No. This is inconsequential. Literally nothing at all.
I wonder how much the FAA will pass away "investigating".
Shirley the thoroughness of the investigation is inversely proportional to the amount Amazon "invests" in Trumps latest scam.
Not surprising at all. This was a concern that was raised over a decade ago, even in discussions here on
The fact is that road maintenance needs to be paid, and it was long thought that charging taxes on gasoline was a good way to fund roads because it was simple to implement, it scales with how far you drive, and it also scales with the size of your vehicle (larger vehicles do more damage to the roads). So it was relatively fair. It also didn't require invasive data collection, such as how far or where you drove your vehicle.
When it was first discussed here on
Of course now we voluntarily GPS track ourselves and send the data to our corporate overlords, so that all seems like a moot point.
Will this new law also apply to those crazy guys that power their diesel cars off used french fry grease they get from restaurants?
The free ride for EVs was going to end at some point. If your only reason to get an EV was to evade a small amount of taxation, well you're SOL and should probably re-evaluate your priorities.
In the UK, you have a yearly car inspection called an MOT that registers your mileage at the point of inspection. In that way it's easy to determine what the per mile tax would be. Personally I'd rather a blanket tax on all EVs as it would be easier to administer but I don't have an EV.
However I feel that we're about to discover the hard way the dangers and downsides of the extreme amount of computerisation in modern cars. They're already sending telemetry to the manufacturer, often without the knowledge of the owner, what is to stop the cars from sending similar telemetry to the government? Your car becomes the snitch, especially if people start to fiddle with the mileage before an MOT. There's no need for a new GPS spying system to be installed, it's already there.
BTW, when it comes to diesel, modern cars can't really run off of chip fat from the local chippy and converting it to biodiesel would be more expensive than buying diesel (especially as it won't scale)... however something similar has already been a thing in the UK for ages as we have "red" diesel... which is diesel sold tax free for non-road use (industrial, mining, agricultural, generators and the like, vehicles and applications that would never use the road) with a red dye added for easy identification. A few people used red diesel for road going vehicles but it's never been such a significant issue that anything beyond token enforcement has been necessary.
I believe that there is no limit to the incompetence of government committee.
We've formed a committee to limit the levels of incompetence in the previous committee.
The difference between the AI slop machine and Amazon or Uber is that even when those were losing money, it was none the less clear that if they scaled up then scaling efficiencies would yield a lower cost/unit and they'd become profitable. The pathway to making money instead of setting it on fire clearly existed. It also existed because it was clear even before they super-scaled that Amazon and Uber were doing something useful for which where existed a demand.
So far all we are seeing with the generative AI delusion is an exponentially exploding waste of resources in order to pollute my Youtube feed with slop. Every enterprise is trying "AI" and essentially all of them are finding it does not do what the people selling the tin claim it can.
There were no Amazon, or Uber or Internet evangelists trying to convince everyone that those things were useful or invent uses for them because there was no need: the value was obvious and real.
Isn't Uber still losing money?
Amazon had a plan for profitability, so much so they took on more debt in the early days to scale up. A gamble that paid off because they had a solid plan to begin with, not a "hope the magic beans drop into our laps before we run out of money" type of plan that AI companies have. Uber's business plan was "lets keep doing illegal shit that our competitors cant and just hope we become big enough not to fail".
Shove Ts&Cs down users' throats and blame the victim while trying to deflect the responsibility.
Erm... that's the whole point of a T&C/EULA/et al. To limit legal liability and as a defence against being sued. Which is one of the reasons most countries do not treat them as binding contracts.
In other news, the catholic church is suing OpenAI because they had the idea to simply make suicide illegal a thousand years ago and have been using it ever since.
Not sure if it's a trade secret or a copyright case, the news often don't mention the fine details.
That's a good point. Here on
The movie analogy is old and outdated.
I'd compare it to a computer game. In any open world game, it seems that there are people living a life - going to work, doing chores, going home, etc. - but it's a carefully crafted illusion. "Carefully crafted" in so far as the developers having put exactly that into the game that is needed to suspend your disbelief and let you think, at least while playing, that there are real people. But behind the facade, they are not. They just disappear when entering their homes, they have no actual desires just a few numbers and conditional statements to switch between different pre-programmed behaviour patterns.
If done well, it can be a very, very convincing illusion. I'm sure that someone who hasn't seen a computer game before might think that they are actual people, but anyone with a bit of background knowledge knows they are not.
For AI, most of the people simply don't (yet?) have that bit of background knowledge.
And yet, when asked if the world is flat, they correctly say that it's not.
Despite hundreds of flat-earthers who are quite active online.
And it doesn't even budge on the point if you argue with it. So for whatever it's worth, it has learned more from scraping the Internet than at least some humans.
It's almost as if we shouldn't have included "intelligence" in the actual fucking name.
We didn't. The media and the PR departments did. In the tech and academia worlds that seriously work with it, the terms are LLMs, machine learning, etc. - the actual terms describing what the thing does. "AI" is the marketing term used by marketing people. You know, the people who professionally lie about everything in order to sell things.
professions that most certainly require a lot of critical thinking. While I would say that that is ludicrous
It is not just ludicrous, it is irrationally dangerous.
For any (current) LLM, whenever you interact with them you need to remember one rule-of-thumb (not my invention, read it somewhere and agree): The LLM was trained to generate "expected output". So always think that implicitly your prompt starts with "give me the answer you think I want to read on the following question".
Giving an EXPECTED answer instead of the most likely to be true answer is literally life-threatening in a medical context.
The 1990s called, they want their meme back.
Mad cow disease, seriously? That hasn't been a thing for 30 years.
There is inevitably someone with absolutely no sense of humour.
Also clearly not British, we tend to enjoy that kind of self deprivation.
Use something better like notepad++, if you are still using notepad maybe change your workflow. I realize that this can be difficult if you are doing tech support on someone elses machine.
The thing with Notepad isn't that it's good... rather that it's everywhere.
Notepad is for when you're working but not on your machine. Not everyone's work flow is going to be 100% local and you probably won't have permission to install something on someone elses server.
No matter what the version, what the patch level, what the fuck is wrong with it, notepad is there and notepad works.
Sounds like MS are working on the last part unfortunately.
Two thumbs up and good luck!
It'll be three thumbs up shortly at the rate they're going.
Completely agree with your post BTW.
It is better to never have tried anything than to have tried something and failed. - motto of jerks, weenies and losers everywhere
