Yeah I agree, but it's probably both! I deeply distrust the government--especially whenever they say something is stop terrorists or protect children, it's almost always gaslighting to get away with something else.

However lots of parents and normal people are seriously concerned about toxic (mostly american) scum getting their hooks into their children, and often feel powerless to stop it.

Not to mention, as a kid playing Doom you either had to find the BFG or your friend Timâ(TM)s older brother could tell you the secret. Today, a million youtubers have already done full 100% letâ(TM)s plays, and every secret, 100% completion, unlock, etc., is a quick google or gpt search away.

I loved adventure games. The genre just isnâ(TM)t viable today. So many of the old hallmarks of games just donâ(TM)t work or make sense anymore. I donâ(TM)t even think thatâ(TM)s necessarily a bad thing. I can fire up SCUMMVM or an NES emulator or Dosbox if I have an itch to play those games.

Entertainment IS a brutal business.

Can I go now?

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

I remember kind of a throwaway small bit in the The Ministry for the Future book by KSR, it was mentioned that a swarm of tiny drones took down a load of private jets one day and no one knew who did it--and it immediately ended all private flights out of fear from the billionaire bellends.

It's nice to think something like that might happen!

It's gonna be a hell of lot easier to manage than the colossal amount of greenhouse gases we've already pumped into the atmosphere.

We have free and fast direct bank transfers in the UK too, some (mostly Asian) restaurants only accept cash or let you transfer the amount directly to their account presumably to avoid the visa/mastercard fees!

All that's needed is a open, universal way to do this more streamlined and the Indian UPI thing sounds like just the ticket!

Aside: Why is a digital currency needed--it's completely unnecessary and unrelated to creating a competing payments network:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative

"I want to use claude code to run 10 unattended Chrome beta testers [more info about what is being tested and specifics]. Write me one or more md files to execute and give me instructions for enabling Chrome mcp, then give me an sh script to launch 10 separate Chrome instances on macos."

I wrote that exact prompt, more or less, a month or two ago, and then other iterations since then, and it's been working very well.

Using LLMs to create prompts for LLMs to use was a good realization.

This makes me laugh! I see classes at universities and colleges on using AI. Not just in the tech arena either, I'm talking liberal arts--med school, law school, you name.

As best as I can tell, "how to use AI" is more or less "don't be a dumbass."

To be succesful with AI, you need the same skills you need to be successful otherwise. Analyze problems, test solutions, think critically, etc. Unattended vibe coding or turning in of AI slop is the same as people who cribbed essays, copied and pasted from Wikipedia, etc.

IMHO, you still need to be a developer to be able to use AI effectively. If you start with a really solid schema, or an existing framework, AI is great at building on top of that. If you give it specific guidance for what and how you want it to develop code, it can do a good job. It is NOT just "lol write me a network utility lol" -- that is a path to disaster.

I've also had good luck with updating and modernizing older code, migrating to a new frameework, and refactoring.

If i'm using claude code, my steps go something like this.

1. Using plan mode, analyze the code base, create a thorough plan and testing strategy for XYZ (Or I provide SQL schema, or I provide a thorough plan of what I want to do, etc.)
2. Refine Claude plan mlutiple times until I'm happy with it
3. Start with writing a set of unit tests to confirm current behavior
4. Implement the first part of the project (this is not coding the whole thing in one shot)
5. Run unit tests, check for regressions.\
6. Rinse and repeat..

Steps 1 and 2 -- with no code being written -- are probably the most important parts.

I should also add that, imo, this will be a relatively short moment in time. I've seen people who are spinning up dozens of agents at the same time -- backend designer, frontend designer, security consultant, css specialist, etc -- that all work together and iterate amongst themselves.

We've been running a beta test of some new software, and one beta tester out of ~30 people hit an error. We could not reproduce it. Claude took ~5 hours, but using Claude to remote control Chrome, in conjunction with analyzing the state of the backend database, and auditing the codebase, Claude was able to reproduce the error and suggest a fix. In this case, we disagreed with the fix (rather, we went for a bigger logical change as opposed to a bandaid), but we've had really great luck with using Claude Chrome mcp as a beta tester.

45+ years of neoliberalism, privatisation, mostly-Tory and right-wing labour governments deliberately starving the NHS of resources and selling it off for parts for a quick buck have caused the problems. Not an increase in the population. This is a common strategy, deliberately starve public services of resources then claim that the "state is failing" and private companies with their profit-greedy owners are asked to step in to "do it better"

An increase in the population naturally gives you more bloody workers for the NHS! So it shouldn't matter at all.

(as for the cost of more workers, serious economic analysis has always shown for every £1 spent on the NHS we get around £4 worth of economic value into the economy)

https://thenhsalliance.org/res...
https://jech.bmj.com/content/7...

Nah not at all! Oversurveillance and Authoritarian tendencies are not Orwellian. The rewriting of history. denial of obvious facts and gaslighting of the masses is en route to Orwellian, and that's really kicking off across the pond.

There's some stupid, unenforceable legislation in place in the UK. This has primarily been pushed behind the scenes by American interest groups and money as it's easier than trying to do the whole US at once. We're basically a guinea pig for American Christofascist interests at the moment, and this was entirely predicted as an obvious outcome of Brexit.

Sad times, glad I'm getting the fuck out of here :)

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).