1. Fertilizer is made from methane, so that's also stuck there. This is a HUGE problem for countries like India.
2. Poor countries are already switching to 4 day work weeks to save fuel.
3. Iran is letting ships whose balances are settled in Yuan leave. That means the power of the petro-dollar is under serious threat.
4. Countries that can no longer get Iranian oil are now buying non-Iranian oil, which drives the price of ALL oil up. There's speculation that it will hit $200/barrel. That's more than 3x what it was over the last few years. That will affect the price of literally everything. All transportation costs go up, so costs for all goods go up.

At some point, the price will get high enough that some countries won't be able to buy it at all, they'll give up. At that point, some interesting things might happen, since the demand drop-off vs. the price drop off will cause a wobble in the price. People will start looking elsewhere for energy.

Solar and small-battery vehicles (e-bikes, e-scooters) might start taking off even more. You might not be able to buy petrol for your car, but your e-bike charges quickly and can still tow a few hundred pounds worth of stuff. Maybe BEVs adoption will become even MORE popular, since it's one less way you have to directly pay for petrol.

But this war is all con. 100%. Like, Trump didn't even fill up the oil reserves before going to war. China's been buying oil for MONTHS at low rates now, so they're actually the least impacted here, despite the fact that they get a lot of oil from Iran. That means they have zero impetus (not that they had much previously) to do anything about this. This is purely punishment for the USA. Those are expensive weapons being wasted on Iranian targets (in some cases, planes that are actually just paint on the ground). It might be possible for the USA to open up the strait again, but the second they leave, Iran can just close it off again. This might be the most forever of the forever wars, or it might just be an outright defeat for the USA.

This whole thing is such a mess on so many different axes. I didn't even get into how Israel is driving a lot of this, and it's all because Netanyahu is a corrupt warmonger. He's firing in all directions, and he's relying on the USA to protect him.

It wasn't just to maintain value for their corporate properties, it's because they love seeing people in the office, doing their bidding. They'd be able to save so much on capital expenditure if everyone worked from home, but they keep people in the office because they looooooove to see who they're oppressing.

Yeah, there was just fuel rationing and it FUNDAMENTALLY changed the car industry for decades? Big cars went out of style and Japanese econoboxes became a thing because people wanted to spend less on gas?

I get it, you were a KID in the 70s, so you didn't really understand what was going on and what the challenges were. But you could go and read about them now if you want--you're probably north of 50, I think you're ready to learn the truth.

Yes. So far, the LLM tools seem to be much more useful for general research purposes, analysing existing code, or producing example/prototype code to illustrate a specific point. I haven't found them very useful for much of my serious work writing production code yet. At best, they are hit and miss with the easy stuff, and by the time you've reviewed everything with sufficient care to have confidence in it, the potential productivity benefits have been reduced considerably. Meanwhile even the current state of the art models are worse than useless for the more research-level stuff we do. We try them out fairly regularly but they make many bad assumptions and then completely fail to generate acceptable quality code when told no, those are not acceptable and they really do need to produce a complete and robust solution of the original problem that is suitable for professional use.

But one of the common distinctions between senior and junior developers -- almost a litmus test by now -- is their attitude to new, shiny tools. The juniors are all over them. The seniors tend to value demonstrable results and as such they tend to prefer tried and tested workhorses to new shiny things with unproven potential.

That means if and when the AI code generators actually start producing professional standard code reliably, I expect most senior developers will be on board. But except for relatively simple and common scenarios ("Build the scaffolding for a user interface and database for this trivial CRUD application that's been done 74,000 times before!") we don't seem to be anywhere near that level of competence yet. It's not irrational for seniors to be risk averse when someone claims to have a silver bullet but both the senior's own experience and increasing amounts of more formal study are suggesting that Brooks remains undefeated.

TouchID is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. I have a Mac Mini and I have no way to get TouchID on this thing and it doesn't make it a bad computer with no security.

The extra storage is the REAL thing you want for MacOS. 256GB is almost unworkable, IMO. It's what I have on this Mac Mini and I've had to fight pretty hard to keep my disk space free, even with a bunch of external drives hanging off of it.

