Yes - exactly this. Stop subsidising gas, but to do this they'll need a transition to move all the gas central heating in the UK over to heat pumps instead. Grants for doing so exist, but also increasing pressure on the gas price side would push people in the right direction as well.

You're thinking DRAX which yes, as it stands is definitely not a net-positive. But DRAX is normally excluded as they usually report on 'wind and solar'. If someone in government wants to look good with a pie chart with bigger numbers then yes - DRAX gets put in. But for the energy industry itself, it's reported differently.

It's the reverse. Green electricity is held back from adoption because the price is linked to the price of gas. While ever that link exists, electricity will be unnaturally expensive in comparison to its raw market price.

It's not completely irrational, although arguable (I would be on this point of view for instance) it's now out of date. The idea is to pick the most expensive bid price for the spot market price, not the cheapest, in order to incentivise continued operation of difficult energy sources. Why would you want to? Because in ye olden days 'difficult' were things like the hydro power or nuclear which were great for maintaining base line load and which you wanted to subsidise to keep going.

In today's market, that's completely on its head and renewables are the cheapest. Established nuclear second, granted construction costs of new nuclear make that overall cost higher of course. This is why the government is incentivising pushes towards heat pumps etc. - the more we get off gas, the less reason to maintain this market oddity exists and it can be removed making electricity cheaper again.

This is easier said than done. Much of the UK's housing stock would need improvement before heat pumps are viable. I recently had a survey on my own house for instance, and it came back as non-viable without a lot of improvements around heat loss first. These improvements would be a good thing and are semi-subsidised, but it's still effort. I believe the new build rules have finally, years late but finally, been changed to require standards around heat pumps and solar.

So yep - electricity being expensive in the UK is not due to the renewables or nuclear, it's due to gas. And the reason we still rely on gas so much is inertia plus building standards and upgrades. Hard one to unpick, but got to start somewhere.

Microsoft hasn't been able to do proper security - or proper development for that matter - in half a century, and AI is notorious for pissing out poor quality code.

Glad I only use the git part of Github.

If only Microsoft saw some sense and quit pushing this disaster of a technology - or at least gave people the option to leave it out of their activities. Fuck this AI shit, seriously. It's getting really tiring now...

Two of my implants are passworded - the TOTP application in my Vivokey Apex and my Walletmor payment implant, which occasionally prompt payment terminals to ask my PIN - and guess what: I didn't forget them because they're kind of important. Duh...

Fundamentally, I agree with your concept. In an idealized world, this is the best method for a public education. The main issue I do have with that is how do you transition to it. You have school districts and states that are historically under-funded for years, even decades. They are in desperate need of massive institutional infrastructure funding, well and beyond what would be an otherwise fair payout per student. Some of these districts need upwards of $1 billion or more needed to get out of buildings that are over 100 years old and have not had an overhaul in over 60 years, with all the included dangers involved of buildings of that age with asbestos, lead paint, lead pipes, and mold/mildew/rodents/insects....

Her wife was giving him the cold shoulder.

A "Disable all AI crap and stop pushing this shit already" switch would be more desirable.

Higher quality slop and approaching pink slip.

...who for some reason deserve to be protected from automation more than fucking literally everybody else, apparently.

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

The torture did end - he was eventually freed by Hercules.

I can't believe it took this long for them to realize people didn't want a camera that they could not fully control within their own private homes possibly recording and displaying everything to random people at the company that built and maintains the device and potentially for anyone who found a security flaw in it.... I mean, really, what a smart item to stick into a TV that might go in say a bedroom, because nothing happens in there that shouldn't be broadcast across the world and saved forever....

What too many people do not seem to understand with LLMs is that everything it spits out is simply a probability matrix based on the input you gave it. It will first attempt to deconstruct the input you provided and use statistical analysis against it's trained knowledge base to then spit out letters, words, phrases and punctuation that statistically resembles the outputs it was trained to produce in it's training materials.

Until this version, ChatGPT obviously suffered from a lack of training materials within it's trained neural network to have it overcome the English language's typed grammar rules for it to be able to discern that em dashes are not typically used in everyday conversations and/or that the input to not use them needed to change it's underlying probability network to be able to ignore the English language's grammar rules and adopt it's output without the use of the em dash. This is a very difficult concept to train into a neural network as it needs to have been training on specifically this input/output case long enough to have that training override the base English grammar language model, which is a fundamental piece of knowledge a LLM requires to function and one of the very first things it is trained to handle.

It also exposes a flaw in how neural networks are typically working. There is a training/learning mode and then there is the functional mode of just using the trained network. In the functional mode, the neural network links, nodes, and function are effectively static. Without having built in-puts to the network so that it can flag certain functionality, it can not change it's underlying probability matrix to effectively forget something it was trained to do. Once that training has changed any of the underlying neural network, you can not effectively untrain it (without simply reverting to a previous backup copy of the network before it was trained). This is why it is so important to scrutinize every piece of data that is used to train the network. One you have added some piece of garbage input training, you are stuck with the changes it made to the probabilities of the output. Any model that is effectively training against the content of the internet itself is so full of bad information that the results can never really be trusted for anything other than probability of asking a random person for the answer because it will have trained on and included phases like "The earth is flat", "birds are not real", and "the moon landing was a hoax". It will have seen those things enough times that it will include them as higher and higher percentages of the proper response to questions about them....

of a slightly shittier country.