Why does Microsoft care what browser you use? Why do they even make a web browser? Revised: Why do they bother taking someone else's open-source browser and rebranding it with their logo?

So it's good.... except for the bad shit.

When I was in college circa 2000, my undergraduate macroeconomics professor pointed out why the US is so attractive to corporations. "If you want to setup shop in China," he said, "you will need to pay for your own backup generator because the power grid isn't reliable like it is here." He went on to explain similarly about labor - how the US constantly produces a supply of educated people (referring to us in the classroom). So when you incorporate in the US, you have everything you need.

For decades people have predicted this would change, and the time has finally arrived. From 2010 to 2020, the US built 1 new nuclear reactor, while China built 30. Education? While we debate subsidies for solar, China covers entire mountains in solar panels. Foreign student enrollment dropped 15% overall, with big universities seeing as much as 63% decline (DePaul University). The foreign students paid disproportionately more tuition, so universities are going to experience a budget declines next year.

We are digging our own grave.

The solution is to do their own work! Or at least check it! This use of AI is like when people just Google for something and copy/paste the first hit.

What the news doesn't show is the millions of people using AI successfully every day. We know that every day people incorrectly use hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, drills, cars, and guns. Yet they are not declared useless. AI is a tool, and in the hands of a someone with genuine interest in using the tool appropriately, it is a useful one. The best path forward is to continue to make fun of the lazy fools who use it as a crutch and don't even read their own court filings.

Sometimes ChatGPT does search the web, but I believe it uses Bing not Google. Microsoft has a private Bing search that comes with privacy contracts to prevent leaking of corporate secrets.

I suppose ChatGPT could use Google sometimes too, or it could be that some researcher at OpenAI took conversation excerpts and put them into a Google search box.

Yes and no. Someone on Slashdot a few months back had a great summary of this issue: He said something like

Donald Trump took the worst ideas from the far left and the far right, and combined them.

I love that take! For example, from the far left he took ideas like his anti-vaxx and anti-science views that led to nominating RFK Jr, plus his general fiscal irresponsibility. From the far right, he takes nationalism, racism, trickle-down economics, and yet another source of anti-science views on climate. He combines them with his own bad ideas like fluctuating tariffs and randomly antagonizing other countries.

I wish I had a link to the Slashdot comment that summarized this well.

Also, the parties switch every few decades, although most people don't even notice ("We were always at war with Eastasia!"). For example, prior to 9/11, the Democrats leaned anti-immigrant (because labor unions vote Democrat in the US) and Republicans leaned pro-immigrant (because businesses wanted both cheap labor and foreign Ph.Ds). 9/11 made immigration about religion and culture, so the pendulum swung the other way.

Ooh, here's another one! I recently learned that he promised college debt forgiveness to anyone who signs on to ICE. That particular abuse of power was Biden's idea, but Biden didn't tie student debt forgiveness to violence against immigrants. So Trump really amped that one up.

Just for the record: George Bush (R) negotiated and signed NAFTA in 1992 but he wasn't able to get the corresponding US bill passed before the end of his term, so Bill Clinton (D) signed the US law in 1993. Both presidents supported NAFTA.

Trump himself was a Democrat until about 5 minutes before he decides to run for the Republican nomination. His whole family were Democrats and donors too. His cabinet has Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr, both Democrats until Trump.

Trump has really turned the Republican party quite blue, both in terms of staff and economic policy.

Most Americans will condemn something, then vote for it again in the next election cycle. The Republican party did not shift away from Cheney, it went full bore into it.

You are completely missing the point. This provides no benefit to anyone, and there are plenty of devices that simply cannot possibly do HTTPS. HTTP is a valid protocol, and just because something is not secure is not a reason to have corporations banning it.

I think the "p" means "peak" and refers to the the rated amount of the panels before you include the capacity factor, etc. That's why the 800 doesn't make sense but the 80 does. This term was new to me as well and I had to look it up.

For all practical purposes anyone can give medical advice and legal advice, it just isn't officially called "medical advice" or "legal advice" - it's called "Moby Disk's uneducated opinion." Like right now - I am arguing about a legal topic, and you can reply and say I am wrong, and it is totally legal so long as we don't represent ourselves as lawyers.

While this change is a good thing, I foresee a dark path ahead: One day we will wake-up to find that Chrome removed HTTP support. Suddenly technicians around the world won't be able to access all the little-known web services running on their own machines, or on LAN-based IoT devices, where security is not important and the chip doesn't have the CPU power to run AES. Google will back it out for a few months, then unexpectedly turn it on again and claim that HTTP is deprecated so everyone had an ample 2 months to redesign and redeploy millions of devices.

I have been burned by Google executing this pattern on other browser features like JavaScript, HTML, or certificates because they seem to think that browsers are only used for public web sites.

These are all equivalent statements. Make the operator responsible for their contribution, regardless of what tool is used. Good contributors will use tools that are effective. Ineffective tools will either improve, or be discarded. The standards do not change if the contributor used an IDE, or a static analysis tool, or an AI, or a fuzzer, or StackOverflow, or their best friend, or 1000 monkeys at 1000 keyboards.

I can find no reference to CNN claiming that there was no Hunter Biden laptop. Even the article the AC linked to shows that CNN did indeed report on the laptop.