Ten tiny companies, ten meters.

I've said this before. That won't work. Business, unlike homeowners, have the ability to create shell companies. The effort required to avoid rules like that is negligible for businesses. All that does is massively increase the billing hassle for the power companies.

In California, they have messed with the cost structure enough that solar without storage is usually not worth doing beyond your peak usage, because your excess power production won't net you nearly as much as you pay to buy that power back later in the afternoon.

My wife recently bought a new laptop and, to both of our surprise, it was configured out of the box to save data to OneDrive instead of C:. She's not particularly tech savvy and one day Chrome complained that storage was full. She did a web search of the error and it recommended deleting data from OneDrive, which she did, assuming that her family pictures were only backed up there - not primarily stored there - and ended up losing important data as a result of this.

Thankfully it must have been that particular OEM that chose to do this. I had installed "vanilla" Windows 11 on a custom PC build and that didn't happen - and we just bought a new laptop for our new business, different brand, and that was the first setting I checked (not an issue).

Still... companies pushing this type of crap on users is just batshit. Offer as an option, sure. But fundamentally re-configuring core functionality that people who have been using the OS for decades take for granted is just madness.

The broad concern from this poll is clear: half of Americans say they’re more worried than excited about AI in daily life. But a key finding that truly crystallizes the issue is this:

76% of Americans say it’s extremely or very important to be able to tell if content was made by AI—yet a majority, 53%, admit they aren’t confident they could actually do it.

That disconnect is dismaying, because deception isn’t new. Politicians shape stump speeches into whatever “reality” sells. Propaganda, advertising, and courtroom rhetoric are all exercises in selective distortion. Starting with the ochre splashed on the walls of Lascaux and continuing through centuries of myth and image-making, human culture has always blurred the line between truth and narrative.

We happily suspend disbelief for cinema or literature, but we are appalled and recoil when the same fakery is spilled across our screens in our newsfeeds. The context has changed, yeah -- in the theater you willingly suspend your disbelief. But why are humans so willing to suspend it when it comes to their newsfeeds? Why is AI the bogeyman, here? AI doesn't change the fact that most humans lack critical reasoning skills, while some are exceptionally adept at exploiting that lack. AI hasn’t made us worse at spotting deception; it has simply made it obvious how bad we’ve always been. The real question isn’t whether we can perfectly separate “real” from “fake.” It’s whether we can re-calibrate our critical reasoning for a world where fakery is frictionless and narrative is weaponized.

AI isn’t the problem. It’s the mirror.

It's inevitable that something like this will appear regularly, and one day it will be silently exploited.

At that point, everyone will scramble back to on-prem, but until then we have to tolerate this cloud nonsense, apparently.

Part of the problem is that trains are really, really heavy. A double-decker passenger train car might weigh 180,000 pounds and carry only 100 people, for a total weight of 1,800 pounds per car plus the person. So you're carrying half the weight of that Prius. The trains are still vastly more efficient because you have one powertrain accelerating all of those people in Priuses (Prii?) instead of hundreds, they accelerate and decelerate slowly (and rarely), they have low rolling resistance, etc.

Imagine how much more efficient they would be if train cars were improved with modern technology to bring the weight down.

Wow. Their refrigerators reportedly have among the worst reliability stats out of all the major brands, but ads are the reason you're rejecting them? I'm kind of assuming the ads are to recover the unexpectedly high cost of warranty repairs and food loss claims. :-)

Having used a lot of their Blu-Ray players and TVs over the years, Samsung reached peak ensh*ttification a long time ago, IMO. What remains is the long-tail death spiral.

The cheese sandwich was the best part of Frye. I've literally had that same sandwich many times, and while it looks sad and basic, if you are in a position where someone is giving that to you where you didn't specifically order it, let me tell you its special and it hits like nothing else on this earth.

Depends on whether the test pilots were in them at the time. ;-)

So let’s get this straight: a MAGA true-believer shoots and kills a MAGA kingmaker, and the MAGA-chaired House Oversight Committee’s big takeaway is call in the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit? Comer calls Kirk a “patriot” and frames this as proof of “radicalization of online forums.” What’s missing in Comer's script is the part MAGA refuses to acknowledge: the shooter wasn’t some “Antifa super-soldier” conjured from MAGA fever dreams. The shooter was one of their own -- just read his social media.

Instead of grappling with how grievance-politics metastasize inside their movement, the MAGA nutbars running the Oversight Committee are doing what the MAGA nutbars above them are demanding: find a scapegoat, any scapegoat, and get the spotlight off of MAGA. Their choice? Silicon Valley. Drag in some gaming-focussed CEOs, grill them on their platform's “nefarious purposes,” and hope the ensuing headlines bury the fact that a hate-spewing MAGA mouthpiece was silenced by a hate-filled MAGA nutbar's rage. Let's be clear, here: Kirk spent a decade cultivating that rage. He reaped what he sowed.

Apple said they’d never cave,
Touchscreens weren’t their game,
walled gardens are their claim to fame,
But here we are all the same

Come on, come on, come on, come on —
And touch me, babe, can’t you see
That’s the feature they resisted endlessly!

Now OLED shines so bright,
M6 dreams at night,
Steve said “no” back in the day,
But now Tim says we can win that fight

Come on, come on, come on, come on —
Touch me, babe, can’t you see
The market is not afraid, what was that promise that Tim made?

Come on, come on, come on, now touch me babe!

With apologies to Jim Morrison and the boys... :)

>"People under 18 should not be permitted to enter into contracts without parental permission."

Parents and their agents should not give unrestricted internet-connected devices to their children, or allow them access to such devices, without direct supervision.

It isn't about not allowing a contract with minors, which would encumber every site out there to force every user (adult) to "ID" themselves and then be tracked, striping everyone of their privacy. The parent(s) gave a minor a device on which he could, apparently, load any app he wanted. Or the device was set up with a blacklist instead of a whitelist, which simply isn't enough.

You're wrong about potatoes. They *are* high in starch, but they aren't "nearly all" starch, like corn or wheat.

I take it your LED lights at home are at least 1500 lumens and 6000k?