The fact that Tesla buys batteries from BYD (as well as making their own) may offer a clue.

Why not? Ancient China disagrees. We are talking about a great filter here. What matters is whether something is possible on planets generally, not whether it is easy here on Earth.
    Early civilisations developed metallurgy without coal or oil. It is easy to imagine other planets having an industrial revolution without fossil fuels. Coal made it a whole lot easier and faster, but is not essential.

The challenge is getting to low orbit, not escape velocity. And if that was much faster, it might have been done with nuclear rockets, back in the 60s or 70s.

GP is making a common error. These energy problems are just filters.
What we are looking for is something far more difficult to pass, a great filter. It is something utterly devastating, almost impossible to avoid. Nuclear war, terrible though the prospect is, was never a candidate.
Our best hope is that we are already past this great filter, that we are the one planet in a hundred billion that made it. The origin of complex cells (eukaryotes) for example.

If the great filter has not already passed, there is nothing we can do about it. We are doomed, and possibly soon. Right now, some consequence of A.I. looks most likely. Will it allow one doomsday cultist to engineer deadly viruses? Any small state to build vast armies of killer drones? Or the AIs start to propagate and compete with one another? Will we build the greatest AI ever in a sealed underground bunker, teach it game theory, ask how to avoid destruction, and be told we don't know the question?

Must be my public education, but I cannot make sense of that incoherent rant. Are you under the impression that I am American? Cannot tell.

Troll? nobody actually familiar with history actually believes that line about the tyrant king. Nor did the educated at the time. It was just a slogan to rouse the illiterate rabble, like "make america great again". You need to persuade the cannon fodder to die for their new masters.
      The colonial gentry also used the injustice of taxes to stir revolution. Then when they won, they went ahead and put up the taxes.

That is a highly selected group. They get in because they are high achievers, and not at all representative of the average African.
In a similar way, I would expect that black American immigrants in Europe and Australia (small in number) do better than the average local. They had to be high achievers to gain residency visas.
    Average IQ of African Americans is around 85, while sub-Saharan Africa countries are in the 60 to 75 range.

This is a law that will allow the federal government to take total control of AI forever

No. The tech is already out — this horse is so far out of the barn you'd need a passport and numerous border crossings to even find hoofprints.

Not only is such a law completely unable to regulate GPT/LLM/generative software in the USA's non-commercial software ecosphere, it can have no effect across national borders and you may be absolutely certain that other state actors will simply smile and wave at such ideas (for that matter, you may be certain that the US intelligence apparatus will do the same.)

At home or cloud-based? It is either-or.

Exactly. These marketing twerps no longer know WTF the words they use even mean. If they ever did. Also, using "secure" in the same context with "the cloud"... that's a similar bit of nonsense. When your data leaves your hands, even just crossing the Internet, it's no longer secure. One party can keep a secret. Anything else... can very quickly become not a secret. As we have seen many times. And of course, we should never forget about this.

> MacOS Sonoma 14.4.1.

Running Ventura 13.3.1 here. Perhaps that's it.

Thanks. I'll consider upgrading after I surf the "bugs in Sonoma" stuff.

I'm no expert, but I don't think the CCP existed 250 years ago. ... I've missed a joke, haven't I?

Oh no! Somebody is still believing that propaganda from 250 years ago? Goebbels was right!
I bet you think Napoleon was short ;-)

Apple is allergic to proper cooling on Apple silicon in the first place, at least based on the Macbook Airs I've had to deal with. The graph of CPU activity winds up looking like a saw blade, with the CPU ramping up and immediately dropping once it hits its thermal threshold, if you give it something taxing to chew on, like Prime95.

I understand the limitations of Apple's SoC and the reasoning for not allowing RAM and storage upgrades, but IMO at the very least they should offer the option for some sort of high speed caching tier, lest the low spec versions of its hardware turn in to e-waste years before the higher end versions.

It just sucks to see that on $1000+ computers.

Ah, as pompous as ever, I see. FFS, put the flag down. Anonymity can be useful, but was never an "essential liberty" when buying groceries.
For most of history, most people knew most people they met. At the shops you expect to be recognised constantly. Good incentive not to steal!

The shoplifting problem comes from a few factors, but anonymity is one part. Simply making the shops work like a Costco, where you show membership to come in. Membership is free, but can be revoked. Now we don't really trust Tesco, so we turn this power over to the courts.
Allow any self-serve shop to require ID to enter. This is a tech forum, so what are the problems:

- ID must not be easy to steal or forge. We don't want to incentivise violent crimes by people seeking false ID.
This has already been addressed by the credit card industry. 2-factor authentication, such as smart cards and PINs.

- Privacy. Well, not a big problem as most people will happily sell their privacy for a few loyalty points, but for the minority, this again has already been solved. Legislation limits data retention. Shops are not allowed to link credit card data to other records to identify you and your shopping habits. Entry authorisation systems need only retain your ID until you leave the shop. Or not retain anything if if is only used to keep out banned criminals.

If you believe that, I have a bridge in Baltimore to sell you.