Pot, meet kettle.

From TFS (a couple of sentences before your quote):

> ...helped push temperatures in Europe last year to the highest or second-highest levels ever recorded...

It's not about this year, or last week - it's about last year. You know, the one where half of southern europe was on fire - that one. People died through all of that - they're called "heat related deaths", which TFS also mentions. The article (and TFS) is pretty clear, although it mixes tenses which is maybe what's confusing.

As for this year, it's shaping up differently to last year, that's for sure. However, I still managed to sow grass seeds and have them grow in the first two weeks of January - and that's "not right", climate-wise.

You've got to admire how cool this is.

Just 50 years ago, we thought dropping things on a one-way trip onto another planet/moon was the coolest thing ever (and was hard to do - the Soviets spent 20 years getting a probe onto Venus, for example). Now they're talking about self-flying robots that will pootle about on the surface of a body far further from us, for *years* looking around, sending super high quality pictures and all sorts of other information.

Probably the best thing is that this sort of project is the foundation upon which my kids will grow up. They may well not go into cutting edge fields such as space exploration, but even still, that things like this are now the "base" of technology gives them such a lot more to work with.

> It certainly does not have the consumer's interests at heart, at all.

I wouldn't be too sure that Chinese manufacturers have the US consumers interest at heart either. They want your money, that's for sure. Politically they want you to be dependent on THEM, that's for sure, but I'm not sure they give two hoots if you're happy or not.

I'm also not too sure we can trust Chinese QA. They're in the same era as Japan was in like the 80s (when we used to say "Jap Crap"). Let's be honest, how many chinese devised products have you bought that have confusing design, obvious bugs, and have been found to have permanent (weak) credentials or whatever else? Are you *sure* none of that "quality" is in that chinese drive-by-wire car you just bought? How many of these cars have killed their occupants in China? You'll never know. At least "Jap Crap" was mostly confined to toys and consumer electronics.

I have no doubt that China will soon be producing some of the best utilitatarian cars in the world - much like Japan did. But right now, they need market share and they need cash, so they're "dumping" on the West - it's the same playbook the Japanese used, but with a less careful engineering mindset. They're absolutely doing it to dominate the world - and it'll make the West dependent on them, which I suspect the West may slowly realise and react to. It'll be a moot point if all your domestic car manufacturers are out of business though.

50% of the time it's useless 100% of the time

This isn't really supposed to stop the creation of such things. If you want to make some wank material in the comfort of your own home, then you go for it. Just as you're actually free to make your own guns, or nuclear bombs or whatever else - if you really wanted to.

However, if you decide to share your awesome work with someone else... well, now you're in trouble. Creation of the work, ownership of the work, and sharing of the work are all illegal. It remains to be seen how voracious the police are at building cases against perps here, but my guess is a few celebrities will have a go at it, and that'll create some deterrent-factor, some general knowledge and kids getting taught about it in schools. That'll probably be an end to the worst of it.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world, well, you can enjoy people making explicit, highly realistic photos/videos of your daughters without their consent. Maybe you'll figure out that it's not a "freedom of speech" issue, and that sometimes a law or two really can help the innocent.

Exactly - in fact, Nasa sent the crew an email saying something like "so small we wouldn't really mention it, but just in case the press ask when you return... a bit of foam fell off the fuel tank during launch - our engineers have looked at it, there's nothing to worry about". I'm not sure they even believed an alternative was worth considering - it simply wasn't needed.

I seriously doubt this guy could have done anything about anything. At that time, Nasa culture was not so hot, and there was far too much internal confidence based solely on "it's worked up to now, so it'll work again". Some very senior engineers and others *did* raise the alarm inside Nasa, and got told "don't worry, it's fine". They didn't try to get any spy satellite photos, because they had previously not been very useful, and they didn't really think there was a need.

If anything, the investigation showed that a similar sized piece of foam travelling at that speed could make a very convincing hole in the carbon wing edges. In some sense, it's remarkable that the shuttle made it as far into the atmosphere as it did - the problem almost occurred in slow motion, with ground control watching temperature alerts in the affected wing going off while they were still talking to the crew, and then some time later losing the craft.

The whole story is a cautionary tail of engineering and management failures. It's interesting because things were engineered to a high standard, and that lead to over-confidence in some areas. That over-confidence became somewhat ingrained and so there was no redesign or tweak, there were few real checks after the fact and that high quality engineering showed exactly what the problem was and how it manifested itself during re-entry when the disaster occurred.

> "if it does not fix everything, it is useless"

It's almost a slashdot tradition, or perhaps culture to rubbish anything that isn't absolutely perfect (whilst doing absolutely nothing to attempt any better/different).

A billion in funding means you're very, very much on the hook to your investors. They're going to want to see a plan for an aspirational IPO of $100bn inside maybe 5-10 years. If you really sweet talk them because your idea is so "vital" for human kind, they might come down to $50bn.

Whilst the mere mention of AI might get idiots to extend their multipliers in company valuations, a $50-100bn company isn't easy to construct - it's gonna have to have something seriously good at its heart (even if wrapped in some crap at first). It'll have to either be usable for numerous B2B contracts no smaller than $100m, or else it'll have to be something so awesome that every middle class consumer on the planet would spend $100/month on it.

