The question was literally, "What happens when all car manufacturers are displaying ads?"

It's not an SUV unless it can comfortably go up an old logging road with exposed rocks embedded in the road and many potholes, on a mountain.

A Pathfinder was an SUV, as was a Forerunner, or a Range Rover.

These new "SUVs" (grocery getters, kid soccer transporters) are a marketing joke that we all seem to have accepted. Those are cars. with a slightly more upright seating position.

In the UK, most medical information will be classified as sensitive personal data, which means it has significant extra protections under our regular data protection law, in addition to the medical ethics implications of breaching patient confidentiality. Letting it escape is a big deal and potentially a serious threat to the business/career of any medical professional who does it. Fortunately the days of people sending that kind of data around over insecure email are finally giving way to more appropriate methods of communication as the technology improves. It's usually governments seeing pound signs and/or businesses who aren't providing direct care to the patients that are pushing for wider distribution (and also those organisations who act as if impossible claims about sanitising the data effectively before releasing it are true).

Good for you! Unfortunately, for a lot of people, having no car isn't really an option, so the answer to what happens next with your strategy is really that all of those people get an inferior product because there's no effective competition or regulation in the market to prevent that, while people like you don't get any product at all.

What should happen is that governments recognise a failure of the market to maintain adequate standards for customers and introduce regulation to enforce minimum acceptable standards accordingly. Whether that actually happens obviously depends on whether your government is more interested in looking out for the people or the businesses.

The voting system is the problem. This does not require constitutional change:

Each state can change their elections for the House of Representatives to something better, like ranked choice single transferable vote in multi-seat constituencies. Changing presidential elections would require constitutional change, but the main problem with American politics appears not to be the presidency, but that the house is completely dysfunctional, refusing to hold the presidency to account in some cases, being unable to pass budgets, parties taking absurd positions because they are the opposite of the position already claimed by the only opposition, etc.

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

(Score:X, Troll)

And yet, your imaginary friend still isn't real. ;)

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

And clearly God (who as we know, is a scalar field) is an AI. That's why there's so much "slop" in the Bible - factual errors, contradictions, different versions of the same text that heavily contradict each other, etc etc. It all makes so much more sense now!

In most EU countries, there is an expectation of honesty in business dealings. Yes, there are always shady characters, but America seems to have an ingrained business culture of trying to fuck everyone else over. I'm not certain why that leads you to the conclusion that it is the EU that is garbage in comparison.

At one point last week I pasted the first ~300 words or so of the King James Bible into an AI detector. It told me that over half of it was AI generated.

And seriously, considering some of the god-awful stuff passing peer review in "respectable" journals these days, like a paper in AIP Advances that claims God is a scalar field becoming a featured article, or a paper in Nature whose Figure 1 is an unusually-crappy AI image talking about "Runctitiononal Features", "Medical Fymblal", "1 Tol Line storee", etc... at the very least, getting a second opinion from an AI before approving a paper would be wise.

FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:

2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195

Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.

The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)

It's mostly a contracting issue. Sometimes, if a customer wants full rights to all documentation and design details (or source code or whatever), they have to pay more. If they want exclusive full rights, they have to pay even more. This can be beneficial for some things, not so good for others. If you want to customize your ERP system (SAP or something like that), you'll generally bring in an outside company to do it. You could demand all the source code for everything they did and pay more for it, but if you don't have the necessary expertise on tap to make use of it, it's just throwing money out the window.

The taxpayers paid for the goods along with their research and development.

Not always. Companies do undertake their own research on their own dime, hoping to later sell it to government or other contractors. To take a simple example, a government that purchases a Cessna Citation jet for travel purposes is mostly buying off the shelf. They may customize it with their own communications gear, but they didn't pay for the R&D that went into it. Textron (owner of Cessna and part of RTX) paid for that and is making it up over time with sales of the jet.

A more complicated example is Anduril, which started developing families of weapons on its own and then started getting contracts to further the development process. How much of that should the government own, or at least get access to, if they didn't pay for it?

I agree that the government should be able to fix its own things through contractors of its choosing, and it should get access to all necessary design data. But it's still a contracting issue.

Sure do :) I can provide more if you want, but start there, as it's a good read. Indeed, blind people are much better at understanding the consequences of colours than they are at knowing what colours things are..

The transformers used by LLMs discover and encode the relationships between words IN HUMAN THOUGHT EXPRESSIONS. The multi-layer nature of the deep neural net into which the transformers encode these relationships results in increasing levels of abstraction of the relationships being encoded in different layers of the neural net, along with the ways and strength that each more abstract relationship-aspect is involved in each more particular relationship. By focus on contextual relationships that humans attend to in their communications, and by having the ability to capture abstract aspects of the relationships, the LLM is effectively learning a semantic network of the concepts that words and word sequences utttered by humans represent. The carefully hierarchically organized and represented statistical properties of human syntax (when averaged over many many uttereances so as to ignore accidental, non-essential differences in expression) ultimately result in a usable (cheaply associatively tourable) representation of the semantics (MEANING) behind human communications. i.e. a general and specific knowledge base has been represented in the deep neural net.

It is then possible to design and implement various query-driven and goal-directed associative touring algorithms to visit the concepts in the knowledge base in appropriate touring orders (nearby concepts are nearby in the neural net representation, more general ones are "above", more specific ones are "below") so that we could say these algorithms are thinking abouit the queries and appropriate answers to them.