A better idea might be to take pollution seriously. Pollution caused by open air fires, burning of waste, toxic chemicals, vehicle emissions, smoking and whatever else is causing such poor air quality and contributing to climate change in general.

Sodium ion batteries are in the same form factor as lithium ion, e.g. 18650 and similar performance. They're meant to be a drop in replacement, albeit less dense. So a manufacturer can build a bank of them and pretty much everything else stays the same with similar performance, draw, recharge times etc. This is clearly not the case if we were talking of lead acid or NiMH batteries which are also way less energy dense by weight and volume.

I think that is where sodium ion batteries will be most useful. They're not as energy dense as lithium ion which is a problem for cars, but not really a problem when they're sitting on a patch of land. But I think there will be lots of applications for these kinds of battery and anywhere you see lithium batteries right now could potentially be sodium instead.

The whole point of banning sale of new ICE cars is so they DON'T have a slow natural death. Countries want them to be rid of them as quickly as possible and have set a date to focus minds on that objective. And we can see from all the bullshit and FUD from the auto & oil industries that they don't like this one bit.

Or at least hold them to a standard where they are responsible for removing misinformation, foreign interference / bots, unlabelled ads, racism / hate, etc., public disclosure of their efforts, free access to researchers to monitor their efforts, and on the receiving end of large fines for non-compliance.

In this case, all their friends won't have it (social media) because the rules will apply across the board. It's a level playing field. I'm sure there will be some kind of "forbidden fruit" attraction to social media as there is with anything that is banned.

But it's apparent from studies that kids spending hours on social media does have a deleterious impact on their academic performance, mental health, sleep, lack of social interaction, misinformation and things like cyberbullying & consequent suicides. I'm sure many kids are able to moderate their use, or brush off these harms, but there are those who can't and clearly Australia has chosen to act.

It's kind of funny since the day after this, Revolut emails me to tell me that on my tier I now have free access to "Perplexity Pro" which is some kind of AI app. And I still have no idea why I would want this shit.

Nobody implements a shitty work policy that will obviously cause people to leave unless their intention was to get people to leave. And there is every reason to think that was Amazon's intention since it's cheaper to make people quit than to pay them to leave. The problem of course, is that anyone who has transferable skills (e.g. AI, cloud etc.) will contemplate quitting and all the deadwood will cling on tenaciously no matter what the company does.

Grow up loony.

Trump is unfit to manage a Subway let alone a country. This should be obvious to anyone and yet there he is. And now the USA and the rest of the World will suffer. Many people are going to die in wars, climate catrastophes, disease because of this dolt and the people manipulating him. And because a few % of fuckwits were swayed by misinformation about transgender children, immigrants or whatever. It's a true idiocracy.

I had no idea that perplexity was even a thing and I still have no inclination to read further about them because the CEO sounds like an asshole.

I think this would be a great basis for a lawsuit. Cars should not be able to discriminate against people with a disability and if cars remove physical controls and replace them with voice controls then potentially they are.

Physical buttons don't move around, their position can be remembered, they give affirmative response when operated and they don't require the driver take their eyes off the road to use. NONE of these things are true for touchscreens. Basically anything the driver can reasonably expect to need while driving should be a physical control - indicators, lights, wipers, wiper speeds, volume, temperature control & aircon, demisters & defrosters, horn, cruise control, gears, parking brake etc.

It is also why reviewers, owners and safety groups are become increasingly critical of vehicles like Tesla (and Rivian) that remove physical controls from their vehicles. It has nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with cheaping out manufacture at the inconvenience and safety of the driver & passengers. EuroNCAP will start penalising vehicles that do it in their safety ratings and it can't come soon enough. But really it should be a legal requirement for certain functions to be physical and the form they should take.

I have a relative who lives in South Africa who had this enabled in Whatsapp without his consent nor any easy way to remove it. His phone has accessibility features enabled so the text size to 1.5x normal so this line of AI garbage was easily eating 20% of the vertical space in the app. Was he a user? How many more have this dog shit in their devices without their need, consent nor easy way to remove it?

As annoying as anti cheat / DRM crap is in the kernel it's not a virus. Arguably the stuff AV vendors shove into the kernel is just as bad or worse for destabilizing the software. That said, it would be nice if there were a simple way to identify anti-cheat software by name which is in the kernel, what game likely put it there, and be able disable or uninstall it