Only it'll be worse, because the value of the "assets" that have secured all those mortgages they sold the risk on as derivatives will almost certainly go into freefall along with everything else when the bubble pops.

"So, Mr. Jones, you secured your mortgage you're struggling to repay with £1m of... ah, crypto. And what are those holdings worth now? $500k you say? Well, if you'll just vacate the premises and hand over your house keys, I'm sure we can sort all that out to minimise our losses as far as possible. I hear there are some nice bridges and stuff to live under not too far from your neighbourhood. Next!"

I remember the old "Windows ain't done until Lotus won't run!" schtick. I wouldn't surprise me at all if the "faulty" code originated with the Edge team to help encourage adoption of their version of the Chromium user tracking software over Google's version, and through doing so nudge a few more people into using Bing and Copilot instead of Google Search and Gemini for even more tracking.

Think of an iceskater pirouetting on the rink with their arms stretched out. If they pull their arms in, they start to spin faster, thereby conserving angular momentum, but they don't gain any additional mass from doing so. More massive blackholes with a faster spin have just consumed more matter to get to that state, but it hasn't fundamentally changed the overall mass of the galaxy they are in.

It was, and is. But there's another factor to this. Look at the figures for Google (which is also doing AI) vs. those for Anthropic.

Google is still mostly an ad-provision driven business, and it is fuelling that business on a relatively low volume of content scraping to actual eyeballs visiting the site and viewing the ads it providing. The cost of providing the data to Google's craweler is, one would hope, largely recovered in the ad revenue generated and other financial benefits from those actually visiting the site (subscriptions, purchases, tips, whatever). In otherwords, they have a viable business model and will survive to provide content to those that want it another day.

Now look at the other extreme in the provided figures with Anthropic. The site gets *nothing* back from Anthropic, quite the opposite in fact since Anthropic is harvesting their content and using it to train their AI engine, any issues around copyright be damned, but is paying for the hosting costs and the quite insane levels of crawling Anthropic is doing. I mean, seriously, WTF is Anthropic doing to need that level of crawling? That's just out of the park and looks very much like a script that is running completely without any throttles even though it's just pulling the exact same content down over and over and over again, which does not give me much confidence in the quality or competence of their developers. For the website though, it's going to completely skew their hosting costs - they had a business model with Google's ratio of 2:1, maybe even at 18:1, but at 60,000:1? That's an increase in an overhead by a factor of 30,000, which is going to break a lot of business models, and potentially they could also be paying Anthropic to help generate some of their content, thereby making their problem even worse... That very likely means more paywalls, more deliberate attempts to poison AI-scraped data, and - of course - lawsuits.

Unless the AI bubble pops soon, I fear that there's only one way this is going to end, and that is with the Internet completely overwhelmed with AI-generated slop, many of the smaller content producers and hosters that can't adapt quickly enough having folded, and any remaining residual content with value that people might actually want to see locked away behind paywalls and other login protections. Maybe it's time for written media to have its "vinyl" moment; Anthropic et al's crawlers are not going to do too well with a printed book...

Perhaps if it had adequate funding... ?

I'm not following your logic there. AFAICT from TFS, the patent in Canada has *lapsed* and no longer exists so anyone can manufacture this stuff (presumably subject to suitable medical grade quality controls) and sell it in Canada at whatever price they choose, including the government or their appointed sub-contractor if they wanted to. That means *every* version of semaglutide in Canada is going to be at generic prices real soon now anyway, because the market will be saturated with them.

If the government bought out the patent sure, they could then license it for a fee, but what would be the point if the aim is to make the drug available cheaply to Canadians and, I guess, USians that cross the border to fill their prescriptions rather than pay US prices that are still under patent cover? That would just add license costs on top of manufacturing and distribution costs and drive the overall prices up, unless you mean by adding a price cap as part of the license terms? The logical thing to do would be to let the market set the prices and if that's at a realistic level, then great, but if not - because Martin Shkreli isn't the only greedy fsck without a conscience in pharma - then Plan B would be to contract someone to manufacture them at a given price for the use of the Canadian health service.

TFS doesn't quite add up to what the headline implies. AFAICT, the actual sequence of events is that Ms. Horan bought and paid for some toilet rolls on May 8th, after which *human error* at the store resulted in her being added to the Facewatch programme. Because she had been added to the Facewatch DB, the programme then did exactly as it was supposed to and flagged her entry into the stores on May 24th & June 4th, prompting the store staff to react pretty much as you'd expect under the circumstances and ask her to leave, albeit perhaps without sufficient discretion.

