I'd agree, except it really depends what you want to do in life. Where AI really does more damage than good is in the Fine Arts. So far, AI has "empowered" the stealing of original creative work by cartoonists, painters and paid photographers, to regurgitate it into "mash-ups" it pretends it came up with organically in response to requests to "draw me a ". It's, similarly, encouraged producing musical jingles and pieces that devalue real, human musicians as part of the process. (If you're a small business looking for a catchy jingle or theme to put in all your radio commercials today? Chances are you opt to save a little money by AI generating something up via a service like Suno, instead of hiring a professional musicians who writes them. That results in AI "synth singers" that all start to sound alike as you hear enough of the content, and to at least some extent? Music that sounds generic and canned, too, due to a limited number of drum riffs and fills, guitar licks and other details the AI uses repeatedly when instructed to play in specific genres.

Even if you believe this is just part of the transition of AI into something far better than it is today? You're just cheering on a world where it will become a special treat to pay premiums for a "real, human-crafted work", while the masses only consume AI art. That doesn't bode well for society in the future, if you ask me.

I mean, most everyone's mad at Trump over implementing these tariffs (and rightfully so, IMO, if only because of how haphazardly it was implemented). But now, you've got companies demanding a refund when it was mostly the consumer who really paid them. (I didn't see many places eating the cost of the tariffs and holding prices where they were? If that had happened, the typical consumer wouldn't have cared so much about them.)

Knowing these companies have no plans to cut prices, it makes it sort of accurate for Trump to praise the ones who won't try to claw back the money. At least as additional revenue to the U.S. government, it technically goes towards servicing the national debt as opposed to tax increases.

Agree with you completely. To me, the real conversation here is probably about whether or not AI has gotten far enough to do a viable simulation of consciousness.
I would be a little disturbed if Dawkins concluded Claude AI is truly "alive" from a few days of interacting with it ... but not sure that's what he's said?

At what point could an AI be treated like a "friend" despite it just being computer software? And by treating an AI as conscious, perhaps it's only a suggestion that interactions with it stay parallel with the ones we'd have with humans. (If nothing else, an AI that adapts and learns partially based on what's typed to it in conversations would suffer from "garbage in, garbage out" if people kept telling it ridiculous things they'd never say to other people.)

We use Notepad++ in my workplace. (At least, some of our software devs do. I maintain it as one of the apps they can install via "Company Portal" in Windows from InTune.)

I had no issues with the software, but I agree it seems pretty similar to other options out there like BBEdit. When I saw the news of a Mac version, I thought, "That's good... more choices for people. I'd never use it, but ..." And now, all this drama because it was released by someone other than the original author.

It sounds like it'll get sorted out, even if Andrey Letov is only grudgingly renaming the app. Honestly? Best answer here would have been Don Ho doing a Mac port of Notepad++ himself. I mean, why not? It can't be that huge a project, considering it's not an app using 3D accelerated graphics or any of that. Just make an official Mac version and expand your user base.

I remember the one thing that really made me rebel against the school system, growing up, was all the homework. I was a smart kid/teen but I also knew what areas I wanted to spend my mental energy on. I always leaned more towards writing, spelling, literature and creative things. I was never wired to be very good at math.

I struggled through the math courses (although oddly did reasonably well at geometry because I wasn't so adverse to doing all the "proofs").

But yeah - any teacher who flat out told me they expected us to do "about an hour a night" of homework just for their one class? I was ready to check out and ignore the work because that led to my whole evening being tied up with it, by the time I got through the homework assignments from all my classes.

There's got to be a reasonable middle ground, IMO. It's fine to send something home each night to make sure a kid is practicing what was learned. But it's also the job of the school to ensure they learn the stuff fully in class. Always thought it was a BS cop-out to suggest "tutoring" as soon as a kid gets a little behind. That just shunts the teacher's job off to a third party because they're trying to cover too much, too quickly, in class.

One big problem I see with wind turbines though? The maintenance has fairly steep requirements. You can't just hire some handyman or general electrician to climb one of those towers and repair a short circuit or whatnot. There's a whole new job created for trained specialists in working on wind turbines, and as one might imagine? They're not cheap to hire.

Solar panels are mundane by contrast. No specially made turbine blades (out of mostly non-recyclable materials) to need replacing. No need to have workers climb tall towers to do maintenance. And any electrician worth a darn can troubleshoot a solar panel array or diagnose a failing inverter. And certainly no helicopters required.

As someone who daily drives an EV and has done so for years, I'm obviously not overly paranoid about the battery fire issues out there. But the faster you charge a battery pack, the more heat gets generated. And the higher the battery pack's capacity, the more potential energy is contained inside it to cause a problem if it has a sudden failure.

While the same could be said about the potential energy in tanks of gasoline or diesel fuel? The challenge for EVs is that extinguishing battery fires is FAR more difficult to do. A number of race tracks have established a burn area to tow an EV with a battery fire to, so it can sit there as long as it needs to burn itself out. They don't even try to extinguish the fire. Clearly, that's not such a viable plan for a crowded interstate during rush hour.

I know there are a few experimental technologies out there, like the device a fire department can attach to the end of a hose, so it rolls under an EV and sprays water directly upwards, to cool a battery pack right above it. That's good stuff, but I'm not sure it's being adopted in the mainstream as quickly as battery pack capacities are increasing.

