I have mixed feelings about the team behind the AI that called itself MechaHitler getting tons of taxpayer money

All of the large AI platforms have similar issues.

xAI is the only one opening admitting it happens and trying to resolve it.

So I'd rather give my money to them then a company pretending the well they are drawing training data from is not poisoned.

You are about 8 billion cycles behind on news it seems like, this story should clue you in as to how far off you are.

YOU should probably try reading the summary, they were not here legally, but were given forbearance because of supposed hardships where they came from - but no one really vetted the claims they made. They could still apply for legal immigration.

To me Bitcoin long term is still kind of iffy, but if you want something ELSE to help you escape the traditional monetary system, there is gold and silver which are also up quite a but for the year, even the past year, and moving higher.

You can also get crypto backed by gold or silver as well if you want an electronic form. Just make sure you get a form actually backed by real metals in vaults.

Not sure about these particular devices, but in general devices will still be fine. You add via a QR code, HomeKit stuff is local only. But even with this - it's Matter/Thread that's the current hotness, not HomeKit/Google/Alexa-specific. If a thing supports Matter and Thread, *properly* (i.e. hubless), then you're fine. If it doesn't, or it does but needs a hub in the middle before it spits out Matter out of the other side...be wary.

This is a good example of why you pick things that work natively with what you want. In this case, if you've connected them via HomeKit then they'll carry on working without issue. In future cases - buy the standards, look for Matter (and preferably Threads) integration to make sure you don't need this kind of reaching out to servers.

Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

Although the literal answer to that is "yes" since people have definitely rewired houses before, the more relevant one is - this isn't a completely different system. Your light bulb remains a light bulb. It screws into the same sockets as the last ones did, and is operated by the same switches.

In terms of protocols, I've already got several protocols running in my house and they mix and match without issue. Gradually switching over to emphasises one of them (Matter/Thread) more than the others won't affect the overall setup at all.

Many aren't doing Matter properly unfortunately. Take Switchbot for instance - it uses a hub to expose its devices over Matter. Aqara did too, though not sure if their latest stuff needs it.

Many people did Matter as "take our Zigbee kit, run it through yet another hub, and we'll push it out the other side as Matter". Not ideal.

Interestingly I've found that there are good deals...just not at Amazon. It's from stores making sure they can compete/are still relevant during Prime day. For example I'm a musician who's into synths: this is a good deal on a well-regarded (if a bit controversial) synth. There are other examples for other niches - I get emails from smart home tech manufacturers for instance and they seem to do ok.

And no-one has ever replaced a light bulb in their house before. No, not ever in the history of the universe.

I don't want to unsubscribe to this or that.

I want to give natural language filters like "I never want to see a political email again, from anyone"

Or maybe "If they make it sound urgent but it's not urgent at all, don't show it to me and remind me a week before the actual deadline if it's at all important".

As others have said, unsubscribe links often do not work and it's probably all the Gmail feature will use.

Was torn between moderating and replying - am replying. Yes, it is and by 'backwards' I'm guessing you mean that as a good thing. Ives did fine with most hardware, but when he got his hands on software and produces macOS Funereal Edition (aka 10.0 Lion) stripping all colour and joy from the interface...yuck.

Bring it back, that's what I say. People still talk about BlingOS, Snow Leopard, as their favourite incarnation. There's a lot of functionality added since that I'd miss and I'm not totally sure on the 3D dock base, but I certainly get where they're coming from.

So what, we plunge to oblivion because we didn't hit good? If we're in a minimisation game, so be it. But we should still try to minimise.

There's still some good news on the UK, although it's less visible. There is a change to building regulations this year requiring new builds to have solar panels. It's long overdue.

There are pushes on heat pumps as well. In fact I had a worry with the original Green New Deal that it had basically been hijacked by lobbyists to concentrate too much on carbon capture, allowing them to carry on burning stuff but still claim the money from the deal. The EV mandate is on track regardless of the lobbying to soften it, which is a good thing, and also lower cost attractive EVs are starting to arrive. Our energy mix is improving too, with a smidge over half being generated by renewal last year.

There's the standard tabloid backlash rubbish, but in general green ideas are popular in the UK so they're likely to continue. Is it as big as the push from China? It is not and the deadcat bounce of loud and boorish objectors is annoying. It's still a pretty good picture though.