I don't hate Trump. I pity him. No matter how much shit he slaps his name on, it won't fill the hole is daddy left in him. But people that damaged shouldn't be let anywhere near power.

I'm pretty sure that Hegseth does, in fact, want Skynet.

One day it's "AI Bubble is Going To Burst", the next it's "AI Is Going To Eat The Economy".

Well, no. It's true you can't buy books for the purposes of scanning them *and then making them available online* (Hachette v. Internet Archive). Scanning them for AI training is not settled law in every Federal District, although in at least one that has been ruled transformative and therefore allowable (Bartz v Anthropic, Northern District of California).

Anthropic famously bought a lot of copyrighted books and scanned them to ingest into its model training corpus. Arguably they aren't violating copyright because what they are doing is *transformative* -- turning words into a statistical map of word associations.

But what China is doing by inferring the structure of that map doesn't touch on *any* kind of intellectual property of Anthropics. Sure, the map is a trade secret, but they've exposed that trade secret through their public interface. It's not human created so it's not copyrightable. Even if that map were patentable, which it probably isn't, it's not patented.

The worst you can say is that China is violating the service's terms of service, which may have no legal force there.

As a lifelong cyclist, I agree in principle. The problem is over the last seventy-five years we have rearchitected the very geographic fabric of society to make *solving* our transportation problems with bike and public transit impossible.

Before WW2, Dad would leave the apartment and walk or take a trolley to work (usually in the same city neighborhood) while Ma "kept house" -- managed cooking, clearning, childcare, and the family's community and social engagement. In the 1950s and 60s, instead of an apartment, it'd be a suburban house. Ma would drop Pa off at the kiss and ride.

Today Mom and Dad both have jobs they have to get to, usually in *different* suburban employment areas; they can locate to make the commute easy for one, but they keep changing jobs every couple of years while their long-term wealth is being put into a geographically fixed asset: their house. They are financially anchored to their house as their jobs move around the region.

Car-dependency is baked into the very fabric of society, in a way you can't fix with transportation policy or projects--not without decades of projects. But we have reached the limits of the car-dependency model; we can't fix traffic by adding marginal car capacity as has been repeatedly demonstrated by freeway projects that fail to fix traffic because we're in an equillibrium between commute times and job selection.

Transit and bike infrastructure won't fix this, but they *can* make marginal improvements in the traffic situation by taking cars off the road for the minority of people who can use these alternatives at this particular point in their lives. I think e-bikes are going to be key. I personally wouldn't consider a ten mile commute by bike on roads shared with cars a barrier to commuting by bike, but most people wouldn't attempt it. E-bikes on bike infrastructure can make a ten mile commute practical for *normal* people, and take a significant number of cars off congested roads. Public transit could help, but again in a marginal, opportunistic way. In Europe or the US Northeast where car-dependency was overlaid on existing dense urban fabrics, there's a lot of opportunity for major transit projects. But for American cities in the West which have *no* center of mass to build around, solving car-dependency is likely a Moon-shot level project.

Well, that's one hypothesis. However since they saw a significant difference in the population where the social media apps were removed, then if your hypothesis is true, the data would suggest that delivering the service as a native app rather than a web app must have some harmful effect in itself. An alternative hypothesis is that their application usage patterns changed when the apps were removed.

It's not altogether far fetched that web-delivered apps have a different psychological effect than native smartphone apps, because native smartphone apps have greater access to the system for tracking and notifications. Native apps also offer different features than their web versions. This is why I use Facebook via a browser, because the Facebook native app is insufferably intrusive, constantly trying to get your attention. It means, however, I can't use Facebook's chat function.

All headphones likely also contain "chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth anomalies, or other reproductive harm."

Maybe there's actually an issue here. But a group calling itself the "ToxFREE Project" strikes me as to be far more like the State of California and its Proposition 65 warnings than an objective observer.

Aren't those "Made in " labels Federally regulated by the Federal Trade Commission? If so this lawsuit is going to get dismissed on Federal supremacy grounds.

Waiting for the engine to start gives them time to put down their cellphone. (Theoretically, anyway, they don't actually put it down until after the honking starts)

Back in the 80's vendors promised companies a "paperless office", but cynics noted that the equipment sold always included printers.

Now we're looking at a promise of a post-human-labor era, delivered by armies of human drones performing mountains fo soul-crushing labor.

The definition isn't particularly coherent. Cane and beet sugar are Group II, but "sugar, oils, and fats for domestic use" are Group IV? Which is it? Ice cream is Group IV despite being milk (Group), cream, sugar, and salt (all Group II)... are they complaining about the often-present emulsifier ,which as a vegetable extract should also be Group II? Certainly it should be Group III at worst. Sausage is Group IV despite the processing in sausage being pretty much purely physical; perhaps they don't know how the sausage is made.

(And of course that pre-Columbian Mexican staple, the tortilla, is clearly Group IV)

This is why pretty much every major 20th century technology was invented in the US (telephony, movies, semiconductors, aerospace, the internet etc.).

Telephony was invented in the 19th century by a Canadian born in Scotland who ultimately became a US citizen. The work was apparently split between the US and Canada. Scotland is also one of those places that had a disproportionate number of inventors -- if you look a little earlier to the Industrial Revolution, especially, you'll note a lot of Scots.

I think it plausible that 99% of new energy this year come from renewable sources because many of those sources come from renewable types with relatively short construction times.

Up until recently, the US adds about 50 GW of capaicty per year. There's a huge uptick in generation capacity because of energy demands from data centers, so recently it's more like 65 GW/year. The challenge is you can't exploit *this year's* high market prices by starting a nuclear power plant that won't come on line for a decade. Even a combined cycle natural gas plant is going to take five years. But you can have a wind farm up and running in months.

It's not the renewability *per se* that's driving this; it's profiting from the high prices before the AI bubble bursts. Nobody is rushing to bring new hydropower or geothermal plants online, and they're just as renewable as wind or solar.

This move to renewables is not about changing the world. it's about short term financial optimization. But these short term, local optimizations *will* change the world, and planning to handle the transformations driven by short-term market forces is going to take coordinated, long term national action. At present there are regional mandates that will stabilize the local grid against variations in electricity supply. But carving up the nation into small regional markets means higher prices and economic inefficiencies where electricity is transfered from high price areas to stabilize low price areas. Market economics don't work if there are non-market forces (stability) that trump profitability.