"Trump does not pay women for sex".

Nope, he pays after sex. And with the nation's courts trying to please him over doing their actual work, he's not paying nearly enough.

Not taking in information from outside the country is leadership in your mind? Ignorance is the only correct term for being oblivious to the outside. Especially when your nation and (non-existing) industry plans to make money exporting things. Without outside data, you will not know if you overproduce/underproduce, can expect to get paid on time or not at all etc.

No, not being open to the situation in neighboring countries and/or the whole world is not "leadership", instead it is the stupidest thing any nation anywhere can do. Trump and the powers behind him chose this type of obliviousness for the US. And I fully expect the whole nation to suffer the consequences of that choice in many ways. About 50% of the US population appears convinced that the 2nd Trump administration is actually doing a good job continues to baffle me, while the rest have no problem seeing the misery coming their way by the current administration.

Ha, as if the current administration won't remain in 2028 and after.

If HBO can't raise their prices, how long do you think HBO will do some cost-cutting and just do dragons with tits?

To my understanding there is the "rule" in series-land, around the 3th/4th season, the actors get a lot more say in the series and also more residuals. So, if the series is doing well, but not that well compared to production costs...than it is cheaper for the studio to stop after the second or third season.

I agree with you that the "streamers" were not the blessing they promised to be. But the above is part of the way how Hollywood has done business for many, many years. Even before the "streamers".

In the 70's, 80's and (early) 90's you hadn't much HD. Now I have seen a Bluray season of Buck Rogers season 1 recently and the sets look horrible in 4K. Even with 1080p you see so much tarnishes, paint errors, dents and broken elements in the set. Which wasn't a problem on low-res TV. So yeah, production costs has risen by a lot.

You are correct about the myriad of ways to consume content. There are only so much hours in the day to spend on that activity, so it is a lot harder to get "eye-balls" now then it was 20 years ago.

Well, I rather have 8-10 good episodes than 26 with a lot of "filler". And in the beginning of this trend that was also the case. Nowadays the drastically shorter seasons also contain more and more "filler". So by now it is the worst of two worlds. For the viewer it certainly is. But I suspect also for the actors/producers/writers/studios I expect the shorter seasons to be detrimental. Storage of sets for series that run only 20% of the year, that must cost a lot. Building and rebuilding as alternative for that is costly too. Actors and writers also have little time to "deepen" a character they play and/or write for. And who knows how many extra stipulations there are in contracts now for the actors to not play in similar roles...to not affect the "image" of the character they play in their contracted role.

Meanwhile, in Bollywood/China/Korea you have series that are still around 30 episodes per season.

You will then be very unpleasantly surprised by modern high end model cars from practically any brand nowadays. All of them use artificial sounds through the internal speaker set to make the ICE engine sound noisier/"grunty" than it is. Especially the car models that are intended for people that employ a driver to transport them.

Simply because these have been soundproofed to the gills, but if the driver is asked to step on it, the car generates (muffled) engine noise through the internal speaker set to give the occupants the impression that the engine is making noise.

BMW admitted they already started to do this about 15 years ago. They even have an audio department set up for that. And by now almost all car makers do this thing now. It is a lot easier to make "grunty" sounds over the internal speaker system than that it is the engine to make the actual noise. By doing so, the product can now be sold for different clientele. Some require the absolute silence, some like to subconsciously know that there is "grunt" in the engine department. So the car maker can sell the same product to every type of client without hardware alterations, maybe just a different set of samples in the onboard software. A f.ckton cheaper for the car maker and the client has their psyche "tickled" just the way they wanted.

Really, all carmakers do this for a very large part of their portfolio. Except for the models where the driver sits (more or less) right next to the engine. Than it doesn't make any sense. But for the rest of the portfolio? You will be amazed how much ICE engine sounds are faked nowadays.

Almost none of the var makers likes to admit that they do this, but all of them do

An electric motor is also a motor, so that last line of the summary is hoghwash. But, BMW seems to take a page out of the Trump handbook, 'ICE first!'. Which is, of course, a valid way. Still, as with any choice anyone makes at any given time, the consequences of these choices are your to bear.

And with that choice BMW seems to go in the direction of becoming obsolete by their own hand. I have owned 3 BMW's when living in the Netherlands. Fine cars, each one of them. Enjoyed driving these as well. But if they don't want to play in a changing market, then why would the market care? Their stance only makes the Chinese car industry more relevant, by simply choosing to remain in the technical backwater that is ICE.

ICE is fun and sounds so much better than EV does. Any day of the week and twice on Sundays even. Yet, that doesn't exclude BMW of moving where the market goes. This is why such companies must work on R&D, without CEO's c.ckblocking the required spending to do so. Else you, as a company, simply become irrelevant.

And keep redefining "poor"-status when the threat of running out of poor people looms?

Have you seen the weight of new ICE vehicles lately? Weight for those went up quite dramatically the last 10 years. So much so that these are hardly lighter than a standard EV anymore. Tire noise is a thing, it does seem to get some people upset. Not belonging to that group myself, your post indicates that you are.

