This is one time I think every distro should do it a totally different way.

If this is what they put so much energy into - internal presentations! - then the company must have a pretty poor culture. The companies who will beat Uber put their effort into engineering, with CEOs smart enough to know who's actually doing the good work by talking to employees in unstructured settings, not sitting through presentations. The whole thing has the whiff of "at Uber we work really hard at convincing our bosses that we're being productive."

Chinese models are open source and open weights, so even if they put in all kinds of ideological filters into their models, these filters are easy to remove if you run the models on your own hardware. If Slashdot stands for anything, it is to root for open source alternatives, which now - weirdly - means rooting for China's AI projects. If the CCP get spooked and ruins this good thing, that would be bad for all the people, not just for the Chinese people.

Let's go Slashdot oldsters, with our low-six-figure account numbers, making Monty Python jokes! Maybe 37 is not old, but we are! Hahahaa! Has it been The Year of Lunux on the Desktop yet? Maybe 2026 will be it!

What these groups need to do to protect vulnerable people is to make sure we build new powerplants soon. It's so sleazy of them to act like they're trying to protect customers from paying high prices for energy when for decades they basically caused energy prices to get so high by having a problem with basically every possible way of generating energy.

Right now, we're noticing that Chinese companies are offering us exploitative deals, and we don't like it, and think that tariffs will fix it. But with tariffs in place, we will find that now it's American companies that are offering us the exploitative deals, but they can charge more now, because they're insulated from outside competition. What I'm saying is that intranational capitalism is just as sleazy and brutal as international capitalism - only less efficient, because it's less competitive.

I agree with you about NATO states paying for mercenaries to defend Ukraine. There are many experienced fighters in Africa and the Middle East, and it's likely that their services could be bought at a reasonable price. Without more soldiers in the field, Ukraine's front is doomed to collapse.

I love AI and I would and could pay for it if I had to, but why would I pick OpenAI to pay? Their product is not really better than their competitors' products, and sometimes it's clearly worse. They have the advantage of being the first mover in their field, and that gives them inertia with low-information customers - the new AOL.com. But apart from that, they have huge debts and not much else to distinguish them. Their best employees had left, and their former partners have become wary of the way they operate. Projections of their future profitability must be based on the expectation that their AI will figure out some better business plan than what the OpenAI humans have come up with!

So now China is making too many electric cars and solar panels, compared to domestic demand. Their solution was to export that stuff. Now we want to impose tariffs on those things, so that global demand for Chinese stuff is artificially depressed. But when China loses markets for their stuff, what will they make with their comically overbuilt production capacity? Not solar panels or clean cars, but weapons. It turns out tariffs don't stop the "export" of bombs and missiles and attack drones to Taiwan.

Really good comment. I think I basicallly already thought this, but the way you put it is clearer than how I was thinking about it, so thanks!

If you go to a Ford dealer, the salesman isn't going to recommend a Porsche. If you go to Taco Bell, they're not going to recommend Wendy's.

Lots of folks have experience installing gas furnaces. That's what they know. They don't know heat pumps. They could learn, but learning is hard. If they can keep selling gas furnaces, that's easier.

My home is made with cement blocks - just like most houses in the UK. It's a massive thermal mass.

I installed heat recovery ventilation which also helps hold heat in while maintaining a constant supply of fresh air.

Which means that temperature swings outside don't really affect me.

I don't plan to move. My roof is cement slate; it will last around 50 years.

In less than four years I've generated over half the money I put into it.

I've been using it for five years now. I'm aware how much electricity costs. But for me, it's discounted by 33% due to solar PV. And my heat pump is 150-300% efficient.

When it makes sense to replace the roof on my house I can double my solar capacity and I'll increase my electricity storage capacity.

So long term it will cost me way less. And, as I noted, the benefits go beyond cost. It's quieter, it's not spewing fumes outside my house, my home has less fire risk, etc.

I installed a heat pump back in 2021. It's fantastic in an Irish or British climate. Home's much warmer and much quieter. Don't need to have CO monitors in my house, don't need to remember to schedule oil deliveries, and so many more things. I can stand outside my back door and not get assaulted by fumes.

All the energy I use at this point is electric - heating, cooking, transportation, all of it. And I offset 33% of the electricity I use via solar PV. When I need to replace my roof, I'll put panels on my house and double my solar production.