Same.
Most of my email these days is for other “me’s”, its getting to the point that the address is unusable and Ive been considering moving away from it.
It doesnt help that Gmails spam filtering is also shite now, and I get 50-60 spam emails into my inbox a day.
Exactly the same as the approach to the movie version of The Martian.
Yup, because those people intentionally looking to mislead or defraud others through the use of AI fakes are certainly going to follow this law to the letter...
Im sorry, but a whole load of those justifications are bullshit.
Yes, but 6.9m of those 27.6m don't have a car in the first place, and pretty obviously,
And how many of those 27.6m will have multiple vehicles?
and pretty obviously, those are more likely to be the households without the ability to park a car off-street.
No, thats very far from "obvious" at all. Very very far. So far, that its a reach.
Did you even look at the Google Maps link I sent? I'd say that under the current approach, a good proportion of the city of Norwich would not be able to charge their vehicle at home because they have no chance of off road parking.
- that still leaves at least 70% of cars / households able to charge at home offstreet compared to 0% able to refuel at home offstreet, which is a massive win for tens of millions of people, and obviously reduces pressure on the public charging network
The reason this doesnt matter for ICE is because refuelling ICE vehicles is a 5 minute matter and the infrastructure has been around to do that for what, a hundred years now?
Meanwhile, the infrastructure for charging EV vehicles anywhere other than very very specific locations right now is non-existent, and will consist of a MASSIVE build out which hasnt even started yet.
- tons of solutions for on-street charging are rolling out, from lamp-post to bollards to gullies
The problem is not that solutions theoretically exist, its that they are yet to be implemented on the scale required in order to achieve the switch over from ICE to EV that governments want to see.
Where is the funding for the roll out of those solutions? Wheres the wide scale planning for implementing those solutions?
- there's tons of other places to charge, including workplace charging
Laughable if you consider that most people don't have a parking spot at work and have to park either on-street near their work place or in a commercial car park. So the same issues apply here as well.
In addition to that, if EV charging spots arent excessively available in numbers then you are going to have an issue where someone parks up, hooks up and sits there for 8 hours while they work.
Once again its an issue of available infrastructure - 10 EV charge points for a road of 50 houses simply isnt going to cut it. You are going to have to have 50 charge points otherwise the shit is going to hit the fan at some point. And we both know that no government, local or national, is going to provide enough charging points for those that dont have off-road parking of their own.
- cars only need to be charged once every 10 to 14 days in the UK, given how much the average car is driven per day
Sorry but I want the ability to drive whatever distance I like at the drop of a hat, which means that my car would be plugged in whenever Im not using it to achieve that. My wife is a doctor who is regularly on call, so she *has* to be able to drive whatever distance she wants at the drop of a hat.
My problem is not EVs, my problem is the lack of infrastructure to support EVs and the timeline that governments want to have the general populace to switch over to EVs wholesale - there are deadlines in place, but theres absolutely fuck all funding at the scale required in order to build the corresponding infrastructure out.
People are used to the availability of "drive to the other end of the country and back again" at the drop of a hat in terms of infrastructure which supports that - for EV that does not exist right now, and its not going to exist a decade from now which is 5 years after the ICE ban in the UK - theres no mass roll out even planned yet, its all handwaving about "solutions exist for that". Great, put the solutions in place then!
Right now, successive governments have basically said "after 2030 you cant buy ICE vehicles - good luck!".
We saw more movement and planning around cable TV back in the 1980s and 1990s - this is so much more fundamentally important, and yet we arent seeing roads being dug up, or even being planned to be dug up.
That article is very nuanced - the exact wording is "18 million (65%) of Britain’s 27.6 million households having – or with the potential to have – enough off-street parking to accommodate at least one car or van".
Note the "or with the potential to have" - thats going to be peoples front or back gardens, with corresponding changes to drop curbs etc. Which still means significant investment at a property level to allow for that - who is going to pay for that?
Look at the streets here and tell me how these properties are going to fit into that report...
Theres still a lot more to it than purchase price, unfortunately.
When I was living in the UK, more than half the place I lived in would have had zero ability to charge an EV - the parking options were either on-road (and if you were lucky, within 3 streets of your house), or if you won the council lottery then you rented a garage within the local area. And no, you couldnt add an EV charger to the garage.
Where I live now, I have off street parking and the ability to add an EV charger - I fully expect my next car to be an EV.
But if I wasnt living here, if I was still living in the UK, then the problem of on-street parking and charging would still be a major blocker that I dont see being solved, properly solved, any time soon.
