We can always hope that the pigs who fucked-up with the user names will be skinned alive, but of course, we all know this will never happen because pigs enjoy an inordinate amount of immunity totally unwarranted by their well-below average intelligence.

Yes, they become an economic superpower and they slowly take the place of the USA on the world stage.

A very nice country, with very nice, hard-working but still fun-loving (take that, calvinists!) people, thank to them not having religious hangups and neuroses.

He sent me the first e-mail I ever received, some 40 years ago...

It was so early that it actually was printed by some service and (snail-)mailed to me...

I mostly do heavy multi-disciplinary engineering problems (these I also use for checking an AI, as they're typically not good at these sorts of problems), complex coding, OS analysis, stuff like that. However, sometimes I do throw the occasional odd-ball - I've used ChatGPT to propose a workable quantum mechanics that will cope with Doctor Who canon, for example, and to produce an outline for a story in which symphonic metal appears in 1964 that is compliant with current sociological and psychological models of behaviour.

Claude Opus 4.6 was coping surprisingly well with just about everything I threw at it (but ran out of credits fast), but Opus 5 is churning out incoherent babblings to the point I'm worried I may have accidentally summoned Cthulhu.

But Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek got hopelessly confused on just about everything past a very low level of complexity. They can handle large problems, yes - Gemini has a huge context window - but complex interactions baffle them.

ChatGPT is able to identify issues correctly, but can only outline solutions, it's just not good at depth. 5.6 is a lot better, but still not good at deep answers. ChatGPT is also prone to agreeing for the sake of it, which makes me nervous about trustworthiness.

That is fair enough. I've been trying out Kimi on the free model, and have subscriptions to Claude and ChatGPT. If Kimi is actually as good or better than ChatGPT, at the pro level, then it might be worth my while moving over as ChatGPT has become very disk-hungry of late and I'm pushing right to the very limits on what it can reliably process.

Although the Chinese models are all considerably smaller, it's not obvious to me that they're as good or better. They could be, but I'm not convinced the benchmarks that currently exist are stressing the models enough to establish where models actually are any good.

You use the can of grue repellant in the lake to get past those.

That humans have sufficiently directional hearing is perhaps the most impressive part. Once you have that, then the rest really just follows,

However, this continues the unexpected senses in humans, one of the first discovered was that humans have a weak magnetic sense.

The potential, both in fact (if you can "see" walls and gaps by clicking then you can presumably navigate a cave even if your light source goes out) and in fiction (this one should really be obvious), is considerable.

I am NOT an Apple hater, and they regularly piss me off, but their gear works for me.
I do not care what you use, if it works for you, you made the right choice.

If I can but buy it outright then I do not buy it.
I still run my 27" iMac with all the software I bought with zero extra costs
I do not install "in App purchases" Apps because of hidden costs, I have no idea what costs are involved, so no, not touching them.
my iPhone 11 will get replaced when it actually dies, not when Apple decides it needs more money from me

I can buy my computers over 3 years, often on interest free terms, so Apple is just running a very bad economic choice here as I end up with hardware I can sell or pass on to Grandkids when they need one for school.

EXCEPT for some businesses who have 3-4 year turnover for hardware "because" then this will work for them as lease costs are 100% tax deductible where as purchases are on a depreciation schedule.

But either way I am not going to scream like a hysterical school girl. I have seen the "flame wars" since my first computer a TRS-80 M1 clone. Boring then, pathetic now.

Not sure you quite get how dopamine works.

I would have gone with "Run Spot Run" for advanced readers ...

How many colouring in books does a library need ?

Kiwi, though Scandinavian countries in many ways are better than us.
Aussies...have some things better but their racism towards the Aborigines is bad.

I have been to the USA about 10 times, both for work and holidays (the tourist trap cities).
Closest to China I have been to China is HongKong before China started becoming aggressive there, won't be back.
Been to lots of EU countries too.

ZERO sympathy for Russia, though I do work with some Russian people, and they are wonderful.
I also have US friends who I do not judge because of Trump (not that they would vote for the pedo anyway)

I am a Kiwi, I have no need to lie