Debt as a fraction of GDP went from 50% to 75%!

Hardly relevant, since that's down to where the previous administration left things. When Cameron became PM in 2010, government net borrowing was over 10% of GDP; you can't turn that around overnight, so of course net debt went up. But net borrowing decreased significantly every single year of his administration, down to 2.7% of GDP in 2016, and if that trajectory had continued we would have been a couple of years away from running a surplus.

Which is irrelevant to the main point that austerity makes you unpopular.

Nobody votes for austerity, that's the simple fact. Spending is what gets you elected, so that's what politicians offer us. It is very hard to see politicians in most countries getting elected on the basis of saying they're going to reduce the debt. Here in the UK, David Cameron actually did a great job of getting government spending under control when he was Prime Minister, and were at the point of being able to start reducing the debt, but his austerity measures made him so unpopular that he felt he had to gamble on a Brexit referendum to win votes, and with Brexit and the pandemic, it all went to shit. Until we, the voters, are the ones *calling* for austerity, it ain't going to happen.

*Definitely* we need to have a conversation about where AI is going.

Probably, but I don't see AI mentioned on the product page, and I do see a picture of a handheld FPV controller, so I don't think that conversation would be in relation to this product specifically. Yes, it's a small step from "robot dog" to "AI-controlled robot dog", but the same goes for anything with a control system.

Details laid out in the indictment underscore the failed economics involved in the mining of most cryptocurrencies

Not really, in fact that's a pretty dumb claim to make. The economics of mining Bitcoin (or other Proof-of-Work cryptos) as they would normally be commercially mined is very different from the economics of mining such cryptos on jacked general purpose AWS instances or whatever. The economics former clearly works, otherwise the companies that do it would go bankrupt and disappear. The latter works for the guy doing the mining because he isn't paying for the jacked accounts, so he really doesn't care how much the resources he's using cost or how inefficient his activities are, but that has absolutely no bearing on normal commercial Bitcoin mining.

In 2020, Synchron reported that patients, in its Australian study could use its first-generation device to type an average of 16 characters per minute. That's better than non-invasive devices that sit atop the head and record the electrical activity of the brain, which have helped people type up to eight characters per minute, but not the leap forward that is hoped for with an implant, Ludwig said. Oxley would not say whether typing has gotten faster or offer any other details from the ongoing U.S. trial.

It may not be a huge leap forward in performance, but these guys are aiming for their device to work from day one, with minimal training or calibration. I'm sure they could achieve higher performance if they were going to spend weeks or months dialling the system in for each individual patient's brain activity, but that isn't their immediate goal.

Because it's not an issue? Intel say they will be recycling basically 100% of the water they use at their Arizona sites by the end of the decade, there's no reason TSMC can't do the same.

I mean, I can see people getting away with manipulating data in relatively obscure research, but doing so in something that's really high profile - there's just no way that you're not going to get found out. You say you've created a high-temperature superconductor, everyone and their dog is going to be looking at your work. Did he think he actually could get away with it forever?

Yes. Coverage from when Starlink first launched says that SpaceX filed paperwork with the FCC and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which is "a United Nations agency that, among other things, manages the global satellite radio-frequency spectrum" (source.

Anyone remember the trend of making a mock transparent screen by taking a photo of whatever sits behind your monitor, setting it as your desktop wallpaper, then taking a photo of your PC from the same angle? I think it was mid-2000s. It's always been a cool concept from an aesthetic standpoint, although I remain to be convinced that it has much value otherwise.

Well, TFS gives the numbers behind the claim - Q3 2023 down on Q2, and Q4 down even further, by 10.2%. The overall 2023 numbers don't invalidate the quarterly trend. However with the surge in consumer debt, credit card delinquencies etc through 2023, it seems more likely to me that people are not buying EVs for financial reasons, rather than any change in sentiment about EVs. The jury's still out over hard landing/soft landing etc, but there's no doubt that consumers have been under increasing financial constraints in the last year, and that seems likely to have an effect on their purchasing choices.

"The camera needs power so it needs to have cables routed to its location anyway [...]

The first few hits from an Amazon search for "wireless security camera outdoor" all featured rechargeable batteries. This is touted as a feature because they will continue to function if power to the house is cut. Must be a pain recharging them, I didn't take the time to look up how long they last between charges.

Sad that none of the tech journalists that copy-pasted this story on all the sites I just looked through, asked the same question. However from a blog post on Gravitricity's web site, it mentions "...you have to drop 500 tonnes around 800 metres to generate 1MWh". Here we have a 1400m shaft, so dropping a 500 tonne weight down that would be 1.75mWh. A weight of a little over 500 tonnes doesn't seem infeasible, so 2MWh is probably right.

That is one heck of a lot of money, and the only thing it is *guaranteed* to find is that they need an even bigger collider still, $100 billion I'm guessing for the generation after. While I'm sure lots of good science will come out of it if it is built, I'm also sure there is a lot of other ways that $21.5 billion could advance science, and I'm not sure this is the best one.

AI companies are currently far from profitable - OpenAI for example is burning through cash at a furious rate, and their path to profitability is based on what seems to me like ludicrous projections of future paying customers, given the amount of competition building up out there. Sooner or later, the AI bubble is going to pop, and then we'll see what sustainable business models will survive. A copyright-holder cash-grab could bring that forward if successful, adding a potentially massive cost to the already huge cost base involved in cutting edge AI, but it's going to happen sooner or later, whatever happens. Personally my money's on the fair use argument succeeding, otherwise that would just be too huge a can of worms to open up, but I am not a lawyer.

I've used it daily for years (but only a few minutes a day). The problem for me with Duolingo is it often doesn't give sufficient context for vocabulary, and if you switch to your browser to look up a word elsewhere, you risk the OS killing the app and losing your lesson progress (on my Android tablet at least). An example would be that it recently introduced the German word "Raum" to me, translated as "room", but didn't explain or give enough context to understand where you would use "Raum" rather than "Zimmer", the word always translated as "room" up to that point. Since they killed the lesson comments, you can't look there for context any more either. So yeah, you can use Duolingo to guide your learning, but you definitely need other resources in addition.

On the topic, I'm not sure AI-generated content is going to be great for, but I guess it depends what exactly they use AI for, so I'll try to remain open-minded on that.