I'm not sure what VCs are paying up to make a "dire browser"...?

Arc was an okay name, probably loved by the 12 people that used it. Dia... what were they thinking?

Where I live, things are different. It's my money, and the bank is responsible for it when I deposit it at the bank. They have to defend my money against unauthorised or even unintended access - if such access occurs, I'm indemnified, and they have to replace any money lost that way. Right now, they're all falling over themselves trying to stop us from sending scammers money - because they're technically still on the hook for those losses, even though they were duly authorised by their customer (there's a lot of nuance to this particular point, and it gets messy really quickly, so better for everyone that it just doesn't happen in the first place, rather than trying to work it all out in every different case that occurs).

I'd also say, where I live, if somehow you get the login credentials to my bank, you're still not authorised to use them, or to perform any transactions. I'm not even sure there's a properly recognised way for me to allow you to perform a transaction on my behalf that really does authorise you to do it (with my credentials. There are ways to allow someone else to act on your behalf, but with their own credentials). Again, if such access occurs, it's still the bank's problem.

If I want to be entirely responsible for my own money, then I can keep it in the mattress. If it's in a bank, then the bank is responsible for it. They don't get to make massive profits without some responsibilities to their customers. It's one of the reasons we license and regulate them.

I think the question to ask is... is the UN right about this? If so, then take the advice. If not, then by all means ignore it.

How the UN, like all organisations is imperfect. They get it wrong sometimes, but they also get it right too. I've got to say, you'd be a fool to disregard correct information because you don't like the source.

How do you decide if they're right or not? Well, that's somewhat up to you, but ultimately it requires some critical thinking. You can't delegate that to AI, Instagram or the TV news, you have to do it yourself.

The 'deniers' don't (generally) deny the climate is changing - they just deny it's caused by any sort of human involvement. They claim it would happen anyway (eg. "the earth's climate changes in cycles"). They'll tell you things like the earth used to be much hotter, or colder or whatever in the past, so it's okay that it's going a bit weird right now.

What they don't seem to grasp is that it really doesn't matter - once your country is uninhabitable, you're going to want to live somewhere else - that means someone's going to get some immigration. Once the 'breadbaskets' of the world are un-farmable, you're going to have a lot of hungry people, which historically has lead to quite a bit of violence and disruption to power structures and societies. How that plays out when we've all got modern military weapons is anyone's guess.

So ultimately, the problems this will cause, howsoever it came about are everyone's problem. Common logic would therefore suggest to try to minimise the future problem as much as possible. Since we know carbon dioxide and methane are at least part of the problem, trying to rebalance the atmosphere makes sense, even if every last gram of those gasses were naturally occurring (which of course they're not).

But this is rational thinking. I can't guarantee the entire audience is rational.

I'm not a 'gamer', so this isn't really my area, but I don't see why you need a specific console any more. Back in the day, compute was hard, and so making a dedicated machine made some sense - you could put into it some special CPUs and GPUs and whatnot, and then squeeze that hardware until the pips came out to make some awesome games and effects that you simply couldn't get anywhere else - a bit like coin-op arcade games were dedicated hardware and beat the living crap out of a generic PC.

Nowadays, a decent desktop with a GPU would eat those old consoles for breakfast. I'm not sure what else a machine has to do to support a running game that such a machine can't do, but it seems to me that you couldn't construct a console for sensible money that would out-perform a pretty normal desktop.

So this seems like a seriously risky move to me. If someone's a 'real' gamer, they might have already spent that sort of money on a desktop, so what do they get if they buy this? Of course, it won't help that RAM and GPUs are price-jacked-up right now, but even taking that out, this console still feels like it'd be $1000 - which still feels like a lot.

When you think of something expensive, do you honestly think of Ebay? You /might/ think about Amazon, as they sometimes have high-end stuff on there, but I personally never think of ebay.

Maybe it's the 80s powerpoint website, the myriad of confusing menus and navigation, or maybe it's just their long heritage of being the place to get cheap shit ("fleabay"), but they've got a mountain to climb if they want to be "premium".

This is almost certainly to cut their costs more than anything, and likely won't be much better than the lack-lustre support they used to offer. However...

I use GCP a fair bit for $work, and the AI on there is actually pretty good as disentangling the mess that is GCP architecture. It'll follow a chain of resources to go read a log file or whatever and then gives you useful results. It's genuinely been really helpful and saved me a load of time trying to figure out how resource X has suddenly failed because it depends on something I did on resource P last week.

How any of it will fare if you've locked yourself out of your gmail account and need some help to get back in - is anyone's guess.

No idea, but I personally use it from time to time because it's free and has oodles of free usage tier, so I can get a load of work done on it when I need to. I wouldn't be surprised if government folks were the same - they start out using copilot because that's the mandated one to use, it's a piece of crap, so they have to hand-crank it a lot to get anything useful out of it, and then run out of tokens for the day (or week, or whatever). They *could* put in a requisition form for more credit, but then they'd have to explain it all to their boss and three flunkies from Finance, so instead, they just ask Deepseek instead.

