Sounds like a great idea!
With the best of intentions!
What could possibly go wrong?

The "We think that some of you might be passing around illegal material, so it is imperative that we be given the power to invasively look at everyone's private communications. We're only going to be looking for this one narrow category of illegal material, and we won't look at anything else. Honest. You can trust us not to abuse this." declaration using the justification "we have to protect the children !" is one of the most abusable power grabs ever. Once a government has the power to read all your communications looking for one thing some individuals may be breaking the law by doing, there's nothing preventing them from saying "Well, we're already reading their communications to find this, so we can just look for this other thing, too, as long as we have their communications" and extending their strip-mining of those communications looking for anything else the government might want to prohibit, starting with other illegal activity and becoming more and more invasive until they're looking for anyone saying something that might be considered to be simply critical of the government.

Paying someone to review the AI's assessments will wind up being cheaper than paying out the settlements on the lawsuits for 'overenthusiastic' police officers forcing a child to their knees, cuffing them, and searching them after a false accusation. And, presumably, the number of times that the AI will trigger on such an event will be small, allowing the human tasked with reviewing AI positives to perform other duties when not actively fielding an AI system's misperceptions.

Microsoft: "Here's our crappiest idea, hosted by Clippy!"

Crappiest mascot, crappiest idea, and crappiest investment: MSFT

Short MSFT

Why not demand 2,000% or 100,000%?

These are just as likely as demanding 30%

Base...Base.

Base.

All Your Base...Are Belong to Us.

The farm-vs-city differential goes back centuries -- look at Edward Jenner and his discovery that farm girls, who worked closely with the animals, would contract cowpox but wouldn't contract smallpox afterward, and developed the technique of variolation to introduce cowpox to uninfected individuals, and acquired immunity to smallpox. But smallpox remained a threat in urban areas until variolation, and later vaccination, became common.

The EV manufacturers could always adopt the Chinese innovation to protect the occupants of an EV in the event of a battery breakdown and fire being detected -- add a mechanism to eject the battery to the side of the vehicle, where it becomes an SEP (Somebody Else's Problem) -- but the occupants are safe from the battery pack immolating itself.

Don't forget the cost of the battery storage system needed to accumulate enough energy to recharge the farm's vehicles, so they don't have to sit plugged into a solar array for days to be usable for a half day. And the farm vehicles need to operate even when the weather is uncooperative -- fully overcast days when the solar array is producing at 10% of its rated capacity. You see solar operators flogging their installation of X hundred megawatts of solar panels... and never admit that that's their rated maximum capacity, and the long-term production rate will be a third or less of that rate, even assuming that they're in a location that's optimal for solar irradiance.

Corals thrive in warm water, not cold water, and have survived for sixty million years, through temperatures and CO2 levels significantly higher than what we're seeing now. The primary reasons for reef bleaching include sediment and fertilizer runoff from nearby coastal lands, chemicals found in sunscreen (i.e., oxybenzone), temporary increased exposure to UV caused by local drops in sea level in shallow reefs, and damage associated with ship traffic.

"What a wonderful idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?"

Passing good bills? In a rare-as-hen's-teeth decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California's "one gun purchase every 30 days" law was an unconstitutional *rationing* of an individual's right to self-defense guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment. Yesterday Newsom AB1078, which restricts handgun purchases to _three_ guns per month, despite not having been able to demonstrate that the previous one-gun-purchase-per-30-days law had any effect on gun violence, and establishes a digital database tracking all handgun purchases with the biometric data of the purchasers, cross-referenced against social media profiles, and uses AI to flag 'suspicious patterns' by a purchaser, and gives law enforcement the authority to investigate any one approaching the three-per-month limit, even if they have no record of criminal behavior. The bill provides for warrantless searches of gun stores, mandatory reporting of customer conversations, felony charges for gun-store owners' systems not interfacing properly to the statewide system, and shares all of this data with federal agencies, creating a national gun registry through the back door.

But he's managed to sign one bill that is unreservedly beneficial to residents, so that clearly excuses all of his other actions.

Or list the charge for the basic service, with the footnote, in something actually readable instead of the "Flyspeck 3" commonly used to hide embarrassing details, that these prices do not include locally-imposed access charges, with a link to a page where the potential customer can put in their general location and get an itemized list of any and all additional charges that apply to service in their area -- if the ISP can't itemize the additional charges for an area, then they can't charge them to the customer.

What TFA doesn't mention is that "renewables" lumps hydro power and biomass (i.e., burning trees, sawdust, and other organic material for power) into the category of 'renewables', allowing the renewable lobby to jump on the claims as proof that the world is rapidly moving toward wind and solar power and away from fossil fuels. In fact, wind and solar only contributed 15% of the world's electricity last year, and is unlikely to rise significantly this year. In the article, Rowlatt declared that solar power " is now so cheap that large markets for solar can emerge in a country in the space of a single year" -- yet the contribution of solar power rose from 5.6% in 2023 to only 6.7% in 2024, hardly a transformative increase.

Why not deploy more, cheaper, less efficient AI processors, but run it only during the daytime when the solar farms are pumping out excess energy? It won't be the highest performance and have more heat output but you don't have to worry about energy availability or build grid storage infrastructure to support it. You could then offer it at a discount for customers that are willing to wait a little longer for training tasks to complete.

This is obviously not good for on-demand inference tasks (e.g. talking to AI customer support agent), but inference is orders of magnitude less demanding on the hardware.