Perhaps we will start to see the punishments fit the crime when the term premeditated fraud in the first degree is used by a judge to describe the felonous MBA fuckery currently building the FY27 balance sheets of Too Big To Fail.

I paid for a year of access to their service last year (recently let it expire/lapse) ... and I agree with another Slashdot poster who called it "impressive".

I guess you can fight legal battles endlessly over what you're allowed to do with content that was made freely available for you to access over the Internet.... But those "vast music libraries" they "stole" were the same ones the average user of services like YouTube are welcome to pull up and listen to any time they like.

We're really just arguing about if it's ok to write code so a computer can analyze the music and use it to create new music based on ideas it "learned" from the content ... vs human musicians doing the same thing.

To me, the impressive part of SUNO was the way I could supply my own original lyrics as text, complete with instructions on how I'd like to hear the words sung, and have it churn out a realistic-sounding result with a backing track fully assembled to go with it. If you listen to enough SUNO content, you start to get a sense that specific music genres it uses result in only a certain resulting sound/feel/vibe. I could tell it to regenerate something I told it to create in the style of an "Irish jig", for example -- and over dozens of attempts? I'd wind up with maybe 4 or 5 really different ways it constructed it, and the rest feeling like small changes to those basic constructs. But to me, that's ok. You shouldn't try to use an AI music creation tool to crank out complete, "ready to play/perform" pieces of music that got rid of human musicians. A SUNO creation should be identifiable as a SUNO creation when a discerning listener hears it.

I see SUNO handling relatively "low effort" music creation needs like advertising jingles or as a tool to inspire a musician to build from what it gave them as a staring point. For a lot of background music, such as what's needed in a video game? It makes sense too.

I feel like it's not only possible, but likely America saw relatively major power outages at close to the same "one per month" rate in the past too? The electrical grid is basically designed with an assumption it only stays up with the help of a crew of linemen who get tasked with locating points of failure and fixing them ASAP.

I remember some years back, I lived in a small city right on the edge of the Potomac River in western Maryland. They were originally set up with "feeder" power lines coming from two directions in to town. At some point, Potomac Edison power company decided to just discontinue one of those feeder lines and let the city get by from the other one. Every time a car hit the right power pole coming in to town, after that? Power was out for the whole community.

Seemed insane to me that they'd purposely remove redundancy they already had in place? But I'm sure it was all about the economics -- with bean-counters realizing the lower grid reliability was still "adequate" per the total population there, and they'd save all the money maintaining the additional lines and poles.

I also remember living in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri where they had a power outage lasting over 2 weeks. A storm came through and knocked down a lot of trees. (The community took pride in having all the trees growing there, but I guess didn't consider how bad that was for above-ground power lines running right past all of them.) They had to get crews from other states out to replace blown transformers on poles and the whole bit, to get it back up and running.

If better uptime was a major issue, you'd think they'd bury those power lines. But again, it's about cost-savings instead.

Oh they know all right... They can sense weaknesses like that.

That's not an argument.

"Yeah, that guy is dead now. We have a pretty solid idea who did it. But not sure if that'll make him alive again, so let's not bother with catching them."

I don't live in the US but I recently moved to a rural area and in doing so I have started to plan out a utility-independent future.

Why? Well, various reasons, including water and sewage companies taking the piss (or actually... not... just dumping the piss in every river in the country and crying that they can't process it because they gave all my money to their shareholders, but... anyway) but also because electricity is literally a con too.

And nowadays? I *can* viably make my own electricity. So... why wouldn't I? Why would I pay a company to do a bad job when I can do it myself?

I did a number of things when I moved to that area, including demanding smart meters on everything, and I monitored my electricity down to 30 minute intervals for 2 years. And you know what it showed? That 1% of the time, I have no power. That's in dribs and drabs, a power cut here or there, a scheduled one lasting a day or there, and so on. But 1% of the time they can't even get electricity to me and... there's nothing I can do about that.