However you want to slice this up, this is really very cool. When I was a kid, we were amazed at some grainy photos of the planets, and yet now, we're going to grab actual samples of... not the planets (that's underway elsewhere), but of the moons of those planets. Then were going to bring them back to look at them. That's really pretty awesome.

Well done JAXA et al. Happy landings!

> I would love to see some kinder, gentler economic system displace hard-nosed capitalism. But, so far, nothing else even comes close.

Depends on your definition of "displace". Lots of other countries have better standards of living, lower costs of living, better healthcare/welfare, better life expectancy, better happiness index, etc etc. So lots of other places are better at /something/ than the USA. The USA is better at making a profit, that's for sure - but at what cost?

As has been discussed many times, there is no such thing as "capitalism". All of us that claim to be in a capitalist nation are in a mixed economy. Indeed, even countries like China, Russia, North Korea etc, what we might not describe as capitalist are "mixed" economies of sorts, maybe heavily concentrated with one particular sauce, but mixed even still. It would seem then, the mixture, the relative quantities and distribution is what makes the magic.

Your description of the problem is mostly good. I'm not sure I agree with your conclusions though.

The UK has built out a lot of renewables, which regardless of other issues has to be a good thing. You're right though, the grid isn't big enough to get that power to where it is needed very effectively, so we have to pay the generators to turn wind farms off (for example). That's clearly a crazy situation which can't go on for long. We also have high electricity costs because we have a janky market where we pay the most expensive rate at any given moment - and at peak times, that's gas, so all that renewable isn't really bringing the price down. That's a solvable problem, and has nothing to do with net zero, or indeed the environment (or grid interconnects).

As for datacentres, small ones are really no problem. However, these aren't small - they're colossal. Amazon's got nothing on these places, and so it's not just that you need the electricity company to dig up the road to get some new fat cables to site, it's that the whole nation needs to think about how it's going to distribute power from place to place to service the need - and so there is an element of the "grid not big enough" problem you describe involved here, which of course adds some delays over-and-above what it would cost to hook up a smaller datacentre.

However, there's an inferred point here which is that the UK is somehow terrible, and only the USA can do things like this. You can certainly take that view, but the USA solves these problems by building gas power stations as part of the datacentre. That avoids the "grid not big enough" problem, but causes something of an environmental disaster, and makes living near a datacentre a whole lot worse than it should be. For me personally, I'd prefer the UK grid would solve the problem properly and responsibly, and probably take longer than it would to "throw out net zero" and have a huge pollutant built "because it's quicker/cheaper".

So IMHO, there's a lot wrong with the UK energy system, but net zero really isn't the cause of it.

Sure you have "Finish setting up your PC" - but are the "recommended browser settings" to use Edge as the default? TFS says no.

Note: It might still say "use recommended browser settings", but does it replace your previously default Chrome/Firefox/whatever with Edge?

Lastly: Are you using the EU version of Windows - I'm not sure how you tell the difference, or which one your OEM may have installed for you. Locale might have an effect, but there used to be a whole different edition of windows for the EU to ensure that only EU people got some freedom, regardless of what language they spoke.

It cuts out a few steps of the process, and arguably makes things easier. This is "developer outreach" because Google's made themselves so hard to do business with, they're haemorrhaging android app devs. This is an attempt to turn that around and build a few more developers up in a sort of "free tier". Just as soon as one of those devs decides their little app is quite cool and they want to share it with their mates... then they have to jump through countless hoops to get into the Play Store. Google's hoping by then they'll be so hooked they don't mind - my guess is they're wrong about that.

Yeah, the "all systems must have antivirus" thing is a common problem. They don't seem to mind about 'appliances' like routers and switches, even though some of them seem to have problems on a weekly basis.

I've found you can (sometimes) say "All Macs have Filevault, so are running anti-virus already". For linux, install ClamAV, and then say "it's got anti virus".

However, the little pricks in IT often want to have it all report back to the central mothership - and that means installing some god awful pile of crap. That's an enterprise problem, not a policy/insurance problem though. That problem changes with a different employer.

It took Google 3 months to re-instate a 'ban' on my account from using Gemini API. No comms in between times, no idea if anything was happening (or not). You simply can't 'bank' on crappy service like that. Contrast to Anthropic, £15/month on the credit card, and I've got all the service I want. Hell, I can do to Deepseek and get all the service I want for £0 too.

I'm still none the wiser how I actually tripped over the 'terms and conditions' at Google. I downloaded the Gemini CLI, connected it up to Gemini - as the documentation describes. I started doing some coding, and then boom - I'm over the daily usage limit. No surprise there, but then I get an email saying I'm permanently banned, and all I can do is appeal. No reasons why, no warnings - nothing - just banned. I appealed, and then 3 months later they very graciously re-instated my ability to use Gemini. Still no reasoning, no hint as to what the problem was. For all I know I could trip the alarms all over again just as soon as I start using it. No thank you Google. In the three months you spent faffing about, I've designed you out of my workflow and designed in your competitors.