Given the speed at which they have already been progressing with IC fabrication, and the fact that people said the same thing about battery technology, photovoltaics, EV drivertains and cars in general, wireless comms systems like WiFi and 5G... Well, I wouldn't bet against them.

Even on the consumer side, their in-car front end software went from some of the worst to now some of the best on the market, in maybe 5 years. Huge generational improvements, much faster than other manufacturers.

Look at the amount of investment it spurred in Chinese development of replacement chips. The government made producing cutting edge parts a national strategic goal, and when it does that it tends to end up dominating a decade later.

It's probably too late to stop it now, and I'm sure the real reason they are doing it is because Nvidia paid for some expensive lunches at Mar a Largo, but it may slightly slow things down a bit.

Ah, the old Playboy defence. "I only read it for the articles!"

It can be minor, but it can also take someone singing completely out of tune and turn it into something passable. There was a leaked recording of the original Paris Hilton session some years ago, and she may actually be tone deaf, it's that bad. The released track is pitch perfect and sounds like a professional, if uninspired, singer.

I'm just waiting for the first breach. People's photo ID, their name and if they used their driver's licence their home address, and a list of all the websites they verified their age for.

I switched my VPN endpoint to a country that doesn't do this. No way I'm handing over photo ID for any website.

There were laws in place to help Afghans who helped the British during the war there come to the UK anyway. Many of those on the list had the right, but the processing was very slow and it was difficult to get out of the country.

Then the data breech happened and their lives were at risk because they collaborated. It was the right thing to do to help them get away. The injunction was to limit the damage of the breech, not to cover up what was being done about it. It was always going to be lifted eventually, as soon as a court decided that the danger was passed.

It's a rare example of the UK trying to do the right thing.

Mistakes were made.

They call them baby boomers for a reason - they are the biggest generation, by cohort size. A lot of the policies that benefited them were made on the assumption that the next generation would be even bigger, and that the economy would keep growing proportionally, and the workers would share in that wealth.

None of that turned out to be true. There were fewer gen X, even fewer Millennials, and far fewer gen Z. Wages didn't keep up with GDP growth.

In the UK, there were about 14 people per retiree to cover pensions and healthcare costs, back in the 1950s. There are about 5 today. It's not just state pensions either, boomers had access to defined benefit pensions that turned out to be unaffordable, so the schemes were closed to new applicants but workers today still have to pay the boomers who got them.

The massive increase in property value relative to wages was a one off too. If Gen Z manage to buy a house, they aren't going to see it go up in value by hundreds of percent over their lifetimes.

And then you have climate change. Too little, too late, with massive costs coming.

So sure, individually boomers may have had hard lives, may have worked hard to get what they have, no disputing that. But mistakes were made at policy level and now nobody has the balls to even try to really fix them. Younger generations are actually screwed. They can't expect the same opportunities that their parents and grandparents had.

Sure, but Google doesn't need it to be better than it is today, just the same or better. I imagine that most Chromebooks will primarily run Chrome and nothing else.

No need to wonder, just go try one.

For example, with DeepSeek if you download their AI and run it locally, it doesn't care about what the CCP wants and will happily tell you what you ask for. If you use it on their website, it depends if you are in China or not.

In other words, it's exactly like Western AIs. If you ask Siri about Tienanmen Square, the answer will depend on if you are in China or not.

Less about porn and more about social media and shopping.

While it is possible to bypass age verification on social media, by its social nature that makes it less usable. It's also harder to get away with, because many of the things people do on social media reveal their location. These companies' business models are knowing where you are so they can send you targeted ads.

Journalists think that laypeople need something to compare these numbers to, to have a sense of scale. Like Libraries of Congress or football fields or double decker busses.

Comparing Japan's domestic internet to other countries is interesting though. You haven't been able to order new DSL lines for years, it's fibre or nothing. The basic fibre service is 10Gbps, with many places offering 20 now. As well as internet, you can get 8k TV and POTS over it too.

This isn't really unification though, because Chrome OS only supports two kinds of apps: Progressive web apps, and Android apps. I.e. it's a web browser and Android subsystem, built on top of a minimal Linux.

Android recently ditched support for progressive web apps, and is also built on top of a minimal Linux.

So they are already 90% the same thing. From an app's point of view they are exactly the same. Most of the work will probably be around managing the transition from running Chrome OS to running a build of Android on Chromebooks.

I would say it's less about unknown things like that, and more about situations where there is a lot of history and neither side is entirely blameless.

It's worse than that. People should have learned from the pandemic. When we collectively get together to push development of these things forward, the results are hugely beneficial. Governments acting on our behalf to get mRNA vaccines funded and released in record time is going to have long term positive effects for all sorts of conditions.

The same thing happened during WW2. Massive advances in technology. In the UK after the war, the new socialist government ran on a platform of continuing those big national collaborative projects, and the benefits were huge. Lots of infrastructure, affordable housing, socialized healthcare, a state pension... The US did some similar things with the GI Act, and also back in the 1930s with the New Deal, and again with Apollo.

What makes it worse than just rejection of science is rejection of the kind of collaboration and national projects that reap huge rewards.

Don't Russian troll farms want the stupid ones to survive? It's the intelligent Americans that they would be opposed to.

I think it's just an effort to cause general division and conflict, as well as worsening America's health overall.