Credit and debit cards are great until there is a power outage, a natural disaster, a war, or a (local and hopefully temporary) collapse of the Internet. Then people just stare at each other and can't even buy gasoline or groceries if they do not have any emergency cash on hand. Hey buddy can you spare a twenty? I need to get to work or my grandmother needs to get to the hospital in the next town over, etc. It would turn panhandling into an art form, not that it isn't one already. And perish the thought that one of those conditions prevails for *months* in which case everyone in the area affected might really be in trouble, especially when the ATMs (which may not work either) and local bank branches (which may not be able to tell what your balance is) run out of cash.

It is embarrassing when a reputable science website makes ridiculous claims like UV-C is the shortest wavelength radiation the sun produces. Perhaps the editors have never heard of x-rays or gamma-rays. And it goes on from there. On the other hand maybe they don't have editors over there anymore, just poorly educated interns supervising AIs making things up. Either way that is kind of sad though.

"AI" is an oxymoron and as soon as people figure that out the better. At least contemporary unthinking, illogical, and delusional stochastic regurgitation AI is. Total disaster and incredible waste of resources too.

I agree most synthetic fuels are not exactly energy efficient. In places like Brazil they make ethanol from sugar cane and power many of their cars that way, and there are some in the U.S. that fuel appropriately adjusted automobiles with 85% ethanol from corn. And both could work, but they are generally less economical than ordinary gasoline, at least around here. There is also synthetic gas that is produced from coal, sometimes known as syngas, which can be (and has been) used to power furnances for (residential) heating applications but which would not make a good car fuel for much the same reason methane does not - not enough energy density even when liquified. And pure hydrogen, though cleaner in carbon terms, is worse, for reasons that are well understood - like being prone to leaks.

One liter per one hundred words? Color me skeptical. It takes a great deal of energy to evaporate a liter of water, and that kind of energy requirement to keep the servers cool (not to mention the cost of electricity to power them) would quickly render generative AI uneconomical. I mean would you spend ten or fifteen minutes boiling a quart of water on your stove just to get one hundred words of text? Even if you could press a button and flash evaporate it that would be ridiculous.

This level of fraud is ridiculous when anyone with an IQ above 50 could tell them how to solve this problem tommorrow. Namely, require in person interviews for financial aid. Or some similar due diligence. This is not rocket science.

Sounds like they need to increase the clock rate by a factor of a million or so to be competitve. It will be interesting to see how hard that is for them. Otherwise this will remain an intellectual curiousity because 25 khz is *very* slow - it would make one of he slowest computers ever built. It would take work to make a stored program microprocessor with a clock rate slower than that, Maybe if you used electromechanical relays or something. Sigh.

(1) Congress should pass a law requiring that bots not misidentify themselves in the user agent string AND require bots to honor robots.txt. Then these obnoxious, ill behaved AI bots could be blocked.
(2) If you have actually valuable content you should put it behind a paywall like most mainstream news sites already do. Making your pages static html, cacheable, or at least really easy to generate would help reduce the load too.

Private entities do not "tell" government agencies to do anything. That is ridiculous. Government agencies can and do *agree* with private entities by contract to do and to refrain from certain things they believe are acceptable costs for the benefits gained, which is okay as long as what they agree to is not prohibited by law. Civics 101. Big difference.

If news sites do not want Google to index or scan their pages they can just block them or make them only accessible to subscribers, which is something they do already. Of course many media companies do have legitimate complaints about traffic burden and fair use of copyrighted works, especially those that require substantially more time, effort, resources, and creativity to create than quite often biased, tendentious, and selective selection of the facts most modern "mainstream" news outlets provide, such as books, movies, and carefully selected, assembled, and edited reference material.

But outlets like the Washington Post have a real problem on their hands, and their current complaints are likely to fall on deaf ears for one major reason. The AI generated summaries that result from a Google search tend to be superficial summaries of facts one can get from just about anywhere including public sources, and if the outlets in question cannot manage to provide value beyond that that the public is willing to pay or suffer advertising for, they do not provide anything of real market value at all. And furthermore their lack of market value is almost entirely self inflicted for reasons that I should not need to repeat here.

Google is your friend.

Not as bad as Spain (or Texas in the winter a few years ago) by any means, but there was a major (and predictable) power outage in Lousiana two or three weeks ago that made the national news. Typical failure to plan properly in the MISO area this time - like not enough conventional power plants, relatively high temperatures, and not enough transmission lines, etc.

Using generative AI in a way that causes non-existent legal cases to be cited should be punished with either disbarment for at least ten years or a year in prison, plus civil damages for any harm caused. And I have to say that so many lawyers who use these tools give the impression of being the most sloppy people on the planet. I mean don't they have reviewers that check their own work before filing briefs that could make a difference in the hundred of millions of dollars for their clients or whether someone lives or dies or goes to prison for twenty years?

To first approximation, environmental authorities and local opposition have made construction of new electrical transmission lines of any significance impossible. And there are a lot of places that need them, which you can see easily by looking at the difference in real time price of electricity just fifty to one hundred miles apart on online charts of those prices in areas that have and provide them. Electricity does often sell for negative prices in the United States due to production tax credits while a hundred miles a way utilities and larger customers are paying a small fortune for theirs. And that will only get worse without more local generation or more transmission lines. I am only aware of one major transmission project constructed recently in the western United States, a high voltage DC connection to supply wind power from the windy plains of south central Wyoming to Delta, Utah, the site of a large retired or soon to be retired coal plant for generating power for the southern California electrical market that has exiting high voltage AC lines that can be reused. And California's grid is in danger of having serious problems due to the closure or impending closure of a number of nuclear power plants, notably the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, and a number of other factors.

Grid operators are among the most heavily regulated enterprises on the planet. And they have to be because they are an actual local monopoly and at some times of the year a modern electrical grid is always five minutes away from collapse. Look at what recently occured both in Spain and in Louisiana, despite certainly some healthy effort (and planning one would hope) to keep the grid in those areas running fine under difficult conditions. The eastern U.S., Texas, and California have also suffered *major* blackouts, and repeat performances are only avoided with the greatest of care and usually only occur in the first place due to inexperience with new market conditions or a collective failure in market design and planning, which is no small feat in any case.