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.

Why would you fly from LA to DC to see a shuttle when there is already a space shuttle (Endeavor) in LA? There were six built (counting Enterprise) and minus the destroyed Challenger and Columbia, there are four left at three corners of the country for you to see.

Dude there are *four* surviving space shuttles. One in DC, one in NY (those are close together, fair enough -- the one in NY was only for atmo testing and while mostly capable of flying in space, but never received the refit to be able to do it) but the other two flown shuttles are at KSC in Florida and in Los Angeles. If your argument was that people have to travel too far, then we'd move the NY one to Nebraska or something to minimize distance traveled from any point in the country. That would also be a lot cheaper to stay at a hotel there than in Houston.

But, conveniently, Florida, New York, DC and California are some of the most visited places in the US. 64% of Americans have visited Florida (far more than any other state), 56% have visited New York, 54% DC, and 50% California. Texas just barely beats California at 51%, so you could probably improve accessibility a tiny tiny tiny bit by moving the LA one to Houston, but that would leave the entire western US with worse access (distance from LA to Houston is 1500 miles, vs distance from Houston to KSC is 1000 miles, and that's not even taking into account places like the Pacific Northwest.)

If you want to see a shuttle for less money, you have a couple of options. Go to Florida and drive to KSC, or stay at a cheap place somewhere along the Northeast Corridor or Metro North train lines and take a day trip into NYC -- you can stay late as the last Northeast Corridor trains run late into the evening and the Metro North trains leave as late as 1AM. (And you can take an uber to Penn/Grand Central to get the short distance to the train stations if you want to avoid the subway at night -- it's not as dangerous as the news makes it seem but you do see some tweakers on the subway, but the regional trains out of the city are clean and comfy)