It could be that. What it definitely was, though, is that Sony thought they could make more money selling to data centers than to the public.

Antiprotons, the forbidden PopRocks

I don't like ads either, but I do like that they (at least for now) have a paid tier with no ads. If there was an option to use google services at some paid tier, without being part of their ad network, I'd probably pay it. But there isn't and llm is as good as search these days (in many cases anyways) so I'm happy to jump ship. Piss off, google.

Trump in his first term was willing to go all-in on human spaceflight to mars...until he realized he couldn't get it done before the end of his term. Trump has always been interested in space stuff...but only if it's achievable within his term. This seems like a play to keep contractors employed and skills sharp until the next administration is seated, which will hopefully be willing to invest in goals longer than 4 years.

Unfortunately everyone picked an opinion two years ago, when AI was genuinely garbage beyond some basic bash scripts or a top 1000 bug/question on stack exchange (which mostly overlap). AI started getting really good in Dec '24, particularly spring '25 and by August 2025 even the $20/mo tier of chatgpt was starting to get legit as OpenAI started to try catching up with (now market leader) Anthropic and their blessed claude code. The 4.5/4.6 models released this year are nothing short of incredible, and the Qwen 3.5 series of models are right behind the state of the art models. Google is doing some stuff too but I'm kind of done giving them my money.
 
In 2-3 years we'll have found all 20,000 top reasons LLMs hallucinate things and solved for 95% of them
 
Creatives rallied against LLMs but as has been proven, nobody actually cares about making funny pictures of , they just want to know that they can.

Or some other Weekly World News cast member?

Only the customers with fancy GPUs have anything worth farming, and they probably want to run games on them instead.

>What's a better solution, if any?
 
Open source firmware

That's my gut reaction too -- this will result in software with obscure bugs that are near-impossible for a human to find or fix because no human even understands how the software works.

OTOH, maybe no human will need to find or fix the bugs, because they can task an AI to find and fix them instead. I'd say that strains credibility, but last year I would have said it strains credibility that an AI can understand (or, at least, "understand") human-written code as well as a human programmer, and yet here we are.

True, but I don't see how that's a problem for anyone.

Or chloromidians? Was there any mention of chlorine on it?

In the absence of chlorine, would flouromidians form? Would flouromidian-based life have any unusual properties?

Or whatever it is that tricorders detect?

Or souls? Did it make a detour through our solar system to pick up a few souls for later use?

For something that's too far away to be of much use, it sure is getting a lot of use.

I think you're confusing fusion with fission. A Mullah (or any irresponsible person, for those who prefer not to sound like a bigot) who has access to grossly abuse a fusion reactor might at worse damage the reactor and sprinkle a trace amount of radiation around. They certainly wouldn't be able to make any kind of weapon out of it.

One nice thing about cobalt and lithium is that they don't get consumed when you use them. When you drive your gas-powered car, the gas you put into it goes away forever, and you have to buy another tank next week, every week, for the life of the car. The rare earths in your EV's motors and batteries, OTOH, remain present and usable for the lifetime of the car, and can and will be reclaimed for other purposes after their service life ends.

So sure, there might potentially be wars fought over those elements; but it's much less likely to come to that, partially because manufacturers are learning to get by with less or none of those elements, but mainly because every nation-state that depends on them already has a de-facto internal stockpile that it can rely on instead of having to go to war for more.

Dunno when American automakers will figure it out; I suspect Chinese manufacturers already have, but we're unlikely to see any of those here. In the meantime, the Slate might be something like what you're looking for.