Still, weight is not nearly as different between EV's and ICE cars anymore. And therefore isn't as much of a difference-maker as you expect it to be. In my opinion, ICE cars have become way too heavy for their own good. Anyway, difference in tires for EVs and ICE are also much less than you probably think. Size and width of tires for EVs and ICE are pretty much akin to each other.

Tires have not been as much of a difference-maker between ICE and EV since the last 5 to 10 years. Everyone seems to want large rims with the least amount of tire around those rims, yet as wide tires as the car chassis will allow for. Probably those rims need to spin too (as part of some 'Thug life'-movement or something).

Much more Cobalt is required in the refining process of any fuels for ICE vehicles than in batteries for EVs. Let that sink in. And that part of the industry really wants and needs Cobalt, as it makes the "cracking" so much more efficient. Nothing holds a candle, in that part of the process, to Cobalt.

So vigilance against the use of Cobalt in batteries is indeed warranted. But ICE has a much larger Cobalt problem in the whole ICE chain, so even more vigilance would be required. Except that this is more often than not covered up by the proverbial mantle of love from ICE fanatics.

Solid State Batteries are already being used in commercial products (as in stuff you can buy at Amazon, not some specialty store), not in large enough quantities for car batteries yet, but in batteries for devices that can power your camping trip/help you through a power outage at home. Not sure about the use of Cobalt in those. Just to indicate that SSB's aren't a pipe dream that is always "5 years away". Put that against the stagnancy in the process of refining fuels, and I know where I would place my bets for the future of myself and my family.

In the Netherlands there are now many cities which severely limit cars in their city center. With a few exceptions for police, fire department, ambulances and occasional electric delivery truck, these city centers feel much more accessible and tranquil. Cities of 300.000 - 400.000 people that feel in essence as tranquil as a village of 3.000 - 4.000 people regarding car noise. These also reconstructed their centers, so people and businesses/stores are actually within walking and/or cycling distances, people are much less inclined to use their cars, as jumping on your bicycle is more often than not (much) faster (and a lot cheaper/healthier) for the incidental trip to the supermarket and their EV can charge for a longer uninterrupted period via a normal power outlet.

So, win, win, win, win for you (the consumer) and loss, loss, loss for the likes of Exxon, Shell, BP and their ilk, which is in essence another win for you.

Of course, this mindset is like cursing in the "church of car centric U.S.A.", but as long as other nations come to that same realization (and they do), it will be a win for the planet as well.

With any change comes a transfer of power. That is the message that is continuously bombarded onto the employees by companies and their leadership. The practically hysterical gobble over "Everything in AI, AI in everything!" by its zealots is such a change.

Just like Google bent Altavista over the proverbial barrel and had its way with it, power was transferred. The dot.com bubble, that was another one of those power transfers.

AI is nothing else but another transfer. And with each transfer, we (the public) tend to draw the short straw. OpenAI and Altman aren't the force of good they think they are. Microsoft never was, of course. Anthropic and especially Perplexity have way more insidious plans with their piece of power. Meta seems the worst of the lot. But I do find it somewhat enjoyable that the high-flyers in AI, hired by Zuck lately, for ungodly sums of money, already have quit their jobs at Meta.

FORTRAN seems to become more popular again in 2025

Developing software sure isn't free by any stretch of the imagination. But there is also cost of running software. Software that you developed yourself, software that you licensed, SaaS, whatever...that is more often than not (much) more expensive than creating it and/or maintaining it.

The latest version of 'LM Studio' has MCP support built-in. Currently I'm only interested in the 'Sequential Thinking' MCP and when activated, that does work within LM Studio.

Was trying out that specific MCP with Claude Desktop (free tier), where it also worked like a charm. Now, I've been testing quite some (GGUF) models lately, varying from 1b to 49b models with a curated set of questions & assignments. There are quite a lot of 14b/30b models that generate pretty decent content/code. One of the assignments to generate a single file HTML page showing an animated representation of the Solar System (including CSS and JavaScript).

Some larger models deliver quite poor representations, while some 14b models do way better. NVidia llama 3.3 nemotron model (49b) barely performs better than 3b models from Qwen3. My curated set of questions and assignments give me a better idea about how well locally running models work in practice. So I don't have to stare at benchmark graphs that tell me very little of the model's actual behavior.

It also shows me that locally running LLM are not nearly as bad as some portray these to be. Or a waste of time. Yes, the paid for LLMs hosted by OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/Microsoft are better and faster. But, depending on my available testing hardware, not that much faster or boatloads better. So, I rather use local LLMs for smaller tasks, according to their strengths, and for orchestrating these small(er) LLMs with either a larger local LLM or use a paid plan from the "bro's".

Saves me a lot on variable costs regarding the use of tokens in whichever paid plan, while I could run completely wild with my local LLMs for a pretty steady cost in energy.