Ours doesn't like being picked up either, although he is slowly coming around to it. Something traumatic happened to him, and I wonder if it involved being picked up.

We think ours did formerly belong to someone, but was in a poor state when he came to us. No microchip and nobody recognized him on the local noticeboards. He's very shy around people, but was definitely house trained before we got him. Over time he is getting a little better with people, but it's a very slow process.

You clearly haven't met my cat. We rescued him and he's not very cuddly. I suppose he is kinda cute sometimes.

That's the problem, in my experience those chatbots can't resist telling you how great you are. I had to ask Google Gemini to tone it down a bit.

Hilarious that this was modded "troll". I just didn't get around to doing one clock one year, and noticed that it was no real effort to add 1 to it, and that I need not bother with the other ones.

Because I do a lot of GNSS and time related stuff anyway, I tend to be working with UTC a lot of the time. During summer time I have to remember to add one to all the timestamps anyway.

Sure, and I wasn't saying that they are the same as human relationships. I'm saying that as an engineer I see this is a flaw in the "design" of humans, one that cats and AI are able to exploit. Affection is an incredibly powerful drug, and you don't even have to spike the victim's drink to administer it.

Have you ever owned a cat? Or more accurately, has a cat ever enslaved you with little morsels of affection in exchange for lavish feasts, on-demand massages, free healthcare and being generally treated like royalty?

Cats, by complete chance, evolved to a form that humans find more than just pleasing. Socially, they have little shame, are demanding, and affection is used as a tool to get what they want. If they were humans, they would be an abusive partner who takes advantage at every opportunity.

Something about humans craves what they offer, and chatbots too apparently. Maybe a good comparison would be nicotine. It's easy to become dependent on it. Some people are obliged to use AI for work, they can't even choose not to start smoking in the first place.

Europe is developing P2P payment systems, and IIRC Brazil already has a very successful one.

PayPal used to be the way to pay for stuff on eBay, but it was terrible, and now thanks to Trump efforts to remove US processors from the loop are accelerating. It seems like the future for PayPal is uncertain at best.

The way it has worked for many years on Android is that even when you enable "install apps from any source", you still have to enable each app that wants to start an installation separately. So your would authorize the app store of your choice, and random .apk downloads in the browser (which Chrome and Firefox will shit a brick over anyway) are still blocked.

To be fair I don't think Google is being accused of using BitTorrent, that was Facebook/Meta. Google actually scanned a large number of books themselves, for the Google Books project. That was found to be legal, although that only covered scanning, searching, and making excerpts available, not AI training.

As for your Sleeping Beauty example, since that story dates back to the 1600s, and appears to be a based on an even older story going back to the 1300s, any copyright protection it may have enjoyed has long since expired.

I'm having difficulty finding good data, but what I did find suggests that the US has not been doing very well for a while now.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-s...

Well behind Europe and China, and especially Japan. Note that Japan has very difficult terrain, frequent extreme weather, earthquakes, and suffered the loss of all nuclear power in 2011, most of which was not back online in the time period covered by that data.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal” - Pablo Picasso

I believe the classic line between copying and synthesis is taking from three artists or more.

The author is allowed to not give a flying fig about that. Or anything else.

You can't really say it's bad code when nobody else has managed to do any better.

Ideally we should adjust clocks/schedules so that peak electricity demand lines up with peak solar output.

Beyond that, human beings need sunshine to stay healthy, so there are probably some limits on how much we adjust schedules relative to daylight.