So this is Geniza from between the First and Second Temple? Sorry, just had to ask. :)

It does not matter how broken the DRM is, circumventing it is still illegal according to copyright laws.

That’s the plan. The AI industry and its dependents will never make enough money to cover their current CapEx and then replace everything in five years when the chips are obsolete and components are breaking down. But if they tank every company that's using AI software will be fucked and the NASDAQ will tank. So the Fed will print a trillion dollars to bail them all out and everyone else will end up with higher grocery prices.

Itâ(TM)s easy to bribe one president to keep the federal government from reigning in a bad corporate actor. Itâ(TM)s hard to bribe fifty state AGs who all aspire to higher office and need big wins to show off on the campaign trail.

Four simple apps that do four different things. Or one bloated app that tries to cram four apps’ worth of functions into one messy UI. Nintendo made the right decision.

You guys get that 4.3% is low unemployment, right? Something like 90% of the last 30 years have had higher unemployment rate than that. It's the participation rate that's dropping, and that's almost entirely a demographic issue... there are more people retiring every year than graduating. The labor pool, as a percentage of the total population, is falling. This was all known well in advance and has been talked about to death. Those lower 4.3% of the population... the vast majority of them are really difficult to employ. A small percentage of people show up work late, or get drunk before they come to work, or whatever, and it's that group that finds it hard to stay employed.

The third solution is a revolution. It’s going to get really crazy when people in the USA realize that there’s not enough food, a couple big Wall Street companies own all the housing, and there are 400 millions guns in private hands.

If you're referring to the chargers, I agree. They have a bad reputation currently. But I think a lot of the effort and resources has to go into more generation and distribution infrastructure, which tends to be robust, but expensive and it takes a while. I do think the AI boom is going to leave us with a lot of unused electrical capacity, and I think that's a good think for EVs.

Won't happen, at least not with my books.

There is a reason writing the last one took two years. Many of its passages have very carefully considered wordings. Intentional ambiguities. Alliterations. Words chosen because the other term for the same thing is too similar to another thing that occurs in the same paragraph. Names picked with intention, by the sound of them (harsher or softer, for example).

I've used AI extensively in many fields. Including translations. It's pretty good for normal texts like newspaper articles or Wikipedia or something. But for a book, where the emotional impact of things matter, where you can't just substitute one words for a synonym and get the same effect - no, I don't think so.

This is one area where even I with a general positive attitude to AI want a human translator with whom I can discuss these things and where I can get a feeling of "did she understand this part of the book and why it's described this way?".

I work in the automotive industry. Two years ago the attitude across the automotive industry was that whole industry was switching to EVs and it was all expected to happen at a completely unrealistic pace. There was still a ton of charging infrastructure to build out, but the industry was expecting high double-digit growth and a rapid phasing out of gas vehicles within a few years. It was absurd at the time. Then a couple years later and the whole industry has flipped (yes, this has a lot to do with government subsidies and Trump winning the election) and now everyone thinks EVs are "dead". This is, of course, just as silly as the continual proclamations that the PC market is dead. In reality, the EV market will continue to exist and mature, and with a number of really promising battery technologies in the pipeline, not to mention a massive build-out of electrical generation capacity to support an AI future that's primed to burst for a few years, there's actually a bright future for EVs. Just not on the ridiculous timeline that everyone was thinking two years ago.

There's another detail that often gets missed. I don't know the details myself, but the way it's been described to me, mid-size pickup trucks fall into a category under the EPA or something which requires them to meet much more stringent environmental and other regulations that full-size pickups are exempt from, and at the end of the day it means that the price difference between a mid-size and a full-size truck was much smaller than it should be based on the amount of materials and extra functionality you get from a full-size truck, so that caused the auto-makers to discontinue most (all?) of their mid-size lineups. You really couldn't buy a smaller truck for about a decade or so. I think the last one was the Colorado.

Fair, but in the business world of people who buy that type of software, being the official authors of WordPress does give them cachet. The Automatic.CSS name was absolutely picked to piggyback off it.

Not just possibly, but absolutely valid. This is exactly the kind of thing trademarks exist to prevent. They aren't claiming the word "automatic", they're claiming that naming a framework that's meant to work with their product (WordPress) a name that differs from their own by only 1 letter, particularly such a non-obvious difference (many people won't notice the existence of an extra 't') is meant to cause confusion an think it's an official part of their offerings. Because it is. If the other company doesn't change the name they will be destroyed in court. And frankly they'll deserve it. Whoever chose that name was either a total idiot with no concept of the law, or a scammer who meant to prey on Autmattic's good name.

I totally understand where you’re coming from. The algorithms default to feeding users people crap, and if you haven’t been watching the same stuff on YouTube for a long time it won’t match you to the good, nonsensational stuff. And that’s a shame.

You are correct about the fascist project, but do you understand that if your alternative is a party (the dems) who have been vocally opposed to the free speech amendment, play with definitions in a weird way a la 1984 (they look stupid when asked to define what a woman is) and doubled down on cancel culture as a way to stifle political speech. So while I agree that Trump and his cronies are fascist, the other side only looks marginally better, and I wouldn't trust them at all. Yes, I would vote democrat, but they're pretty horrible too. I would easily vote a moderate left or moderate right party over either of these alternatives, and I suspect most people would.