And the same thing I used to say to the doctors (who should know better, given the annual refresher requirement) where I used to work when they made (sometimes repeatedly) the same mistake, it's the "Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act" -- 'HIPAA', with one 'P' and two 'A's.

Run the audio through speech recognition, filter it for keywords, discard the audio, store the keywords, and aggregate them to produce a model of your interests, then sell the model. You can say definitively that you're not storing the audio, and the fact that you've stripped the audio for identifiable -- and marketable -- tags they can sell to companies wanting to deliver more focused advertisements to you has nothing to do with that.

The unspoken addendum to this announcement is that it's an admission that, between the additional load of AI data centers and the charging of all the EVs that Governor Newsom wants everyone to drive, matched against the inherent intermittency of wind and solar power production (despite the pravda that the blackout affecting the entire Iberian peninsula on April 28 was not the fault of a sudden cutout of renewable production tripping protective cutouts), it will require an AI-driven monitoring and control system to be able to respond fast enough to manage sudden swings in generated power, because humans can't react fast enough to prevent a sudden production drop at one facility from taking half the state down with it.

To steal a line from ReasonTV's 'Unintended Consequences' videos, "Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?"

Or are in a different city and don't want to take a chance on a random restaurant. McDonald's doesn't stand on quality; they stand on consistency -- with precious few exceptions, what you're getting served at one McDonald's is being served at thousands of others, starting from the same corp-delivered food bases. There are some exceptions -- the lobster rolls I saw advertised when I was in Boston, for example -- but you're going to be getting the same Big Mac no matter where you order it.

No, no; it's "Where do we want to allow you to go today?"

China's start to the construction of 94.5 gigawatts of new coal-powered capacity and resuming construction on 3.3GW of suspended projects in 2024, all fueled by investment from the coal-mining sector, would suggest otherwise. Analysts may expect that China's expansion of its clean-energy capacity will slowly squeeze out coal's share of its electricity generation, but their rapid coal-power expansion is posing a "challenge" (it's amazing how "challenge" sounds so much better than "major stumbling block") to their high-level climate commitments, including commitments on reducing coal use.

And Robot Jox .

It's a particularly niche webcomic, but the 'your job has been replaced by software' thing appeared in the 'Sabrina On-Line' webcomic twenty-five years ago, albeit with a somewhat different focus. The same 'pointy-haired boss' syndrome, though.

SAG is suing because the game didn't hire a live SAG member to do interactive voiceover work in a MOBA, where the live voiceover artist has to respond in real time on a 24/7/365 basis to an unknown number of dialog streams... while the voice actors were on strike. When SAG can produce a voice actor who can, at any time day or night, with no rest at any time, produce intelligent voice response to whatever a player might say, and do this in, say, ten simultaneous dialogs, I'll concede the SAG has some truly amazing voice actors. And if SAG suggests that a group of voice actors be hired for this work, add the requirement that they all must be phonically indistinguishable from each other -- essentially, requiring their speech to be run through an AI voice transformer into JEJ's voice, and since you'd be paying for the voice transformation already anyway, require them to demonstrate how an indeterminately-large team of voice actors is more efficient than making the whole dialog process AI-driven from start to finish.

That's a denigrating comparison to male bovine solid waste products.

Ketchup is jam or a fruit preserve.

And, equally, not a word about how, say, 1.5x battery capacity will mean 1.5x charging time. If it's taking you 40 minutes to charge your car now, with the "new, improved!" battery, it will take you 60 minutes. Consider the effect on the wait at EV charging locations if each vehicle is taking half again the time before they free up their charge point.

And the article waxes lyrical about the properties of this 'superwood', but doesn't say a word about how energy-intensive it is to make. It could require a bigger carbon cost than smelting steel. And if it's compressed by 4x (from the article), that would be, essentially, taking a 2x4 and making a 1x2 out of it, so the resulting volume is smaller, and until the laws are changed to recognize that this material is stronger and doesn't need as much volume for the same strength, building codes are going to require the same dimensions of lumber used in construction, so you're going to be using 4x the amount of wood in order to get the legally-mandated dimensions for the, say, framing timbers.

Isn't erasing all your data already a built-in core function automatically executed by Windows at random intervals?