Only the customers with fancy GPUs have anything worth farming, and they probably want to run games on them instead.

That's my gut reaction too -- this will result in software with obscure bugs that are near-impossible for a human to find or fix because no human even understands how the software works.

OTOH, maybe no human will need to find or fix the bugs, because they can task an AI to find and fix them instead. I'd say that strains credibility, but last year I would have said it strains credibility that an AI can understand (or, at least, "understand") human-written code as well as a human programmer, and yet here we are.

True, but I don't see how that's a problem for anyone.

For something that's too far away to be of much use, it sure is getting a lot of use.

I think you're confusing fusion with fission. A Mullah (or any irresponsible person, for those who prefer not to sound like a bigot) who has access to grossly abuse a fusion reactor might at worse damage the reactor and sprinkle a trace amount of radiation around. They certainly wouldn't be able to make any kind of weapon out of it.

One nice thing about cobalt and lithium is that they don't get consumed when you use them. When you drive your gas-powered car, the gas you put into it goes away forever, and you have to buy another tank next week, every week, for the life of the car. The rare earths in your EV's motors and batteries, OTOH, remain present and usable for the lifetime of the car, and can and will be reclaimed for other purposes after their service life ends.

So sure, there might potentially be wars fought over those elements; but it's much less likely to come to that, partially because manufacturers are learning to get by with less or none of those elements, but mainly because every nation-state that depends on them already has a de-facto internal stockpile that it can rely on instead of having to go to war for more.

Dunno when American automakers will figure it out; I suspect Chinese manufacturers already have, but we're unlikely to see any of those here. In the meantime, the Slate might be something like what you're looking for.

That's true -- people tend not to properly consider the costs of problems that they can't directly see. Such as the housing/infrastructure costs incurred by having too much CO2 in the atmosphere, or the security/stability costs incurred by having to fight wars in the Middle East every 15 years.

At least the environmental messes in China remain China's problem; one that they will likely sort out on their own, because unlike some superpowers I could name, China is very much into solving technical problems. The global-scale environmental messes, OTOH, are everyone's problem, and only get worse the longer we ignore them.

That would only reduce costs if it allowed them to ship a single standardized keyboard silkscreen worldwide. As soon as they need to support both QWERTY and AZERTY designs, for example, they're back to having to create separate variants again and any potential cost savings are lost.

I think this more just Apple being Apple -- too many graphic designers chasing not enough remaining graphic design problems, to the point where they start "solving" things that didn't actually need to be solved. Now every new buyer has to learn what the new glyphs are supposed to represent, or guess what they mean based on their location on the keyboard.

I've never seen a keyboard where you could drag across the surface of a key, or press on different parts of the key to invoke different actions at different times. If such a thing existed, I think it would be very expensive and also not very useful. So, a touchscreen is not a key.

Yes, you make an excellent argument for constructing more renewable energy generation facilities. I'll even include nuclear in that, if you can get the price down to where it's competitive, without compromising on safety.

Maybe I'm out-of-date or a control freak, but I don't want my codebases to contain custom code that I need to rely on but that I didn't write myself. I barely trust my own code, much less code that an opaque AI generated that I consequently only half-understand.

With code I wrote myself, the way it works is a direct reflection of my own thought process, and by the time it's done, I've spent enough time writing and refining it that I'm intimately familiar with it and can tell you exactly what every line does, why it's there, and why I wrote it that way and not some other way.

Which isn't to say I don't use AI, but I'm using it either to review the code I wrote ("check this for any potential bugs") or to provide me with examples of some common technique, which I can then study and rewrite to my personal taste before adding it to my codebase.

My God, are there 337.8 million American homes without power today? You'd think that would have made the news or something.

There is one thing a rooftop system provides that a utility-owned system never can: control over future expenses.

If I install a solar array on my roof, I know (roughly) how much the power it generates will cost me for the next (N) years, and I don't have to worry about anyone jacking up the price on me because of AI data centers or whatnot. If I rely on the electric company's solar array, OTOH, then I'm going to have to pay whatever rates the electric company decides to charge me for that privilege. For some people, having more control over their own power budget is a not-insignificant advantage.

True, and for justifiable reasons. I imagine at some point (when batteries get cheap enough) they'll start selling these in combination with storage batteries, so that people can use them as an emergency UPS and/or to recharge their EV when it gets in, and not have to bother with interfacing with the general electrical system.