I'm curious(honestly a bit morbidly) to see whether there will be organizational/emergent downsides. In principle not being able to do novelty is fine. Realistically a lot of science simply isn't going to be novel; between interesting hypotheses that ended up not being borne out by experiment(such 'negative results' being a necessary but under-published area) and things like ecology or material science where sometimes you just need to characterize all the bivalve species on a coastline even if they seem to mostly just be fairly basic clams and mussels; or pound through eleventy-zillion variations on plausible engineering ceramics looking for atypically good properties.

However, as we've had the misfortune to see in our inboxes and the powerpoint decks that get inflicted on meetings; people tend to generate more of what is easy to generate; and scientists often get rewarded(in terms of hiring/tenure track; grant funding, etc.) for apparent productivity. The most extreme exploitation of 'AI' for this has proven somewhat nontrivial to combat(the various shit-tier journals and paper mills that add noise to the literature and allow the dishonest to pad their resumes existed back when they relied on human labor; but systems that are good at high speed production of plausible-looking output have thrown them into overdrive); but even if you focus entirely on honest actors doing real science in good faith, if the bots are genuinely useful but only for non-novel work; that seems like a situation where you've just created an incentive toward focusing on low-novelty work and toward seeing the scientists doing the most bot-friendly stuff as the most productive; while those who venture beyond the scope of its abilities are putting out papers by hand and appear much less productive.

Science has often had a slightly ambivalent relationship with novelty(you probably won't end up being remembered as a rock god unless you do come up with something really cool; but initial reception can be downright chilly: look at the career trajectory of someone like Barbara McClintock and transposons. Worked out for her in the end, Nobel in 1983; but that was for work that people were actively disinterested in when she did it in the mid 40s to 50s; and not everyone gets brought in from the cold before the point is moot); but it's probably not going to help if, wholly aside from cranky old guys controlling tenure committees and grant allocation, people who hew quite closely to data that LLMs have already chewed over genuinely crank out research substantially faster than people who venture further afield.

I'm genuinely curious if there will actually be a reallocation to 'AI-focused roles and initiatives'; or if that just sounds nicer than "business is bad and we've run out of room to pretend otherwise"(or the very similar "business is bad and we've run out of room; but we are using a transcription bot in some zoom meetings" which is an 'AI initiative' in the sort of exceptionally banal way that farming some stuff out to AWS is exciting cloud-native hyperscaling)

Aside from skepticism founded on the largely negative results reported for business 'AI initiatives'; I'd be very, very, curious whether there's something cool or profitable you can AI out with pinterest internal data(I assume that their tracking of user interaction and click-through behavior and such is more precise and detailed than 3rd party tracking); but can't with a nearly-free scrape of the parts of pinterest that are publicly exposed on the internet.

It's entirely possible that Pinterest is single-handedly responsible for most of what AI models 'know' about how mormon housewives classify conceptually related images; but even if that is value it's not something pinterest is going to capture; it's just going to get scraped out of them.

I can't comment on whether it is 'desperation' or not; but this seems very much in line with how they handle the "smart features" toggle in 'workspace'/gmail. There is just the one(merrily enabled by default in the US; not in the EU) and it gates both things that fairly obviously involve their bot like "Smart Compose is personalized to your writing style" and ones that we somehow managed to implement a zillion years ago by banging floppy disks together in the dirt "spelling"; along with ones that pre-'AI' google somehow managed by other means, like regexing tracking numbers out of shipment notifications.

Hasn't quite gotten to the point of locking support for signatures behind 'smart reply'; but the structure of the consent-to-all-or-get-none checkbox is certainly quite opinionated UI design.

End result China's IQ reduces by 10 points listening to limey blabber.

Any word on whether the implementation is actually invasive, unreliable, and unbelievably computationally expensive; or is a desperately classical feature that's probably older than I am being artificially tied to a totally unrelated set of antifeatures to help goose adoption numbers?

It's weird to see a global espionage saga and say, "well that's dumb. I am not a wizard with nation state resources, but I could so that on a casual weekend." Their security sucks so much that my grandson could probably accidentally do that while settling up a game server.

It's not every day you see somebody use the courts to pound a blunt screwdriver into their own nuts. I hope the lawyers are OK.

These social media sites are all lost money. They come and go.

He didnâ(TM)t advocate not respecting copyright law in what he said. He said he shares copies of everything he has, and that he only has free software. That sounds consistent with copyright law. He donâ(TM)t say he shares non-free software nor did he tell not hers to do so.

I only just installed a great journaling file system on my EV1's infotainment system to make it snappy and was all set to drive it around proudly.

Only if you are willing to accept specific drawbacks.

If you are just doing it to save bandwidth the concept of shipping encrypted data in bulk and delivering a tiny private key over the network is viable; but that does mean making the physical release literally useless without a network-connected install (potentially a full size one, depending on whether your encryption interferes with layout/seek optimization on the disk and what the console's support for partial disk/partial install setups is); which is a potential issue for some physical copy buyers. It's not news that the release version normally gets a more or less massive patch covering all the changes made while it was being mastered and duplicated; but when someone is making a partially emotional decision between physical and electronic copies the difference between 'v1.0 is scuffed' and 'disk is literally unplayable without install and internet connection' can be significant.

'timelock', specifically, also addresses a questionably useful niche: there are cases where the ability to keep a secret for an extended but defined period of time is useful; but if you are a game publisher developing a game with hundreds(probably thousands if you count various support studios and support staff) of people across multiple sites it would be an...atypical...IT situation if you were somehow buttoned up enough to avoid leaks during development; but not buttoned up enough to hang on to a single private key that needs to be used once and kept secret for less than a month. It would, presumably, work; but it's not a situation where the security assurances really line up with the threat model all that well.

The Line was the worst idea ever. 200 meters is way too thin, it needed to be at least 400 meters wide. 200 meters is the distance you walk in about 2 minutes. A mediocre golfer can whack the ball farther than that. Speaking of sports you can't fit a stadium in there.

This is only true at optimal conditions (e.g. constant speed at high gear and low speed). Trucks running long distances at constant speed come close to the theoretical maximum. But usually, a gasoline car is not driven under optimal conditions, and the efficiency is lower.

Lets put it like this: The whole announced capacity for e-fuels right now is somewhat close to 40 TWh per year, of which only about 5% are backed by investments. The fuel consumption of the world right now is more than 100,000 TWh per year. Norway has already finished its conversion to BEVs as of 2025, and gasoline cars, given an average live span of 20 years, will be a thing of the past in 2045. Most of Europe is at 20% BEVs right now, and given the example of Norway, will not sell many gasoline cars after 2035, with the gasoline cars disappearing from the roads until 2055.

You have to be really fast to get enough e-fuels manufactured to get a return on your investment, and at the same time scale up e-fuel commission 250times and financing 5000 times to make economic sense of e-fuels in the meantime.

Because solar panels are cheap, and farms have large roofs to cover in solar panels, farmers are asking for electrical solutions. Electric tractors, electric combines, mobile battery swap stations etc. will replace the need for gasoline in remote areas.