Yes, TFA says that, but I suspect that is a misstatement. This other source https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q4-2023-ev-sales/ says 2023Q4 sales were 317,168, which suggests to me that despite what TFA said, the drop of 100,151 to 89,933 must have been a drop in growth rate rather than of absolute sales.

It's not just that TNG had a big miss with the contractions thing. Even more startling is how easily the transformer overcomes what was once considered the most difficult challenge of Natural Language Processing: disambiguation. When I type stuff into ChatGPT4, I often leave out all the details because I know it will figure it out. For example, here is one from just a few minutes ago: https://chat.openai.com/share/836cb8e1-ab89-4a90-94dc-2c3f70d01f1a.

The transformer is the new protomatter

Reading the summary about "ground stations", I honestly wondered if StarLink maybe had a terrestrial RF system to serve as backup for end customers. No, the "ground stations" are really gateways between satellites and the backbone. The word "gateway" should have been used.

The biggest problem with emulating old DOS programs is that there were no device drivers to speak of, so everything controlled hardware directly. New machines don't like that. Everyone ignored the serial, parallel, and video drivers in ROM because they were garbage, and proprietary hardware had to be controlled directly by the application, often through parallel ports or custom ISA cards. The main thing people let the OS do was handle mass storage, and even that required custom TSR drivers for stuff like external drives. New machines are also just too damn fast for some of the timing loops that were hard-coded. Some of these issues can be handled in emulation, but a lot of them can't.

The actual Commodore 1541 disk drive was itself a 6502 based computer about as powerful as the C64 itself, and many of the copy protection schemes of the day involved reprogramming it.

Aside from whatever sins Intuit might have committed, the larger issue here is that the gig economy has become the default entry level position. And that requires an extra form (Schedule C). The IRS should make it as easy to file 1099-NEC as it is to file W-2.

If Windows was a car you'd find it changes color every couple of weeks. One day the emergency brake handle is replaced by an Advanced Braking Assistant which only works when the car has internet access. One day the radio knob disappears and you have to use a menu to tune it, then two months later the knob would come back. It would constantly be guessing where you're trying to go, usually wrongly, and offering better routes. And don't get me started on the ever changing shape of the steering wheel.

Assuming the average GPU costs $10,000, those 600,000 GPUs amount to $6 billion.

First time I've heard of a Federal Circuit Court referred to as a "lower court"

To get nickel-63, one has to bombard nickel-62 with neutrons. What is the efficiency of that relative to lifetime energy output? If it's less than 50%, I don't see it being viable.

First, what counts as plagiarism is whatever the institution decides and the employee agreed to.

But I think Harvard's rule is so strict, when it comes to non-fiction, that I think it slows down science. A fact should be allowed to be repeated verbatim, because attempts to paraphrase said fact inevitably change its meaning.

People have been trying to write music composing software since computers had enough RAM to hold the sheet music for an entire song. Most of the early efforts involved creative filters applied to the output of a random number generator. None of it was what anybody would think of as AI. It was thought that music is by its nature inherently algorithmic, so writing and recognizing it might be a natural thing for computers to do.

In 1981 I was part of a 10-person group of science fair winners who got to tour an air force computer facility that featured a Cray 1. We were all allowed to sit on the bench so that we could say we had. Also, Robert Redford sits on the bench in the movie Sneakers.

More importantly, cars today require less service, use less fuel, pollute less, and are far less likely to kill you in a number of common accident scenarios. It was rare for a 1974 engine to go 100,000 miles without needing to be rebuilt, even if you religiously changed the oil (every 3,000 miles) and otherwise kept it up. You would almost certainly replace a water pump and alternator in that first 100K miles. I am now on my third car that got to 200K miles without needing any major engine maintenance at all, the oil is changed every 7K, and the car reminds me when I need to do that. The second of those cars went to the scrapyard because I got T-boned (by someone looking at their cellphone instead of through the windshield -- another issue) and I walked away. I only realized after the car got towed and I looked it over how carefully the roll cage had folded up to keep the jeep that hit me out of the passenger compartment. If I had been driving my old 1972 Buick Skylark instead of the 2003 Toyota Camry, I'd have been dead. And both of my current cars get nearly 40 MPG, an unheard of figure even for a compact in the 1970's. Modern cars could certainly be even better, and the next step might be hybrids and EV's, but they have improved a great deal over the course of my life.