5) Everyone decided 'derp tariffs bad' so (2) will be filled by China, and poorer client states

I think you missed the recent news stories about the EU removing the de minimis customs duty exemption, which was decided in November and comes into force on the 1st of July.

These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.

It has been my experience, sad to say, that online stores aren't above selling consumer credit card information either, and I've grounds to think Amazon is one that does this.

I have an industrial air conditioner for my home. (It's a small home, but summers are increasingly severe.)

I don't recall being asked a damn thing.

My suspicion is that this is scaremongering.

I have been stress-testing AIs with increasingly complex projects for some time. The Chinese AIs struggle, but actually do a FAR better job of handling massively complex tasks than Grok, and Gemini just rolls over and whimpers at anything above a very low level of complexity.

What I've found is that the Chinese AIs tend to be sycophant but do "understand" complex projects properly in that you can ask specific technical questions and the answers will be generally very accurate. Any sort of critical analysis is beyond them, though. (Ether that, or I'm a mega-genius. Which....doesn't sound terribly likely.)

Of the "Top AIs", ChatGPT is good on basics but is incapable of any kind of detailed generation. Claude is brilliant at detailed generation, but overloads with anything but a tiny data set.

I've been putting up the projects on Gitlab for a while, so anyone who wants to see an AI break down and cry in despair is able to do so.

The secret tools don't bother me - they'll have long understood how to use Big Data and Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. AI isn't going to find out any more than combinations of those tools will, because that's basically all AI is - a Big Data classification system.

The Spanish Wikipedia article does say that some comms took three days to restore, because after the power came back the configurations of some devices, I presume routers, had been lost. Specifically it cites newspaper articles about remote assistance buttons, but the journalists either didn't understand the technical details or didn't want to explain in detail. So the misunderstanding is probably that it took a few days for everything to get back to normal, even though the actual blackout lasted 18 hours or less. (It was about 10 hours for me, but I'm in a major city).

So you're telling Claude something vague and washy, then Claude invents a prompt that might vaguely possibly be somehow related to what you want along with a drink that is almost but not entirely quite unlike tea. Claude then recurses through this until it has a Celtic knot so intricate that it has its own Hausdorff dimension. What burps out is a product that is completely useless and patented to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

They won't be OceanGate-grade. They used PRCF that had already been rejected by quality control. That's a non-starter in aircraft.

As production has ended, if the A380 is genuinely necessary, then the economics shift somewhat. That doesn't mean they CAN be replaced, from the sounds of it they can't* (at least in many cases), but the inability to replace the aircraft would mean that options that aren't rational become necessary.

*I have to be careful here. If the wing is designed to be the absolute minimum weight possible, then I don't see how they could be without fully disassembling the entire wing and then reconstructing it from the ground up. And adhesives/welding might mean that just can't be done. At all. On the other hand, there's no obvious reason why you couldn't design a wing to have far more structural support than actually needed AND make spars deliberately maintainable and replaceable. I don't have an A380 handbook in front of me, so can't say how Airbus approached this. But it seems improbable that they're built to be swapped.

And the fact that this was in response to a blackout that lasted days

Either you're confusing it with a different blackout or this needs clarification. The power was back to 99% of users after about 18 hours, and although I can't access the primary sources I see citations that it was fully restored within 24 hours. Your main point still stands.

I still had 4G phone signal for an hour or two after the blackout. When the power hadn't come back after about half an hour I looked online and discovered that it was a national event rather than just my block of flats.

Its original use dates to WWII and was more akin to "military R&D engineer/technician": the people who developed radar, for example; or Barnes Wallis of the bouncing bomb and Lancaster bomber.

The use has generalised over time and would certainly include madcap inventors like Doc Brown from Back to the Future, who is very much not an ivory tower dweller. I would guess that that's the sense which was contrasted with engineers in the documentary.

In the vernacular of The Register, which the headline comes from, it is used quite generally for scientists or engineers.

The Trash 80s? Had a Commodore PET 3032. A whole 1 megahertz. On the other hand, the IEEE 488 meant that I could send a command to one disk drive to transfer to a second disk drive, whilst printing, with the computer then totally free to actually do other stuff. SCSI it wasn't, but for the time, it was an ingenious solution to a lot of problems.

Sheer luxury, lad! Sheer luxury!

We had to make our own bits and push them uphill! Both ways! In the snow!