully undermine my well-being?

I'd worry that "safer" etc really mean "infused with the biases of its creators". Nonetheless if these are transparently and openly stated, that's a step forward.

Did Discovery improve? I gave up towards the end of the first season, there was too much that felt off:
* everyone has to be pointedly gay/bi/trans/non-binary/ethnic etc to the extent that it feels like a sledgehammer diversity and inclusion sermon
* snarky Buffy-style dialogue
* non-stop music which thereby loses all impact and makes the whole thing feel like a video-game cut scene (Picard has this too but the overall hokiness of the show makes it more bearable)
* non-stop moving and "epic" camerawork (like the JJ Abrams movies) which thereby loses all impact

It felt like something aimed at fans of the recent movies rather than of Star Trek generally, which is fine, just not for me.

But if they toned all that stuff down later on maybe I'll give it another go.

ChatGPT with a voice interface wrapped in a little device would probably sell well. Moreso if it could do things beyond answer.