There are some clear ways in which Street View gave Google Maps an advantage for many years. One big one was recognizing front doors and house numbers, giving them better accuracy than rivals that only knew where an address was to within whatever radius the postal code was. It was also a lot better at taking you to the front entrance of shops and offices, instead of the nearest side door.

For some reason the US seems to have really bad map data. Most countries made it a priority to get accurate GIS and infrastructure data, so it seems to work much better in Europe and Japan.

Maybe this is what he was talking about when he said there was a lack of optimism.

AI is inevitable. The only question is who is going to decide how it works, and how it affects their population. The choice of US billionaires or the CCP isn't a great one, but it could also be the EU or US government having a big say in it. At least in the case of the EU, that is likely to result in a smoother transition to whatever is the next stage, for us.

I recently set up Navidrome for this. It scans your music (and audiobook in my case) collection and serves it all up via an HTTP interface. There are apps for Android and iOS.

For remote access the best option is Cloudflare Zero Trust. I know, the Evil Empire, but they provide a useful and free service where they act as an HTTPS proxy for your home server, via a VPN connection. They support various authentication methods too, so your server isn't exposed to the internet, their proxy is.

Anyway, with that I have hundreds of gigabytes of music and audio books that I have collected over the years, accessible from anywhere, and it costs me nothing.

CNSA is working on debris removal systems, which also happen to work as offensive anti-satellite weapons.

The US and Russia are working on them too.

The solution to the debris problem might end up being that everyone wants on-orbit offensive capability, under the guise of cleaning up debris.

Maybe you should look at an off-grid system then, or a plug-in system. Although it sounds like your city has decided to wage war on renewables, so maybe those are banned as well.

That's a novel solution, but I think most countries would be reluctant to allow the Navy to own and operate such critical infrastructure.

The fuel isn't the only issue anyway. And as always, it comes back to "why bother?" We have a cheaper solution, available now, with no issues beyond the usual NIMBYism. Maybe if we get to 95% renewable and there is a real problem that nuclear could solve cost effectively, we could look at it again.

Russia, the US, and India have also tested anti-satellite weapons, creating debris in orbit. But it's unlikely to be anything related to that. There is much more debris from satellites that collided, parts of rockets that didn't quickly re-enter the atmosphere, and natural rocks caught in Earth's gravity well. It might also be something that was dropped from the Chinese station or one of the visiting vehicles itself. I haven't seen any reports of them losing stuff, but during EVAs on the ISS, tools are regularly lost as they drift out of reach.

There were complaints about music in the 1950s being all short and bombastic little songs for people no close to zero attention span. Ancient Greeks had similar concerns about their youth.

I'd say the issue is more like drugs than lack of attention span. That little boost from being entertained by a video, the urge to swipe to the next one. Kinda like how people get addicted to alcohol and tobacco.

I don't watch linear broadcast TV either. I do sometimes watch long form YouTube essay videos. 4 hours of H. Bomberguy recently. I don't watch YouTube Shorts at all.

Came to say, this is standard on many vehicles from other countries too. Tesla can remotely brick cars, disable DC charging capability, remove features that the owner paid for etc. Many vehicles have some kind of telemetry interface now, especially commercial ones where it's seen as a feature (for tracking, driver monitoring, anti-theft, maintenance).

There was a bit of a controversy when Hyundai introduced a "feature" via software update that allowed them to geofence or remotely disable vehicles.

The only difference here is that the manufacturer is Chinese, so there is paranoia that Xi might decide to brick all the busses in Denmark when WW3 starts.

The risk is that it pushes China to overtake the US even faster.

Look at what DeepSeek did. Massively reduced the cost and energy needed to train an AI, leapt ahead of all the US competitors who were throwing huge money at Nvidia. All the export restrictions are doing is spurring that kind of innovation.

This will probably just bring China's future cutting edge chip manufacturing technology forward a few years, as efforts are redoubled to replace US and European parts.

I digitized all our analogue photos a few years ago. Some did need restoration work, but I was mostly able to use the automatic setting.

When you go back and look at photos like that you realize how good modern cameras are. So many are a little out of focus, a little over or under exposed.

I'd like to see AI enhance the presentation of routing options, so a brief overview of the pros and cons rather than just a map. It could also make better use of public transport, survey routes for issues like steep slopes, and make suggestions like "if you hurry you can catch an earlier train".

They could do with some small UI improvements too, like showing how much leeway you have to make connections.

It very much depends where you live and the quality of the data available for that area. Google does generate some of its own data, from satellite imagery and Street View images, but it has to rely on third parties for some stuff too. In places where that data is good, so is Google Maps, and every other mapping app.

Japan is a good example of that. It varies by prefecture, but generally speaking it's excellent. There are some weaknesses, which are down to third parties not providing timely updates, such as closed bus stops.

The correct quote is: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

I'm not sure Steam is a monopoly, but it's certainly quite dominant. I prefer GOG because you get an offline installer that you can keep forever.

It speaks to their generally lax security efforts. People imagine that the Louvre is some kind of Fort Knox style impenetrable fortress d'art.