So, if I want a computer to stay on... I already need to spend money and do it myself because they simply can't do it. 1% may not sound a lot, but that's 3.65 days a year if you think about it. Spread out randomly - an hour here, an hour there. Literally my computer "uptime" was "two nines" and that was driven entirely by grid power supply.

That's ATROCIOUS in my opinion, in the 21st century. And I wasn't prepared to tolerate it. I was already buying the house with the intention of becoming utility-independent but that really drove home why I need to. So I started to build my own solar, for several reasons.

1) To ride out the outages
2) To reduce my bills so they got as little money from me as possible
3) To not be reliant on the grid
4) To ultimately remove the need for grid entirely

And it's really not been hard. I started with cheap junk just to see if it would even work in my climate, with that house orientation, etc. It did. I started with a small 12v panel and an old car battery. And it was actually worth doing when I ran the numbers. It would take a few years to pay off the cost of the panel, but it would do so.

And then every month for 2 years, I would get more panels, more and better batteries, more efficient and powerful equipment in between. And it got to the point where it is technically capable of running my whole house for much of the year. And that's before I ever got onto SERIOUS panels and professional installs. That's just me, a bunch of cheap 12V panels, some 12V LiFePO4 batteries and a serious enough charger/inverter, then later going onto 24V by re-arranging them.

And I'm looking at that and thinking: Why the fuck hasn't government / the utilities done this for me? Why am *I* having to do it? Because it really is that simple and they have access to far more land, far better kit. But, no, I'm still paying inflated grid prices from when Ukraine was first invaded because of the price of GAS. What the fuck are we doing?

So now, more than ever, I plan to be utility-independent by retirement, which is 20 years away, and whereas before I was wondering if that was even viable in that timeframe, I'm now expecting that to be 100% done way ahead of schedule, just by a factor of "whenever I can be bothered". It was that easy, and doing the maths was that easy.

I might retain a grid connection, or not. It depends on what happens and what kind of low-usage tarrifs I can get in the future but I'm looking at the whole thing thinking "Fuck you, I'll do it myself" because even as an amateur... it's perfectly viable to do so. I don't care if it even costs me more (it won't). I don't care about having a grid connection or not. It's just that I will be able to be *independent* of it. When they play games, raise prices, or have power cuts, I won't be reliant on it at all. I'll use it when it's to my benefit, and not other times.

But all I ever think about the whole thing is: How have I, an amateur, cobbling cheap Chinese shit together, come up with a more reliable and cheaper power supply, that's utterly independent of fuel prices, than an entire national electricity grid could do?

The answer, of course, is corruption and profiteering. That's the only part that I've eliminated. And that's the part that, when it's gone, makes it all viable and even cheaper.

And that's the thing that's going to see me having zero electricity bills when I retire. Just by removing the profit and corruption.

Yeah, there's two main problems:

1) People entering the wrong fields. For example, medicine really needs workers, at all levels, but not enough people are going into it.

2) Certain manual labour fields, like field work and home construction, because... well, I think we all know why there's a shortage of workers in those fields.

Translation; Instead of wasting time dissipating the harm over days, x-ray test monkeys spent four hours hittin’ that thing like Grandpas groovy gravity bong.

Just to make sure the crushing vacuum of space is still the risky part of the trip.

That's the thing: these OpenAI things are basically Alexa +. But what's the plus? What compelling new features are being added that justify buying a new device, and paying for a bunch of AI data centers to make it work? I've got voice control for my smart home working cloudless already, and I rarely use it; I prefer silent interactions. Same for asking questions, I prefer using a regular search engine, where a quick peek at the returned links can give me an indication of how accurate the AI summary is (sometimes it is, often it isn't).

I'll say it again:

Active military personnel carrying around standard mobile phones is such a breach of all kinds of basic security protocols that it should be illegal.

But can't let the troops get bored, eh? Have to let them do their fitbit on board your cruiser that you're trying to keep secret, and have them checking into Facebook while they're in Helmand province, and giving away their movements when they're running around your bases at home, and having an always-on device capable of tracking and recording everything from audio to the radiowaves to location, made by the Chinese, wherever they go.

