Ultimately, it was just a car lugging around all the things required for an internal combustion engine AND electric vehicle parts at the same time. Double the complexity and a rolling compromise.

That was my experience owning a hybrid. Ultimately, the controller part that mated the EV and ICE vehicle parts was what failed, and the cost of trying to fix that negated pretty much any fuel savings we'd ever get out of the vehicle.

A plug-in hybrid with a proper battery that can run as an EV for short trips and use ICE for backup makes a lot more sense. The range extender hybrids are just extra complexity for what's just a hack to reduce fuel consumption. But to maximize that fuel consumption, you kinda need to tweak your driving patterns to optimize for EV behaviour, which is also a technique that can get significant fuel savings on an ICE car.

Are they teaching LLM use in the abstract, or are they teaching how to purchase specific products? Literacy skills still work no matter who publishes the book; does Claude prompting work *reliably* for ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Llama, ... all others? Will Claude prompting work the same a year from now?

I hated it when I saw credit courses for "How to use Adobe Photoshop" in college, but at least those courses weren't mandatory.

despite the fact that no one asked for it

Not exactly true; Unity was first seen in the netbook edition, and it was darn near perfect for that environment. The netbook edition was shipped pre-installed on various netbooks until Microsoft got their thumb out, so I'd argue that someone definitely asked for it, and Ubuntu delivered.

Switching the non-netbook Ubuntu to Unity maybe wasn't the best choice, but at the same time, that's around when both KDE and GNOME kinda lost their collective minds and decided to rewrite just about everything, so I kinda consider Unity to be the desktop that got Ubuntu users through that mess until we had more sane alternatives.

From what I understand, Allbirds sold off almost all their capital assets two weeks before, so it was just an empty husk with debts and pre-made paperwork. The last thing it sold-off was that pre-made paperwork, to some other company with a very different mission and business plan who measured it was cheaper to buy someone else's legal homework than doing it themselves.

I was at ground-zero for another company that wanted to get on the NYSE but they weren't American. They found an American corporation that was just a sheaf of papers in a shoebox, arranged for that "company" to buy this one, and boom bang whizz now this company is technically American and has a paved avenue to New York and that sweet one-time cash injection of selling public shares. The second company didn't "pivot" into a new business plan, it was merely a shell-game.

It's not "disobeying." We don't say a software library -- .dll or .so -- disobeys when there's a segfault or gives you an unexpected response. It is practically impossible to disobey; you just don't know what it was told to do. So long as you are using someone else's LLM, built somewhere you can't see before you use it, you will never know what it was told to do. Your belief that the clockwork is thinking, and it's thinking what you're thinking, is dangerously naïve.

"It did a thing that harmed me" well, same goes for a worn tire blowing out on your car, but do you assign intent to the tire or the car? Hell no. "I filed my taxes, but when I was audited it was found I owed another $200" and do you say the US Tax Code disobeyed? Hell no. What if you were audited and found you had a $200 refund, would that be disobeying? Because that's the same thing here: you prompted the tax code bureaucratic process with your tax returns, and you got an unexpected answer.

If you think the housing crisis is caused by not enough wealth, or needing robots because you can't hire enough people who want to do the job, you are grossly misunderstanding the problem.

"Solar In Poor Countries Is Creating a Huge Lead Hazard"

Good thing we use coal and petroleum to charge our cheap acid batteries; we should be safe from the lead hazard because they said it's solar that's creating the lead hazard.

Is writing proper headlines a lost art?

By "AI" they mean "purchase American products and become dependent on American products."

Peace Corp don't impose subscriptions on people in dire straits.

So the next big moneymaker is Teddy Ruxpin? Sorry, I meant to say Furbies. SORRY sorry I meant to say Internet of Things. I mean smarthomes.

This is like how video streaming services re-invented cable tv, and much innovation, such wow, and we're overjoyed to see the return of what we escaped from.

"AI can fix the climate" "AI can cure cancer."

No you pillocks. AI can't do these things anymore than a book can do these things. You need people, and materials. Maybe they'll follow instructions from a book, but the book itself is inert. Furthermore, it takes a person to pick the book and distribute it.

If there's nobody willing to gather the people and commit the materials, there is no cure for climate or cancer or whatever thing you're responsible for. Eventually you'll have to do the work.

"Nobody is looking over your shoulder"

Tell that to Nicanor Briones, who was caught watching cockfights on his phone when he was at work in the legislature.
Of the North Carolina senator caught daytrading when he was in the state legislature.
Or Mike Bennett of Flordia caught looking at nude photos during a session on an abortion bill.

But you know how it goes: people think they're the main character of the story, so of course they're important enough to be under constant surveillance.

"AI isn't really stealing jobs yet..." AI won't steal jobs, just like immigrants don't steal jobs. The factory owners take jobs away from you and give them to whoever they think they can better dominate.

"What's your church group posting about..." There's laws in Quebec to enforce secularism, with no public displays of religious clothing[*] and there are states like Russia and China where atheism is enforced. Don't think any group you find pleasant is excluded.

[*: oh, but Catholic trappings like crucifix jewellery and wimples were grandfathered in, for historical/cultural reasons.]

Thank you for attempting to answer the question. I'm having trouble understanding the N.O.V.A. criteria in a consistent way.

Nova classification Grup I includes "milk" as "unprocessed food." That sounds to me like unpasteurized or "raw" milk, and that is not as safe to eat. Later it says some processing is allowed while still calling is "unprocessed." It mentions pasta as "unprocessed" and brother, grains have to be rendered unrecognizable multiple ways before it becomes pasta.

Grup II claims "pressing" is a threshold of processing, yet "grinding" is still Grup I. Pasteurizing is still Grup I but bringing anything other than milk to a boil is Grup III. I find it confusing.

Unless they're building LLMs in these courses, I reads like they're teaching how to be consumers of corporate AI services.

If a college offered a diploma in "how to be a good Amazon Web Services customer" they should be laughed out of the room. These kids are going to go into massive debt to learn how to give more money to already-wealthy institutions.