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.

I don't know what expectations these are defying unless they're from those created by anti-EV FUD. I thought it was pretty clear that EV batteries usually last longer than the cars themselves. If 250K is exceeding expectations, then the expectations are wrong and haven't been supported by the data for a long time.

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.

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...)

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)

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.