I just tried this for fun with Gemini (hardly the best model, but I wasn't about to spend the money having an agentic framework of high-end models go over it ;) ). It advised:

1) Working with the Iranians at the upcoming UN meeting to try to strike a deal where the US stops its blockage of Iranian oil in exchange for Iran allowing free traffic through Hormuz, without nuclear programme preconditions.

2) Adding pressure on Putin to accept the Ukrainian offer of a mutual energy industry targeting ceasefire

3) Focus freed up US naval forces on protecting convoys through the Bab-el-Mandeb

4) Launching an emergency Jones Act waiver

5) Order the EPA Administrator to issue temporary waivers easing seasonal Reid Vapor Pressure (RVP) gasoline restrictions and granting flexibility on Tier 3 sulfur credit banking.

6) Convene the CEOs of the top domestic refiners into a taskforce run by the Department of Energy to coordinate autumn maintenance schedules to avoid multiple regional coker and hydrocracker units taking turnaround downtime simultaneously.

7) Formally announce that the administration will not conduct large-scale, unrefined crude releases from the SPR. Signal to the industry that physical crude in domestic storage is adequate, shifting regulatory focus to downstream bottlenecks.

8) Reprogram allocated DOE infrastructure funds ($1.4 billion) to expedite cavern repairs at Bryan Mound and Bayou Choctaw.

9) Deploy the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve (NEHHOR) strictly on an exchange/loan basis (where refiners borrow diesel barrels now and repay them with interest in refined barrels next spring) to protect national balance sheets while easing spot tightness

10) Issue an Executive Order under the Defense Production Act (DPA) to expedite pipeline compressor stations and pipeline permits connecting the Permian Basin to Gulf Coast refining hubs

11) Direct the Surface Transportation Board to prioritize crude and chemical feedstock movements on Class I railroads.

12) Use USDA Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) authorities to establish emergency fuel cost-offset credits for agricultural producers and commercial freight carriers until crack spreads retreat below $30/barrel.

13) Announce this unified security-and-energy plan publicly to provide appropriate signals to the market.

The US economy as a whole would lose more from banning exports than it would gain. If one is concerned about "ordinary people", it makes more sense to continue allowing exports, add a windfall tax on oil companies or add export duties, and then rebate the revenue from that across the US population, than to ban exports.

Had the oil industry not been so naive and spent this whole year betting on TACO and/or Iranian surrender, the US could be making even more money right now on this crisis. New shale production from an existing lease can be added in just 3-6 months, yet shale expansion rates didn't increase over baseline from spring through the summer. Refining capacity is harder to add that quickly, but probably could have been boosted several percent, which would still be a quite meaningful added value. It gets harder to improve capacity now because most types of capacity addition involve downtime and absolutely nobody wants to be shut down now while crack spreads are this high.

I'd love to see the US congress pass a bill renaming Trump ;)

"a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling not warming"

How is this not an indictment on America's ability not to raise incredibly dumb voters? I mean .. c'mon dude. This has to change. I dunno how America, but it's getting hilarious.

"We need to call it Super Intelligence!" Trump demanded, waggling a finger at an iPod.

Lol, this is the president some people are willing to tolerate for a party that promises you'll have lower taxes (while only giving them to the upper class) and less thinking about trans people or something. Communism! Boo! It's quite astounding.

I saw it with a group of four people.

Three of us enjoyed it quite a bit.

I didn't mind it but nothing was surprising to me.

I saw several scenes that could have been more cleverly written but I was glad to support the group that saved a creative work from the burn pile. The idea of killing a movie for accounting losses seems sinful.

The motion-control photography, practical effects, and integration of animation were at least as good as Roger Rabbit.

If you enjoy the craft of filmmaking it's at least worth seeing.

I didn't see any marxist social commentary. Perhaps folks in the "Flock does nothing wrong" camp might feel otherwise.

It's actually very funny. There's a reason word of mouth has been doing the heavy lifting for this.

"No, I grew up in the 80s watching the roadrunner"

The connotation that the roadrunner in the 80s was original is hilarious.

"protect against renegade AI"

This is a fundamentally unsolvable problem. It's like: "How do we stop humans from being humans?"

Saying that's your objective is fundamentally dishonest. You can't protect against the unknown. You can't protect against anything without covering all the corner cases, and AI, by it's very nature, is almost exclusively corner cases.

I wouldn't, simply because you can get similar specs for significantly less money. Unless that magical NPU is somehow worth (and notice I didn't say "costs") $200+, this is still just a Chromebook toy with a bit more horsepower.

Rather, I think the real intent behind this is clear - It's a lame attempt to force Gemini onto yet more uninterested customers. "You all refused to download it as an app, but how about if we charge you twice as much and make it a required component of the OS itself? Now do you want it?"

I'm not saying this as anti-Amazon or pro-AI (and certainly not pro-Meta!), but the key difference here is people are choosing to send proxy shoppers because they can't stand how crappy the store itself is. The closest analogous physical situation would be Walmart refusing to let your aunt pick up some half&half for you.

That said, I'm not really sure why Amazon wants to die on this hill considering it's already been decided by the 9th circuit in Amazon v. Perplexity 2026. An agent acting on behalf of its user cannot be considered "unauthorized" access under CFAA or CDAFA as long as the user themself had a right to the same content accessed.

Amazon might be able to spin this into a TOS issue, but that has its own risks - Anyone TOSsed from a platform clearly won't be buying anything from it, "sponsored" or otherwise. And dissecting that a bit further, the entire question only exists today because we're currently in a grey area between viewing agents as an external resource vs just another tool built into the browser (the latter was the heart of the Perplexity case). Assuming people eventually come to love the bomb, telling our browser to go buy something on Amazon will become technologically indistinguishable from doing it ourselves.

Would be lovely if they could take a breath and spend a release fixing Dr. Konqui or Akonadi or whatever crashes that show up a few times a month for me (regardless of hardware).

This has been going on for half of its 30-yr release cycle.

I must admit ignorance of how this can persist for so long. FLOSS developers typically obsess over stability but seemingly not in the KDE culture.

I used to install symbols and submit bug reports but they're not interested if you're not running the latest tip.

Not that there is an obvious better DE right now. XFCE could stop corrupting its preferences files too. I used to have a script to restore a config from a previous ZFS snapshot when it self destructed but that gets old too.

If I'm building a device for production I'll use something simple like openbox/devilspie2 to get stability.

Lots of folks seem to get fed up and start a new project but momentum is a real thing. I hear Omarchy is stable and not withering but tiles just aren't my thing. More power to those who love them.

And it didn't work at Nuremberg either.

Amazon's search is defective by design. If you could actually jump right to the product you want, you'd never scroll through page after page of sponsored garbage Chinese knock-offs again. Can't have that, now can we?

Basic site search was solved decades ago. The fact Amazon's is such hot trash cannot possibly be accidental.

And now they have Alexa - Which is admittedly an improvement over their last on-site AI that actively refused to answer questions about or even search for product listings. Alexa is at least happy to send you to today's semi-relevant sponsored products.