The USA used to have vocational schools. Many of them were high schools. They taught draftsmanship, printing, auto mechanics, and other trades. There were also one and two year schools that would teach people how to be plumbers and electricians and diesel mechanics. Over the last couple decades we lost that. Instead everyone was going to work in The Service Economy. Lots of those service economy jobs were either outshored or never even existed. Thousands of people who would have been fine with a vocational degree ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a degree that cannot pay for itself. This is a failure of leadership by parents, principals, school boards, politicians, and of course by the colleges that marketed themselves as the newer, better vocational schools. This isn't just an American problem, it's even worse in China. We need to stop pretending that college is for everyone and return to the days of educating people for a realistic future instead of pretending that there will be an endless supply of jobs for anyone with a degree in anything.

The noise probably comes from the equipment that sucks air out to maintain the vacuum.

Depending on when it pops many of the datacenters may not have been built. The ones that have been built might not have power, and (in the USA) by the time all those big Westinghouse reactors and small SMRs have been built the datacenters might be obsolete and not worth updating without big AI customers. So there's a possibility that they'll just end up abandoned building complexes in the desert.

It's mostly a contracting issue. Sometimes, if a customer wants full rights to all documentation and design details (or source code or whatever), they have to pay more. If they want exclusive full rights, they have to pay even more. This can be beneficial for some things, not so good for others. If you want to customize your ERP system (SAP or something like that), you'll generally bring in an outside company to do it. You could demand all the source code for everything they did and pay more for it, but if you don't have the necessary expertise on tap to make use of it, it's just throwing money out the window.

The taxpayers paid for the goods along with their research and development.

Not always. Companies do undertake their own research on their own dime, hoping to later sell it to government or other contractors. To take a simple example, a government that purchases a Cessna Citation jet for travel purposes is mostly buying off the shelf. They may customize it with their own communications gear, but they didn't pay for the R&D that went into it. Textron (owner of Cessna and part of RTX) paid for that and is making it up over time with sales of the jet.

A more complicated example is Anduril, which started developing families of weapons on its own and then started getting contracts to further the development process. How much of that should the government own, or at least get access to, if they didn't pay for it?

I agree that the government should be able to fix its own things through contractors of its choosing, and it should get access to all necessary design data. But it's still a contracting issue.

OpenAI will be fine. They just need a few more infusions of cash from Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, and Oracle that they can use to buy stuff from Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, and Oracle. This can go on forever because this is not a scam. Just trust your capitalist masters, they are CEOs and in America CEOs know what's best for us all,

BYD makes the best cars. They're also very well priced. Europe is keeping BYD out of their markets with tariffs. So BYD is setting up a plant in Europe. Trump knows that American tariffs cannot keep BYD from opening a plant here. So to make sure that Tesla, Ford, and GM keep cranking out poorly engineered and overpriced cars BYD has been put on a bad list.

Conspicuous consumption. People want to be seen with the flashy array of cameras on the latest high end iPhone.

Unlikely. With skills in economics, AI, and deception he'll either become a think tank wonk or a Silicon Valley startup charlatan.

Wind and solar are only less expensive if you can actually build them. The current president has made it clear that he will not allow any new large wind or solar projects in the USA. Given the long running tendency of the GOP to swing even further to the extreme right, and the Democratic party's long history of capitulating to the GOP, it makes little sense for businesses to make long-term plans around renewable resources. Even if Trump leaves office and is voted out by a Democrat he might be replaced by someone who's even crazier and decides to actively destroy old renewable power setups. So if you need power for your data centers it just makes more sense to bite the bullet and go with nuclear.

Also, nuclear can probably done for a lot less money if they get the government out of it. Take out public financing and pork barrel contracts and nuclear can be less expensive. Especially if the same companies build the same reactors repeatedly instead of implementing one new design on a rare occasion. We'll find out if Starlink actually gets built and it's four reactors are powered on before the AI industry goes tits up.

Microsoft hasn't been able to do proper security - or proper development for that matter - in half a century, and AI is notorious for pissing out poor quality code.

Glad I only use the git part of Github.

If only Microsoft saw some sense and quit pushing this disaster of a technology - or at least gave people the option to leave it out of their activities. Fuck this AI shit, seriously. It's getting really tiring now...

Two of my implants are passworded - the TOTP application in my Vivokey Apex and my Walletmor payment implant, which occasionally prompt payment terminals to ask my PIN - and guess what: I didn't forget them because they're kind of important. Duh...

Why does it matter? Microsoftâ(TM)s code was buggy garbage long before they implemented vibe coding. If the entire OS was rewritten by a buggy AI nobody would be able to tell the difference.

There are a couple of things going on there. First of all, schools are really designed to teach kids en masse. If you had to teach ONE kid, you'd never set that kid up as we do, where a kid sits down and a teacher talks to them from the front of a room and, after that, gives the student a few minutes of individual attention. The classroom format is designed to maximize the amount of the teacher's time spent teaching while trying to maximize the aggregate learning of the class. But, that means that, for any particular kid, there's a fair bit of the class time when they're not learning at all or learning slower than they are capable of.

You can offset that, some, with differentiated instruction where you put the "smart" kids together -- there, the teacher can go at a faster pace, can provide more challenging work, and so on. But, it still has the same fundamental flaw -- you're optimizing for use of the teacher's time, not the student's.

The other thing is that schools, especially public schools, are bureaucracies that tend to be driven by centralized policy, not by individual decision making at that staff level. Part of that is necessity, but part of it is because administrators don't trust student-facing staff to make good decisions and are also hyper-concerned with liability when student X gets to do something when student Y doesn't. If X and Y are of different races, then there will be a claim that Y was denied BECAUSE of his/her race, even if the decision ultimately made sense for both X and Y.

It sounds like a tool for creating clickbait videos. CANNIBAL CORPSE IN THE STYLE OF BANANARAMA! sort of shit. But I think most people will get bored and cancel before their 30 day trial renews.

Windows isn't enshittifying. It’s been shit for 30 years. The new AI shit is just a replacement for the Cortana shit. People are attributing new Windows bugs to shitty AI generated code but Microsoft has always had bugs due to shitty human generated code. AI isn’t going to make Windows shittier, because it's just the latest generation of shit.