Unfortunately an 11 year old EV just isn't worth the battery replacement. The car does what it needs to do, and I'd rather invest in a newer vehicle. It won't be more than a year or two before rust starts eating the thing out from under me anyway.

AI is trained on human data, so good AI output cannot be separated from human output unless the output is long enough that incoherence seeps in.

As AI models improve, the length of output required to reasonably determine 'AI-ness' is going to increase.

This is not a complaint, but I have an 11 year old Leaf and while it reports a 120 km at full charge, it drops to ~80 km by the time you reach the end of the driveway. You don't dare use the heat or AC unless you really need to. Realistically it has about 50-60km of safely usable range.

It's not enough for distance travel because it's possible to find places along the routes I travel where the gaps between L2 chargers are bigger than that, and I'm not stopping for 10 minutes every 50 km when I still have an ICE vehicle that will go 650 km on a tank.

However, it is awesome as a city vehicle. I don't even have a 220V outlet for it - it charges overnight on 110V, and I can get around town without ever needing a gas station.

My experience with the Leaf is why my next car will probably be an off-lease Chevy Bolt, and when I make that move I'll have enough range to do 99% of my driving without stopping.

Actually those numbers are from OMB. I didn't ask AI. And, yes, they're percentages of spending.

One less 'cousin' species to daydream about...

We share the FOXP2 gene with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and it is strongly suspected this gene is what gave us our next-level language abilities. It appears to have evolved somewhere between 500k and 700k years ago.

If we split with the hobbits over a million years ago, it's very good odds they didn't have it and couldn't have been significantly more like us than any modern non-human ape species.

On a percentage basis, mostly what we get for our tax dollars is entitlements, like social security (22%), medicare (14%) and medicaid (10%), plus interest (14%).

If your profit margins vary significantly between countries and the deviation from the expected appears to line up nicely with financial transfers from a high tax country to a low tax country:

A) The high tax country should make that illegal

B) The high tax country's collections enforcement should give your corporation a financial colonoscopy followed by a fine equal to twice what you 'saved'.

In the US, in the majority of regions, it appears to serve the desires of the wealthiest members of society regardless of the expense to the remainder.

In no sane society would datacenters be prioritized over supplying water and power to citizens, nor would standards and enforcement be so lax as to leave water and power supplies unsafe and unreliable so private operators can have better profit margins.

The reason you pay taxes is to support a community that provides common benefit. When there is no benefit - and even if you're incredibly wealthy infrastructure benefits you by providing a nicer country to live in - you have to start to wonder why you're paying taxes.

I have a ":w! saves" mug ;)

I have to ask: did you literally never use a computer lab at all in the DOS era?

Not "logging into DOS" - logging into your account. I literally said "mimicked the DOS prompt, including common commands", e.g., you're at the DOS prompt. When you want to login, you ran LOGIN.EXE, which "mounted" your network account. I believe it was Novell NetWare-based.

Once the target enters the correct password, PamStealer displays a message stating that the file is damaged and can't be installed. This is designed to be a decoy to prevent the target from suspecting anything is amiss.

Same sort of technique I used back in secondary school, lol ;) We had a programming class (in Basic on DOS), and it was painfully trivial, so I'd always complete the assignments in like 5 minutes and then spend the rest of class messing around. So one thing I wrote was a program that mimicked the DOS prompt, including common commands, and when someone ran the login command and typed in their username and password, it would say that the password was incorrect so they'd think they had typed it wrong (while it was actually saving their username and password, then logging out of my account), so that when they tried again, it worked. I would launch on a bunch of computers in the lab after class when I could get away with it..

Among the passwords collected were the teacher's administrator username and password. So when it came time to write my final project for the course, among the various demo-style scenes in it was a stereogram generator. The hidden image in the stereogram was her username and password. ;)

(Thankfully she had a good attitude about it... seemed like she wanted to get mad at me but also found it funny. In retrospect, that could have gone very badly had she gotten angry...)

Even after all this time, I am somehow surprised that the compromised Supreme Court had to incur Trump's wrath to protect him from trying to fix the election in ways that would disproportionately disenfranchise his own base.

Two generations from now, it will be a struggle to convince students any of this actually happened. It's just too stupid to be credible even as I'm living through it.

A post-pandemic boost is plausible, but you cannot trust any numbers from the current US government, especially when it's facing slaughter in the upcoming midterms.

Yeah, this is what I always worry about when I see studies like this. I know they always try to control for confounders, but it's really hard to do right. If you mess up, you get another "Regular wine drinking improves your health!" craze (wine consumption is correlated with wealth and better access to healthcare, and also, people with serious health problems often have to give up drinking)