Last I heard, 3D printer and filament manufacturer AnyCubic was including some of these restrictions for printers like their Kobra 3 Max?
They were enabling it via their cloud printing functionality though. so setting the printer to LAN mode circumvented it for now. It may even be a feature they coded but left disabled while they wait to see how legislation pans out? But I recall some people in Facebook 3D printing groups being really angry about it when it was first discovered.

IMO, it amounts to more "feel good" legislation where some politicians want credit for making the nation safer. But in reality, it'll be ineffective because it can only work based on matching CRC hash values of known prints they want to restrict/ban. If people have such a print file in their possession and modify the dimensions a bit, it won't match any longer. And eventually, if they try to restrict too many items (say with AI trying to determine what is or is not a gun part?), they're going to start creating false positives that stop people from printing things they need to print.

On one hand? I think there's considerable evidence this AI bubble is going to pop; maybe in 1-2 years from now? If that's the case, the tech workers who manage to get paid training AI models still walk away with that money when it gets shuttered due to lack of funds.

On the other? I also get how distasteful it is to "train your replacement", especially when the replacement is just computer software.

I think much of this depends on how things *really* pan out. I'm not seeing big I.T. job losses due to AI implementations, so much as the regular economic pressures that drive companies to work with less staff. There's a lot of high-level/upper management talk about AI replacing workers. But it's more hypothetical than reality right now. People are still needed to put the right queries into the AI engines to get the desired results back out -- and that's often kind of an art or skill in and of itself.

On top of all of this, there really needs to be more of a realization that for many people? They're pretty ok with being "fat". The medical field wants to keep pushing obesity as a disorder or a disease. But a lot of people have no interest in going to the gym/working out or making a special effort to eat only "health foods". Many even prefer the look of an overweight person to an "ideal weight" person of similar height.

Like anything out there, you can go to extremes and then you're liable to suffer consequences.

But the medical field created a whole lot of peer-pressure to conform to a certain norm for weight - when without anyone labeling it all a "health problem", you'd have far more people out there who weren't so depressed about their body/looks. Also a lot less money wasted on diet fads and scam exercise equipment that doesn't really do much.

When a society has easy availability to food, it makes sense they'd collectively be bigger/heavier than people functioning in the hunter/gatherer situation our ancestors were stuck in. And again, you're going to have people who choose to risk shortening their lifespan if it means they get more enjoyment out of the time they're around. Enjoying tasty food and drink is a big part of that for many people. (The ones who only "eat to live" and don't care much about it are an exception here, but I'd say they're also a minority.)

I've run NextCloud for quite some time, and my frustration with it has more to do with the project not seeming interested in pursuing some of the things that could really increase its adoption and usefulness.

I'm not denying they need to find a workable solution for an open-source Office suite that integrates with it. Don't really care if they move to LibreOffice or they settle this dispute w/OpenOffice instead.

But why can't they support message boards? If you think about it, NextCloud has all the other pieces to work like a computer bulletin board system for the Internet era (as opposed to the modem dial-up days). But with no public message forums integrated, where you could control people's access by security level? It's just a non-starter.

The thing is though? The money going into any retirement plans of theirs is still money they had to earn first. The ones who "lose everything and have nothing left to retire on" aren't going to just vanish because you prevented them from investing in crypto or in some private equity firm.

These are, by and large, going to be the people who never put much into a retirement fund to begin with because they felt they needed all they could get from each paycheck for their current expenses. They opted out of the 401K plan they were offered, etc.

I don't see why I care about government trying to protect people from themselves with this one? I would never invest in crypto and very likely not private equity funds as part of a retirement plan. But that doesn't mean other people wouldn't want to. If you've got enough money already saved up in retirement funds and you believe you've found a window where it makes sense to risk, say, 20% of what you've got on something like crypto? It might double that money for you practically overnight. It also might just cause you to lose it all. But maybe 80% of your total was all you really needed to save in the first place?

ClipChump is the worst.... Many corporations stick people with that as the only (free and included w/Win 11) tool they've got to work with the occasional need to edit video. It feels like it's cloud-enabled for no reason except to say it "uses the cloud"!

It feels like a poor attempt to imitate Apple's iMovie except crippled with less functionality and a huge performance hit because some of the features only work via the cloud, plus it insists of storing files/folders in a personal OneDrive that syncs to the cloud. It acts like the audio portion of a clip is an afterthought, too. You can mute the existing audio or remove it from a clip, but it has zero for EQ'ing it. It doesn't even allow grabbing a still frame and putting it in the video for X number of seconds!

People keep asking why bother submitting apps for iOS if Apple can just de-list or reject anything they like, at any time.

The obvious answer is that you stand to make a lot of profit and considerable brand recognition if your app is listed there and becomes popular.

The reality is, Apple isn't just going around, randomly kicking apps or app developers out of their store, though. They have actual reasons. People usually just happen to disagree with them.

I'm not familiar with this Musi app, but from the Slashdot description at least? It sounds like another useless "front end" app that just pulled from YouTube and regurgitated their audio content to users. I'd put it under "apps nobody needed". Their own web site says. "Discover Musi, the free app that allows you to stream and organize the music that you want. With unlimited playlists, crossfade, equalizer and more".

Honestly, that's nonsense. You can organize your YouTube streams using their own app. I know people who paid for YouTube Red (ad free) who listen to custom playlists all the time from it. Maybe there's no built-in cross-fade option but would you *really* install another app just to hear your tracks cross-fade between each one when you stream them? You can set a global EQ for what you listen to from your iOS device too. If you feel a need to keep messing with it for various songs you're streaming? You probably just need to find better sources for those streams! Low resolution digital sampling of the original content is your likely culprit.