There's really only one screw up here, and that was by the staff at the May 8th store who added her to the Facewatch DB, everyone and everything else seems to have done as they/it should have done under the circumstances. Still, on the "lessons learnt" front, users of systems like this *really* need to allow for the possibility of human error in the submission or a mistaken ID by the system (not that this seems to have happened here) when challenging someone like this, and have a clear cut audit trail and process of appeal. If Home Bargains had been able to say, right off the bat, that it was down to a presumed theft of toilet rolls on May 8th and undertake an on-the spot review on May 24th, this could easily have been avoided.

Because it's good PR, for once, as opposed to the expected "Oh, sorry, but you're out of warranty and therefore SoL"? It's basically admitting that yes, they (or one of their component suppliers) screwed up, but that they are going to make good and give you either a credit voucher to buy something else from them or an upgraded model of the product. That some of the these are 10 years old and likely long since lost or discarded means that this is going to cost a lot less than the total ~$30m value of the banks being recalled, which could be a hell of a lot less if they were to get sued, especially in the US, gives them an out on any future issues ("they were recalled, why were you still using it?"), and is probably covered by insurance anyway.

One frustrating thing with this list is that communists *always* have to get rid of labour power. Should be obvious. The Nazis did the same thing for the same reason. You cannot be socialist and have the workers revolting. Instead, you take over the unions.

And this issue about corporations being protected... well, yes. More like co-opted. Like Nazi officials in every business mediating labour relations and directing some business decisions. So just like China. Corporations protected. Yes. But are they really corporations or defacto parts of the government?

This is unsolvable in many ways, because tribal knowledge (religious/political) is invariably dripping with nonsense. As humans we cannot see this in ourselves. It's to do with knowing who is and isn't on your side, so we are primed to censor and attack each other based on what amounts to cr*p that we don't know is cr*p.

Humans are a bad example here because of the "learning/maturation" confound. A baby goat is born, and walking withing minutes. They're almost immediately good at not bumping into stuff -- it seems problems mainly due to muscle coordination. Or how about a chicken, that has perfect stereo vision depth perception without any learning at all. This was tested by putting hoods on the chickens that let them see through one eye. (You have to alternate the exposed eye each day, so that the eyes still develop.) The instant you remove the hood: perfect depth perception. 100% maturation. No learning.

The irrationality myth comes from confusing people's goals with people's reasons. Reason serves the goals. Behind the vast majority of "irrational behaviour" is some game-theoretically optimal reasoning to a desired goal.

Further, reason is fundamentally different to pattern matching. If humans were mere pattern matchers, we'd be incapable of testing ideas, and we'd need millions or billions of years to examples before we could write or talk. Humans also do "one shot learning".

We can create reasoning computer systems, and "one shot learning", and pattern matching (LLMs). The problem is how do you merge these together. That is a giant mystery that the human brain does on 20 watts of power.

If this were true then it'd take a child about a million years to learn how to talk. Humans have pattern matching, sure, but we also have reasoning, and "one shot learning", and some secret sauce to coordinate all of these.

Exactly, this is coming across as more of a sweeter to placate people's concerns (by essentially buying enough off that the remainder are very much a vocal minority) in order to get things done. No one likes things like HT pylons in the rural landscape, and rightly so, but the UK's nimbys have an awful lot of power to ties things up in legal knots and prevent progress that really must happen one way or another.

The devil's in the details, but my gut feeling is that much of the distribution infrastructure for this need not be HT, other than for the short haul near the generation facility to include a grid interconnect. If the generated power is only going locally, and never needs to really touch the national HT grid, then you may be able to get away with mostly 33kV and below "last mile" style pylons and cabling, which is much less visually intrusive and can indeed be more readily buried. This is also presumably the model for the containerised reactors; small, mostly self-contained, networks of both power generation and consumption.

build more power lines,

That's the crux of the problem. The UK's grid was built when large carbon-fueled power stations were king, and so the distribution network is essentially a hub-and-spoke design radiating out from those to the end users, with the load carrying capacity getting smaller and smaller as you go. That means by the time you get to the rural fringes, like Scotland and Cornwall/Devon, which is where a lot of the optimal offshore wind sites are, the grid simply does not have the capacity to take large amounts of power the other way. Baseload capacity has to be pushed around the core of the grid, which - since we're talking overhead HT lines - are generally built along mostly flat routes between the carbon-fueled power stations, and only pass conveniently close to on-shore wind farms or off-shore wind landing stations by coincidence.

You know what else the UK has a lot of besides green energy it can't fully utilise? Nimbyism. As you'd probably expect, Nimbys really don't like the idea of new HT lines running through their local countryside (or nuclear plants, to touch on your other point), so the other goal of this regionalisation is to encourage them to accept the tradeoff in return for (relatively) cheaper local market prices in areas where there is a lot of existing or potential green (or nuclear) energy capacity. Supplementing that with local storage systems - batteries, pumped water, molten salt, or whatever - should hopefully be something that comes along in lockstep, but so far that doesn't seem to be integral to the plan, but is rather being left up to the generating companies to decide on.