What the world would really like is something that performs like nuclear fission (lots of 24/7 reliable baseload power, deployable anywhere) but without the big upfront expense or the catastrophic risks (pollution, storage, proliferation) to manage.

Is there such a thing? Could there be? Nuclear fusion might be one answer, and they've made good progress, but it's still a bit iffy and even in the best-case scenario it won't be applied at scale for some years yet. Geothermal is seeing some interesting developments that might allow it to be deployed more broadly, so that's what I'm currently geeked over. Short of that, there's always good old-fashioned renewables+lots of storage, which can be made to work, but requires a lot of infrastructure.

The actual ban in force (and wanted to be lifted by Germany) is not about ICEs in general, not even ICEs in cars. It's about banning the sale of ICE cars without the warranty that they can be operated by carbon neutral fuel like e-fuels or green hydrogen.

The "ICE ban" is often misunderstood. Companies are free to build more ICEs, they just have to warrant that they are powered by carbon neutral fuel, e.g. e-fuels or green hydrogen.

If I had a dime each time someone predicts the immediate demise of the E.U...

This still does not explain the dropping allergic rate. If you are careful, you are still allergic. You just know how to handle the situation.

Anyway, even at the height of the peanut allergy craze, the number of teenagers dying in car accidents dwarfed the number of teenager dying from an allergic reaction to peanuts. But we know that improved crash security in cars is the main reason why less people today die in car accidents than in the 1970ies, and not bad drivers dying out due to car crashes.

No. Being allergic to peanuts does not reduce your ability to procreate in a significant way, large enough to explain a drop of more than 30% within a single generation.

I wonder, are there any computers that both have a PS/2 port and also can run Windows 11?

The legislation introducing tax breaks and similar subsidies for PHEVs was argued for by larger savings in gasoil use. They don't realize, so what's to do about the subsidies? Why should PHEVs in some places get the same subsidies as EVs, despite only saving 19% instead of 100% in local emissions?

Au contraire -- quite a few police have a well-known back door that you can exploit with nothing more than an envelope full of $100 bills.

I suspect the idea they are hinting at is that ancient yeast might have been living on (then-livable) Mars and got meteorite-blasted over to Earth, and survived the trip. For a temporary trip like that, survival is sufficient.

No, that's exactly not what chatbots are doing. Chatbots have no concept of right and wrong. Chatbots know that given the frequency of words already in the conversation and their probalistic neighborhood to elements in their body of data, which words are most probable to come next. And if there is not enough data fitting their current state, they randomly add words, because no possible next word presents them with a high probability.

The article claims to measure the severity of a memory leak defect based on the amount of memory it leaked -- but most memory leaks (that are severe enough to be noticed) are small leaks that occur at regular intervals, meaning that the program's memory footprint will continually grow larger over repeated operations.

Therefore, do you want a 1MB memory leak? Run the program for a while. Do you want a 1GB memory leak? Run the program for that much longer. Keep going, and you can eventually get to any number you want, to post in your Substack article; this makes the reported numbers arbitrary and therefore meaningless.

TL;DR: Memory leaks are a problem, and they can be avoided with care and proper coding techniques, but claiming that software quality is worse now because the leaks "are larger" is silly.

OTOH there are actual Apteras on the roadways... only about three of them, but they do exist, at least in prototype form.

In general, nothing. But rich people buy sports cars for the same reason less-rich people buy video games that let them pretend to race sports cars, i.e. so they can have fun "going fast". Driving a sports car without cool engine sounds (however you want to define them) would be like playing an auto-racing game on mute -- less fun than it might otherwise have been.

Once you have a plant cover, it starts to be self-reinforcing, as the plants already grown provide shadow cover for the next generation. The pioneering plants get replaced by other species later, once the local micro climate has changed, and then you get an even more complex and more stable ecosystem. Of course, this takes many decades to establish completely, but it might be that it is self-sustaining much earlier.

Biologists study this all the time. Spoil tips, abandoned crop fields, volcanic ash, or the charred remains of a bush fire, they are ideal research objects on how Nature reclaims those areas. And the time line is vastly different depending on the environment, between a few years, and centuries. Until an oak forest has naturally regrown and gets into balance, it takes about 1000 years.