Given it's a "personal" device, the big contract thing is out, so it's going to have to be something so amazing everyone needs/wants it. That's also a tall order - you can hit up every 'tech bro" or every hipster, or every influencer, but hitting up absolutely everyone... it had better be good - and solve a real 'need'. From a practical point of view, unless you've solved some difficult energy consumption issues, it's going to have to offload to cloud servers - which means you're going to need ubiquitous 5G (or 4G at a stretch) - that already rules out a lot of people, making this an uphill battle to say the least.

Good luck to him/them - it'll be interesting to see which, er, fools line up to part with their money ;-)

I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually a tactical 3 year bet inside Google. That is, someone came up with the idea, the management have decided to throw however many millions at it "just to see". If it works out, it's a huge boost to Youtube - indeed, the two would probably merge in some way (Youtube for business?). It it fails, then no problem, it's not "core" so can be killed off easily.

G is clearly finding Youtube to be a cost centre. They're cranking the monetisation handle quite a bit there, but it seems it's still not turning out the profit they want. They need some new use for it, some new source of revenue or to make it more "cool" than it is now.

FWIW, videos don't work well because they're "temporaly challenged". A big essay suffers from the same problem, but at least that's easily searchable and 'scannable' (ie. fast-forwardable without missing anything). The world seems to be settling on relatively small chunks of information at a time, easy read/digested without distraction of other details. Video doesn't fit that brief very well IMHO, so I can't see this working out well.

If you've ever used a Raspberry Pi, it's super easy - you just flash an SD card, boot and it all works. From then on, you can more or less do what you like with it. All the drivers and other stuff you need is all part of the mainline kernel project, so you can pretty much do anything and it'll work. It's a lot like the x86 world - you just buy a motherboard, bung software on and it'll work just fine.

If you've ever tried one of the (cheap, Chinese?) Arm boards, they're an exercise in pain. Even Gateworks (a US company, definitely not cheap) isn't simple. The point is that the kernel you need isn't just something you can pull off the shelf - it'll be a very specific one, with some very specific vendor-specific patches in it. They may or may not (most likely not) make those changes available to you, so you end up having to use their kernel for whatever system you want to build. Most of those vendors lose interest after about 10 minutes of release, so you never get kernel updates - that severely limits what you can do with the board going forwards.

So yes, the instruction set is standardised, but absolutely nothing else is. That makes working with Arm considerably harder than x86.

It seems doubtful MS would magically bring any such standardisation - they'll be trying to do this on their own hardware rather than letting any old PC builder start making Arm computers. As such, they'll just add another proprietary system to the list, and those machines will be impossible to run Linux on unless you want to spend months of your life reverse engineering them (as has already happened with previous Microsoft tablet products that were just destroyed when they didn't sell because they're the worst sort of e-waste).

Exactly - that's how ChatGPT will exceed our capabilities. Not because it gets any better, but because we get dumberer.

Less facetiously, 'contacts apps' meant we forgot how to remember phone numbers. Search engines meant we forgot how to remember most other things, ChatGPT will mean we forget how to construct half decent sentences. AI video will mean we believe anything we're shown because we've long since forgotten any sort of critical reasoning. Phones mean we've forgotten how to walk about in public.

To say AI will get cleverer than us doesn't look like an especially high bar to reach ;-)

Likewise, we dropped it after 2 years of free service because it hadn't ever really got used all that much.

By coincidence, I've just got a new phone contract and I wasn't allowed to checkout without selecting a free trial of something I didn't really want, so we've got another 6 months of free Disney+ - just in case there's anything to watch on it now. In fairness, the kids are a bit older, so maybe they'll watch some Simpsons or something now - you know the stuff Disney bought rather than any of the cruft they made themselves.

I can count on one hand the films I started to watch and didn't get to the end of - no matter how bad, for some reason I always think "maybe it'll get better" right up until the credits roll and I feel disappointed that it didn't.

Matrix Resurrections was one of the unlucky few I didn't stick with - I think I lasted about 40 minutes. I deliberately like to do as little as possible in the evenings before bed, but even so, I don't have time for crap like that.

They could have just rented hardware - still a tiny fraction of what it costs to use the same hardware in AWS/GCP. There are umpteen datacentre vendors just itching to fill racks with hardware - if you have a budget of $99mil/year, you could throw them a few and end up with racks and racks of hardware just for you - and some goons to protect it, and some geeks to swap out stuff when it breaks.

I know it happens, and I know why it happens, but anyone spending more than a few tens of thousand a month on 'fixed' hardware at AWS/GCP (Azure? Oracle?) should at the very least be doing some feasibility studies into finding cheaper alternatives. You might find it's "not worth it", or maybe the hassle factor is too high, but at least you'd know you're not spending big when you don't need to.

Sadly, even self-hosted software isn't immune from the exact same problems as connected apps. You have a degree of control with something self-hosted, but once it's got a couple of CVEs against it, you're going to need to upgrade - and then you get the bloat and enshitification.

I don't know what the answer is - keeping away from Silicon Valley is probably a good idea, and open source is an option I suppose. Buying from companies that aren't going to IPO any time in the next 5 years or more, perhaps?

FWIW, I have 'smart' heating control, made by a small company in the Midlands (of England). It's what it is - it doesn't get glitsy new features, it doesn't even get many bug fixes really, but it keeps on chugging away as well as it ever did. It still needs hardware upgrades from time to time though, so there's an element of "subscription" to it even then. I was an early adopter, and man, I suffered for my choices in the early days - but these days, it works pretty well.