So far no mention of the Chinese elephant in the room? Also curious about the European situation. Or should I report on the increasingly bleak Japanese situation as regards electricity supplies?

One thing about renewable power like solar and wind is that you may have "free" excess capacity just because the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. For a lot of the AI training stuff, that can be scheduled when the power is available and thus lower the electricity demand from the data centers for AI training... You don't need to worry about storing the electricity if you have some lower-priority stuff scheduled to use it immediately.

Why funny? Because I think it would be funny if someone made a special version of the Tesla logo. Look close and you'd see it's actually a starving child with extended arms. One version could be a plastic logo cover for the hood ornament on Tesla cars.

I also considered the option of a little note to stick under the wiper of a parked Tesla: "Are you pro-life? If so, why do you drive a car linked with starving innocent children to death?"

Of course I'm just joking and I'd never actually do such a thing. Or maybe I'm not joking and I just believe that no insurance company would cover a Tesla unless the owner has a parking place with surveillance cameras? But I don't think you could pay me enough to support any Musk enterprise now. No joke.

Just checking... Was that a coma joke? If not, then could you explain the context?

How fast can we make things worse by burning more fossil fuel? The answer may surprise your children, but not your grandchildren who will be sadly too familiar with the mess we've created for them.

In related news: Bears as in a plague of bears. Not a simple and direct relationship, but they have certainly become a massive nuisance in Japan. New record for human deaths, apparently because the beech trees had a really bad year resulting in lots of extra hungry bears. However what surprised me the most was an estimate of 4,200 bears already "culled" this year. I was checking on the base as the government announced new policies that essentially call for war against the bears and wondered how bad it could get...

Yesterday saw a "Funny" video of a big bear demolishing a bear trap. Smarter than the average bear?

Modern models will take into account statistical biases in lotteries. For example, here's ChatGPT:

Pick good lottery numbers for the Virginia powerball lottery

Good question. First, a reality check: Powerball is pure chance — there’s no “good” numbers that are more likely to win. Every set of 5 white balls (1–69) + 1 Powerball (1–26) has exactly the same probability.
wwwuat.valottery.com
+1

That said, I can give you a few tips + a sample “random but balanced” pick, if you’d like to pick your own numbers rather than use Quick Pick.

Some tips when choosing your Powerball numbers

Spread your numbers
Try to pick a mix across the range (low, mid, high). According to lottery-strategy advice, not clustering all your numbers in one group is better.
samlotto.com

Avoid patterns
Many people pick birthdays, anniversaries, or sequential numbers. That’s fine—but if you win, you might have to share with more people because these are popular picks.
lotteryvalley.com

Use “due” or “hot” numbers carefully
Some sites (like lottery-analysis tools) track which numbers are “hot” (drawn recently) or “overdue” (haven’t appeared in a while). But remember: past draws don’t change future odds.
m.lottostrategies.com

Mix even and odd
According to some statistical analyses, it’s less likely to draw all odd or all even numbers.
samlotto.com

Play responsibly
Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are extremely long: 1 in ~292 million.
lotterycritic.com

Sample “balanced” Powerball pick

Here’s a random-but-balanced combination you could use just for fun (or as a basis to tweak):

White balls: 8, 23, 41, 57, 65

Powerball: 12

If you like, I can generate 5 different “smart random” picks for the next Virginia Powerball draw (balanced by probability and number distribution). Do you want me to do that?

It's a damned shame '99942 Apothis' will miss us in a few years

It's not too late to fix that.

The thing is, it very much *won't* be random numbers. It's about as far from a random number generator as you can get.

In a really bad model, one would expect it to likely be "numbers it's seen the most in the context of a lottery". But in a good model, esp. a thinking model, one would expect it to think over which sorts of numbers are statistically over-chosen (birthdates, etc) and avoid them in giving its answers.

The funny thing is, think of how this woman will interact with ChatGPT from now on. ChatGPT could say "Abraham Lincoln was married to John Wilkes Booth", and she'd be thinking, "Okay, that sounds really, really wrong, but on the other hand, it picked the right lottery numbers, so..."