Dumbest fucking idea ever.

"OpenAI's success in hardware will hinge on bringing a novel approach to the market"

It says as it releases an Alexa....

I live in Oslo, Norway. I'm driving a BMW i3 I bought new 12 years ago. It was a piece of shit the day I bought it. It's the exact same piece of shit now. I've calculate that so far, I'm at about $245 USD per month total cost of ownership including charging and toll booths across these 12 years. I suspect I can drive it for another 6-10 years and by then I expect the TCO to have dropped to about $195 a month before it starts increasing again.

I can't drive this shit heap too far, 120km on a great day in the middle of summer. And I had an incident a few years back on the countryside in -11C temperatures where I only got 50km in the mountains that day.... that was REALLY COLD but I had blankets for the 3 hour wait for the tow truck.

We'll take a vacation in a few weeks, we'll rent a crappy tesla and drive to Gothenburg or Stockholm. Still massively cheaper than wasting money on a new car that would give me better range for the week or two I need it to. But I still go grocery shopping a few times a month in Sweden because I'm not stupid and this crap car can make it there with a little extra charge each way. Which is no problem because there are chargers at pretty much every exit and they're cheap.

So, that brings me to trucks...

1) one driver 5 truck caravans. This is close and it's going to happen. In fact, I'm pretty sure within a very short time, we'll see most trucks driverless on the highway and then you'll see professional drivers being delivered to trucks for last-mile travel where the trucks will still do the driving, but supervised. And then in time, no more drivers... except in New York where some guy named Joe Joe who graduated from "Vinnie's airplane towing school" is considered more qualified than an airline pilot with a hundred thousand hours of flight time and a formal education and tows airplanes to the terminal because "we're a union shop".

2) Telsa isn't selling the trucks to make money from the trucks... oh they will... but consider that a model-X at 1/50 the size is like 1/3 the cost of the truck. The money comes from the infrastructure. Tesla will build out a charging network even if they have to dip into the college funds of Musk's 72 children to do so. And he'll use fuel cell and solar and possibly wind to charge up the battery power banks. He'll then find a way to cut deals with the truck stops that he'll install the chargers at their truck stops in exchange for parts of the food profits and for massive discounts on any fuel needed for the fuel cells. Then he'll make a deal with netflix and disney plus and all of them for the entertainment systems in the trucks and he'll charge the truck drivers for Starlink. And he'll then have a huge fleet of spare Tesla Semi's that can be quickly delivered to drivers on the road who have problems. They'll then arrange for the semi to be serviced and returned to the driver as he passes back. Of course, all at a cost.

Within 5 years, he'll have streamlined most of the US land freight infrastructure, bled everyone dry in the process and be strongly positioned to sell Tesla Semi as a service in competition with the existing fleets.

Europe and Asia (outside of Russia and India) will be a much tougher win because we prefer rail where possible. And at least here in Norway, we would still rather invest in new rails rather than new roads.

The Windows Start Menu is so frigging confusing that I use it for two things

1) press windows, type name of app, press enter
2) press start, type basic equation (I.e 5/1.35), pray it gives me numbers and not an advertisement for feminine hygiene products

I am terrified when I need to use a mouse on the start menu. It's as though it can do everything except start programs

While Paramount claims they cancelled Colbert as a cost cutting move, that makes no sense since other late night shows on other networks with smaller audiences continue. They must make some sort of financial sense.

It is widely understood, though not provable, that the move was a bribe to Trump in order to get the merger approved. Trump has had a longstanding dislike of Colbert because of his commentary on Trump as a person and as the President.

When is a hard question. Rationally it should never have blown up this much in the first place (some expansion would be rational, but not like we've seen). Clearly the minds driving this are not rational.

Insanity is notoriously hard to predict. That's why short selling is so risky. The market can clearly remain irrational longer than most people can remain solvent when betting against it.