Numerous studies of "agrivoltaics" (solar PV combined with farming) has shown that solar PV improves yields, reduces water use by providing partial shade. Good for both plant and animal farming.

More and more I'm encountering AI as customer service agents (both online and by telephone).
I have not had a singe good experience with any of them. They provide wordy generic useless responses.
The worst experience was with Tesla Insurance. They randomly sent me a message that they were cancelling my insurance because they didn't have a home address for me (in spite of them being able to see my car parked at home every night for the past three years). I thought I could just call them to straighten out the confusion. AI agent was useless and said I had to talk to a real person. I spent hours a day over a week and never got to talk to a person. I ended up just cancelling and getting a new (cheaper) insurance company.

Are they using Musk's Nazi-Grok AI?

Tesla has been collecting extensive data on all their models since the beginning.
They used to do it without charge (how generous of them) but now charge about $10/month if you want extra data services (maps, etc.). Even if you don't pay they still collect data on the car, location, etc.

Interesting to see all the deniers here.
China is ahead in robotics, automobiles, and manufacturing of all kinds.
The US is "great" at borrowing money and buying stuff from the rest of the world.
Oh yes, don't forget our military bases all over the world. All these do is cost money and make people hate the US.
The US has lost the plot. It's not military power, the winning ticket is economic power and China has it.

I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

Good to see that the "professionals" are looking up from their greedy profits and starting to realize that the Jenga tower is tottering.

Hotels often drop prices when they have unsold rooms and it is getting close to the date. They would rather have a lower income than let the room expire without any income.
That's why I usually book rooms at the last minute when traveling. I find I can get a better deal. Also, the risk that I would have to cancel so close to the date is small.
As far as availability goes, it's rare for an area to be fully booked and I've always been able to find a suitable room.

It (bitcoin mining) is the same efficiency as a heating coil. 100% of the electricity input is converted to heat.
NG heaters convert 60% to 90% of the potential energy to heat.
Heat pumps move up to 400% of the input energy to useful heat.

As far as bitcoin mining goes (I am only vaguely familiar with how it works) I think that you get "credit" for each number computed whether or not it is the solution so that when the actual solution emerges from the pool, everyone who contributed gets a share of the "coin". So yes, you can make money with a small bitcoin miner but probably not enough to pay for the electricity.

China's CO2 emissions have plateaued and dropped over the past 18 months.
If China can do it, so can the rest of the world; especially the "developing" world since they can bypass fossil fuels and go straight to solar and wind.
Pakistan is a notable early example.
(The US, I fear, will be relegated to third world energy status due to ignorance.)

Not necessarily.
China tends to use AI for real world problems in science, manufacturing and engineering where it has proven utility.
The US tends to use AI for slop to attract "views" and sell stuff (mostly from China).
See the difference?

Look at DeepSeek as an example of China's thinking.

A person has to be pretty stupid to blindly follow all these steps.

US auto manufacturers count a car as sold when it is delivered to a dealer.
Currently there is a glut of new cars and dealers are sending them to auctions as used.
The US economy is going down the tubes and taking autos with it.

No; it's absolutely a terrible idea. It may be great for the businesses; but, it's absolutely fucking terrible for the consumer.

This is absolutely fucking insanity. Imagine having to carry 6 different cards and wondering which one a particular store is going to take.

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.