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Comment Re:Fungus vs plant (Score 4, Insightful) 47

It's kind of a suprising to me that it was a fungus and not a plant that developed this ability. After all, plants already feed on elecromagnetic radiation.

The chlorophyll in plants is finely tuned to absorb specific wavelengths of light. It already has a hard time with green light compared to blue light, and it's simply not going to work at all with radiation that has wavelengths that are orders of magnitude shorter. Chlorophyll acts like a little antenna that gets excited by certain light frequencies, but ionizing radiation would just blow the chlorophyll molecules apart and destroy them.

Taking advantage ionizing radiation is going to require a completely different mechanism than plant photosynthesis, just like you can't use glass lenses or parabolic mirrors to focus X rays or gamma rays. Plants probably have no more chance of having such a mechanism than fungi do.

Comment Re:Not surprising to me... (Score 3, Insightful) 56

Those mitigations could cause other problems down the line, so it makes sense that Microsoft didn't want to deal with those for Windows 11.

IOW: "We've only got $3.5T in capital to work with, so this is just too hard for us to figure out. You'll have to switch to an OS made by unpaid volunteers."

Comment Absolutely pointless (Score 4, Insightful) 36

There's only 2 reasons to have a new piece of hardware rather than make this an app on your phone:

1)It adds new sensors that your phone doesn't have (yet) that will enable new functionality. This won't be the case, as there's no usecase for it
2)It adds a new IO methods that aren't possible on the phone. AR goggles might do this. An AI assistant doesn't, it's all audio and voice.

This is basically just going to be replacable with a bluetooth microphone paired to an app on your phone. Which means nobody is going to buy it- even if they can actually find a usecase people want AI for (doubtful).

Comment Re:Aluminum (Score 1) 35

What will they call it in the US ?

We should call it "job incomplete".

Most common metals have a simple one or two syllable name: Iron, Copper, Tin, Zinc, Lead, Nickel, Silver, Gold, etc.

The USA recognized that to some extent and got started by chopping off one extraneous syllable, paring it down from five to four. However, once it was realized that Al would be a common everyday material like iron, we should have gone ahead and pruned it all the way down to two syllables, maybe something like "Alem".

Comment Re:WhatsApp? (Score 1) 84

Those exist, but divide the view count by number of comments. It will show for the most part thousands of views per comment. That means most people aren't using the social part. I've yet to ever write a youtube comment, but I use it daily. So if you asked me if I use YouTube you'd get a yes, but it's not social media for me. If you limit it to those who read/write comments it would be fair, but I'm not sure they did that.

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