For a laptop, the chip is fine. The A18Pro is faster than the M1 Mac Mini that I'm typing this on, and the M1s are all still getting along just fine--I'd like a newer machine because I compile code now and then and it's punishing on this thing, but for day-to-day use, it's still going strong. The REAL limiting factor on these machines is storage. 256GB is *barely* enough. macOS is bad about allowing you to offload certain things to external drives without jumping through some hoops, and once the space starts to run out, the OS flips out pretty hard. So storage management is kind of always an ongoing thing.

But if you're mostly using it for a bit of schoolwork, web browsing, some spreadsheets, and you rely on the cloud for all your photos and music, it's probably fine.

Seriously, this is a very good deal. I do agree that they should have physically marked the USB 2.0 port SOMEHOW, but other than that, this was a decent set of compromises to make to drop the price.

It's making a comeback. It's WAY easier than painting, and the glues are better so it's easier to get the paper off afterwards if you want to take it down.

There are now THREE core types:
Super (previously 'Performance')
Performance (new)
Efficiency (same)

The M5 Pro and up chips have a mix of 'Super' and 'Performance'.
The base M5 chip has a mix of 'Super' and 'Efficiency', but has no (new) 'Performance' cores.

It's not straightforward, but it's not the same as Apple making the chips worse and renaming the cores so you don't notice.

(+1, Truth)

Of all the major streaming platforms, Paramount+ stands alone in how often it just doesn't work. It doesn't work reliably on state-of-the-art streaming boxes. It doesn't work reliably on desktop PCs. In fact, of all the devices we have in our household, it works reliably on a total of zero of them.

We have several of the other commercial streaming platforms plus the apps or online services for several of our main national TV channels as well and almost all of them work almost all of the time. It's bizarre how bad Paramount+ manages to be compared to literally everyone else. It must be hurting their bottom line to some degree or surely will do soon if they don't get a handle on it, because why pay for something you literally can't watch?

I have Apple Music and it's FINE, but I'm annoyed at how often I have to authenticate myself for my own goddamn music. Now, a lot of the music is stuff that I already own that I've uploaded to Apple to match for me, but I want to be able to say that I own my music, that I can take my ball and leave any time I want.

The main reason I still use Apple Music/iTunes is that there is STILL no music player with smart playlists as good. I still have playlists that are things like, "select 25 songs by least recently played from the compound list of other playlists that are selected by rating and play frequency". I've looked, and nothing else is remotely as powerful. But I want to be in control of that music so if one day I decide I'm gonna put it on an SD card and just play music only on a physical device hooked up to speakers and never use my phone again or whatever, I have that option.

And I love some of the artists whose albums are in my library as streaming only. I want them to get paid for the amount of enjoyment I derive, and I know that streaming rates are absolute garbage. Return me to the days of the iTunes Music Store and CD Baby and Bandcamp. (I still buy from Bandcamp quite a lot. More this year.)

It is the Microsoft way.

There's a difference between not using AI tools at all and not using code generated by AIs.

The latter involves a lot of risks that aren't well understood yet -- some technical, some legal, some ethical -- and it's entirely possibly that some of those risks are going to blow up in the face of the gung-ho adopters with existential consequences for their businesses.

I mostly work with clients in industries where quality matters. Think engineering applications where equipment going wrong destroys things or kills people and where security vulnerabilities are a proxy for equipment going wrong.

I know plenty of smart, capable people working in this part of the industry who are totally fine with blanket banning the use of AI-generated code on these jobs. A lot of that code simply isn't up to the required standards anyway, but even if it does produce something you could actually use, there are still all the same costs for review and certification that any other code incurs. That includes the need for at least one human reviewer to work out why the AI wrote what it did, which may or may not have any better answer than "statistically, it seemed like a good idea at the time".

The claims also seem a bit sus. "Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week." Is this the same statistic someone was debunking recently where anyone who had done something really basic (it might have been using the search facility?) was counted as "using Copilot"? A lot of organisations seem to be cautious about using code generated by AIs, or even imposing a blanket ban, so things must be very different in other parts of the industry if that 80% is also representative of professional developers using Copilot significantly for real work.

It's worth noting that the Canadian grant system is incredibly overloaded, and so it can be really hit or miss for artists who are at the beginning of their careers. I have friends in several theatre groups and they have to jump through a lot of hoops and ultimately get very little grant money.

The basic income plan is so much better just for its reliability.