If one person in twelve hates these cameras, he won't be convicted. That's the whole point of jury trials. If everyone loves the cameras he will be.

Using em-dashes is perfectly good and common English usage in writing. AI is using them properly, though using them more than a human normally would.

I haven't tried asking one to not use them lately but when I tried a few months ago it went quite insane and started doing all kinds of weird stuff.

The bigger issue is that the big models like Claude are becoming less and less capable of writing fiction because they're being trained to produce boring business stuff and that eliminates the ability to make up stories or write in a literary style. I'm told they're also being loaded up with more and more layers of "safety" which refuse to write in existing styles or even to edit work that might be copyrighted, even if the user is the one who originally wrote it.

Meanwhile I'm sure companies like Amazon must have their own internal AIs in development so they can just look at the kind of books people read and automatically generate a book tailored to the things they like.

Yes. I can no longer use em-dashes in stories I write or idiots will shriek "IT'S AI!" I never really did the "not X but Y" thing, but the rule of three is an ancient writing rule because three is about the most things an average human can keep in their mind at one time.

It's all 'tarded.

That's simply not true. AI is allowing some writers I know to become far more productive, in one case going from one book every few years to one book every month or so.

And it's not just AI slop, they're interesting stories where they've taken the James Patterson/late Clive Cussler approach of writing the story outline and having the writing assistant fill in the words. The only difference is their writing assistant is a computer, not a human.

They've literally spent half a century exporting our essential production to China to save a few bucks, while replacing competent employees with Indians and people who can't tell you what a woman is. Now we're supposed to believe that those people can suddenly turn all that around in time for WWIII?

It's not going to change until the West does fight one of the wars its pushing for and is decisively defeated because it's run by idiots who exported all the manufacturing to countries who don't see us as friends. Only then will people be ready to throw out the current 'elite' and replace them.

Unless the Internet is lying to me, Leo orbits around 600km and Starlink around 350-600km. So it doesn't appear that will make a lot of difference.

Most of the latency in my Starlink connection is because the signal comes down in the US and has to route back from there to Canada if I ping my office from home instead of going direct through a cable. So I wouldn't expect to see much difference if I was using Leo instead.

Yes. One thing to remember is that Boomers are retiring en masse and older Gen-X are saying 'screw this' and retiring early because it's not worth the hassle of working any more. So it's not just people being laid off but also people deciding they don't want anything more to do with the awful work culture of the modern world.

They could charge a subscription so other "Smart Glasses" users will see you wearing pants. If you don't pay then the other users' glasses will automatically AI-remove your pants whenever the glasses see you.

Although I guess some people might consider that a feature rather than a bug.

Yeah, I have bigger batteries in the basement connected to the solar panels in the yard but they're not powerful enough to run AC. Can run a few fans though.

And our wifi is the only one on the street that's up when the power is out so curious neighbours could figure out something's going on at our house.

Looks like it's currently $849 in Bluetti's summer sale. That's for about 2kWh of battery, 2kW-ish inverter and solar charger in one box, which is a lot less than it would have been five years ago.

Designed to fit on top of a fridge but it can be used for powering other things too.

Oddly enough the UK was the only place where we had a generator hooked in to automatically take over power for the house when the grid went out. That was partly because we lived in a wood where falling branches would take our power lines, but it was also because the power company couldn't be bothered to clean up the lines so falling branches wouldn't take them out.

It works as a UPS but you can also attach solar panels to it for off-grid use. I didn't because I don't want to have to run cables through the walls into the house.

I recently hooked up a battery to my fridge because I got tired of not being able to open it when the grid power went out. Now I use maybe 10% more power because even though it passes AC straight through when the grid is working, the electronics still need to suck up a few watts to keep it working.

I suspect a lot of these battery purchases were made for similar reasons: we no longer live in First World countries where you can rely on the power to stay on and now we have to adopt Third World practises like having generators and batteries for when the power is out. I now have enough batteries to run lights, the Internet, the TV, my work computers and a few other things that we don't want to be without when the power goes away again.

How many different types of drone are you planning to carry on your back when running across a field while under attack by artillery and the other guys' drones?

I said "Drones CAN be defeated by a mesh net," I didn't say that a mesh net will defeat all drones. And the reason I said it was precisely because that guy I mentioned who has spent much of the last few years working with, fighting with and training Ukrainian troops mentioned it as one of the simplest defences against Russian drone attacks. They do it because it works against the kind of cheap drones which are typically launched against them.

> Stealth aircraft don't yet have countermeasures.

Yugoslavia shot one down in the 90s.

Russia regularly shoots down Storm Shadow missiles which are not much easier to detect than an F-35.

So yes, countermeasures are out there and have been for decades. This is why Israel doesn't fly its F-35s over Iran, and never even flew them over Syria.