One other thing we didnt have when the X Files (series or movie) came out was
The lack of a requirement to conform to a fixed schedule meant that your episodes can be as long as you want them to be - the last season of GoT ranges from 53 minutes to 81 minutes...
Series produced before the 1990s stayed fixed to a broadcast schedule - long episodes were two parters and few and far between. Which ultimately meant that writers wrote that way for a series - and now they are no longer constrained to a broadcast schedule, very rarely do two episodes in a headline series actually have the same runtime. They run as long as the writers and producers want them to run, as long as the budget holds out.
Sounds like you want to go back to the concept of "local time for local people", which existed before railways required common timekeeping for the entirety of a route... Noon was at different times of the day for east-west services...
There are reasons why "local time for local people" didnt work then for anything more than a single town or village, and those reasons are still valid now.
The problem here is that developers can take responsibility for the action while AI can not. Humans do make mistakes and that's ok; best practice is not to just can employees for messing up. Once is a mistake. Twice is an HR event. When someone does something dumb we forgive but we also insist that meaningful steps are taken to prevent that problem in the future. AI can't really take those steps because AI can't be accountable for "don't do it again." Taking down production because you dropped a table once is forgivable. Taking it down twice for the same reason is a different matter.
The developer can be accountable. And if HR fails to hold them to account for it, HR is accountable. And if HR isn't held accountable, leadership is. And if leadership isn't held accountable, the board is. And if the board isn't held accountable, the stockholders have some hard decisions to make. And if they choose not to make them than it wasn't really that big a deal, was it?
But with an AI the option is "we stop using AI" or "we live with the result."
Go further.
Remove copyright protection for any US work.
Everyone is so excited about not having to pay software engineers to write code that they've forgotten what engineers actually do. It's less common in the software world but go find a civil engineer or an electrical engineer or an aerospace engineer and follow them around for a week.
At some point, there's going to be a document in front of them laying out how something is going to be built and they're going to be asked to approve it. And when they do that they're taking responsibility for the design. If it falls down, if it catches on fire, or if it crashes into the mountains and kills people, they're the name on the form saying that won't happen. They're responsible.
Claude 4.5 Opus is very impressive, but if it writes a software application that kills people it can't take responsibility. It can't be punished. It can't even really be sued.
I just don't see how we, as a society, can trust fundamentally unaccountable entities to build systems that can do real harm if they go wrong. I suppose the alternative is that Anthropic accepts full legal liability for everything its models do. Their unwillingness to make that move tells you all you probably need to know about their own internal confidence in those models.
Kosh or Ulkesh?
One thing the science does tell us is that we all have a very hard time separating the world that existed when we were children from our perception of that world through the eyes of a child.
Ask nearly any population in the United States when this country was best and you'll get a majority who'll swear to you it was when they were teenagers. The age of the group doesn't matter. You get the same result from 20 year olds as 40 year olds as 60 year olds as 80 year olds. And what you're seeing is people looking back to a time when they had lots of free time, lots of freedom, and most of their income was disposable and thinking "that was pretty great." And it was.... except they were living under a roof someone else paid for and still experiencing the risks and complexities of the world through the filter and safety net provided by their parents.
And since we're being scientific about this: yes, obviously not everyone. I'm sure someone reading this right now is thinking "I had a tough childhood." And I'm sure they did but anecdotes are not data.
The 1980s were -- and I say this as both a historian and someone who lived through them -- fucked. Reagan torched the New Deal consensus. The AIDS crisis was literally laughed out of the White House press room. Our government perpetuated a long string of dirty intelligence/foreign-policy interventions. The wealthy and powerful were juiced to the gills on cocaine.
There was a sense of decorum which has sense evaporated from American politics but that's about it.
I suggest you read up on the actions of MENTOR 4, launched in 2009, and the satellite that it replaced, MENTOR 2, before claiming that Im "full of shit".
https://www.thespacereview.com...
At what point did actually being able to have a reasonable discussion about things end, and jumping to insults and vitriol become the norm? Why did you feel that you had to immediately be abusive in your response, rather than ask for more details and
Why in the holy fuck is a judicial position at all an elected one?
These officials should be following the law, not following the whimsical needs of an electorate. There is no way anyone from the lowest police officer to the highest judge should be held to an electorates position on anything.
The electorate should be able to vote the people in to change the laws, they shouldnt be able to vote people in who enforce the laws. Enforcement of the law should be entirely blind - if the electorate want a law to not be enforced, they need the law changed.
The problem that we thought was a problem was, indeed, a problem, but not the problem we thought was the problem. -- Mike Smith