I'll go with NHTSA and NASA over the "Barr Group" ambulance chasers, thank you. Barr found that it's possible if you get like a cosmic ray to flip just the right bit you could stick the throttle on (but still not make it overpower the brakes). NHTSA and NASA investigated not just the software but the actual cases. In not a single actual case that they investigated did they find that it wasn't well explained by either stuck pedals or pedal misapplication (mainly the latter).

Oh hi, I remember chatting with you earlier :) Sorry to hear about your back. If you're ever planning on visiting Iceland, drop me a line, I can make recommendations. :)

There's some fascinating new work on "inverse-vaccines". In the same way that antigens can be flagged as "foreign", they can also be flagged as "non-foreign" by attaching N-acetylgalactosamine (pGal) to them. The liver recognizes that tag and uses it to suppress immune activation against that antigen.

That's not the goal of a vaccine against a dormant virus (destroying B-cells), it's about developing a more capable immune reaction against the virus itself. See for example the shingles vaccine (targets dormant VZV, aka shingles / chickenpox). With a strong immune recognition of the virus, as soon as it tries to reactivate, it's immediately targeted, preventing it from becoming problematic.

Dormant viruses use a combination of (A) techniques to suppress immune recognition of them, and (B) low / no reproduction until your body's immune recognition of them has weakened. Vaccines help deal with both issues.

(BTW, if you're getting up there in age and haven't gotten your shingles vaccine, do so. It's one of the "rougher" vaccines, IMHO (both on my initial and followup doses I had "flu symptoms" for a day, when I normally have no reaction at all to vaccines), but that's *way* better than getting shingles)

The funny thing is that as soon as I saw "[condition] may be linked to a common virus" I thought, "It's Epstein-Barr, isn't it?"

Seems it causes bloody everything under the sun :P

As soon as there's even a clinical trial I can sign up for to get vaccinated against it, I'm getting it. I had mono in my late teens, so I can be expected to have dormant Epstein-Barr in me. A horrible autoimmune condition that my mother has (which leads to among other things her skin regularly feeling like it's on fire) seems to be linked to Epstein-Barr reactivation.

He has a joke "You know I can see you" that he targets at live audience members who act like they are watching television.

Headline of the story is not helpful. Should have been "in-tv-cameras" or "cameras-with-TVs"...

But now I'm wondering if TikTok can watch back? Or is this just an idea for a fresh form of app perversion? You didn't notice that the ToS gives us the right to capture everything we can get from your front and back cameras, plus you gave us permission to use AI to search for the funniest bits and post those candid-camera videos online. I imagine a business model where people can claim 1% of the profits for their contributions, assuming they can actually prove the linkage... But of course such a highly ethical company will be laundering all of the money through various jurisdictions and it turns out there are no profits! (PROFIT!)

Topic certainly seems to have room for some Funny, though I'm not holding my breath waiting for today's Slashdot to deliver it.

Not sure how much I concur. There's also the possibility that he thinks there won't be any value in the currency after the coming crash, so there's no point in placing more bets. "Full faith and credit" may implode on the "faith" dimension? Or perhaps he thinks "legal tender" will implode on the "legal" dimension?

Also, the only realistic way to create a true "unintended acceleration" without pedal misapplication is something getting stuck in the pedal or the pedal getting stuck down, which is not actually a subtle thing (again, these things have happened, but they're dwarfed by how often people hit the wrong pedal). Just sensor readings alone don't cut it. As a general rule, pedals have multiple sensors reading the pedal position (typically 2-3). They have to agree with each other, or the target acceleration is set to zero. A sensor failure doesn't cut it. Also, Hall-effect sensors are highly reliable.

Oh, and there's one more "failure mechanism" which should be mentioned, which is: creep. Some EVs are set to creep or have creep modes, to mimic how an ICE vehicle creeps forward when one lifts their foot off the brakes. If someone forgets they have this on, it can lead to "unintended acceleration" reports. There have been cases where for example the driver gets in an accident, but not intense enough to trigger the accident sensors, and the car keeps "trying to drive" after the accident (aka, creep is engaged). People really should not engage creep mode, IMHO - the fact that ICEs creep forward is a bug, not a feature.