"These systems cannot 'answer questions' because they don't understand them."

This is obviously false. AI systems are already answering questions, and whether or not the AI "understands" it is irrelevant if the information being returned is largely correct.
Sure, there may sometimes be some incorrect information or hallucinations, but most questions on general subjects do seem to yield reasonable results, and it's only when you get into areas that have small volumes of training data that you tend to get sketchier answers.

AI doesn't have to be truly "sentient" to be very useful, very disruptive, or very dangerous, depending on how it is used - and mabey all three of these at once, if you are using it to control targeting systems to defend you.

Better than a dyslexic genie. No one wants a 12 inch pianist.

Sounds like Snowcrash for AI.

If Ai ever become AGI will it think of the real world the way we think of virtual worlds?

The war in Iran was the direct reason I decided to maximise the system I could put on my new roof - and oversize the battery. I was expecting oil prices and energy costs to go high and stay high.

I ended up installing 10kw of 23% efficient solar panels was all I could fit on the approximately 100sqm north side of my roof. They are paired with a FoxESS 9.9kw single phase inverter and a 48kwh stack of Fox CQ7 batteries.

I might have slightly oversized on the batteries but over the last three weeks since it was installed, including rainy and cloudy days I have been 98% energy independent (the inverter always draws a little power from the grid) while exporting 15 to about 34kwh a day.

A 25kwh battery would probably do just as well for home power most days, though obviously with less energy arbitrage capacity.

At 15k AUD for the whole setup and warrantied stored power throughput of 178 MWh that will work out to about 6c/kwh for any stored solar power power I am using from the battery, so if the grid export price is significantly above that its worth exporting excess power and turning a profit, to help cover the electricity providers fixed connection fees.
Its the beginning of "winter" here now (where the temperature plunges to 16 centigrade at night and I sometimes even have to wear a light sweater.
In Summer I'm going to be drowning in excess power, even with my AC cranked because the house is pretty well insulated.

It really is possible to use renewables to completely cover your energy needs with a modest up front investment (esp. compared to the overall cost of a house) , and it's only going to get cheaper and more environmentally friendly as sodium ion batteries ramp up in production.

My next car will be electric or plugin hybrid for sure.

It is a supply and demand problem.
Since it requires such a huge amount of capital to ramp up production, manufacturers are loathe to ramp up production too quickly for what might turn out to be a bubble, so meanwhile there is excess demand.
This will eventually correct, and if it does turn out that AI was just a bubble, or even if it turns out to be useful but the rate of growth slows down, there will be an excess of memory and processors and we can enjoy cheap prices for a while.
If you want to help lower prices, invest in chip fabs, or stop using AI.

Here in British Columbia we just changed our clocks for the last time and will remain on UTC-7 indefinitely. Parts of B.C. (the northeast part) have been UTC-7 all year for a long time. The southeast part has been Mountain time (UTC-7/UTC-6) for a long time. Neither are changing how they do time.

I applaud losing the time change but I'm not crazy about permanent DST. People obviously haven't thought this through, what it's going to feel like come November.

...laura

Near-lifelong B.C. resident here...

People have grumbled about time changes as long as I can remember. Pick one. Stick to it. Just do it.

I can't say I agree with their choice. Not so much the crazy late sunset in the summer - we're used to that - but the very late sunrise in the winter. The sun will still set by 5 in December and January. So what?

...laura

As long as Ai requires vast data centres and ground based energy sources and humans to maintain them, there's plenty of reasons risk for them. The time to really worry is when AI's are hosted on solar powered orbital platforms with self maintaining capabilities.

"Please" and "thank you" are relics of a bygone age to most people.

The one that pisses me off is the habit of customer service people addressing men respectfully ("sir"), but not addressing women with respect ("ma'am" or equivalent). This isn't an issue in places like Texas, but it's very much an issue here in Canada.

...laura

When I first saw 4k I was startled by the picture quality. I also winced at the price tag, and shook my head at the lack of native 4k content. I now own a 4k TV, stream lots of 4k content on line, and generally like what I see. I shoot my own YouTube videos in 4k.

Is 8K just not that much better? Lack of content? Or just bad timing, people would rather spend money on food than a new toy?

...laura

All those cars are parking somewhere for a lot of the time. It's a matter of setting up charging points wherever cars park.
  Not every parking space needs to support charging - but even for curb side street parking, if you have a street light nearby it shouldn't be that hard to add a charger to the closest one or two car parks - and considering many of those streetlights would have been installed and wired when lighting was using much more power heavy incandescent lighting, there is likely to be a fair bit of extra capacity that could be used for charging, now lighting is all low power LED.
That's just one option. Another is chargers in supermarket parking lots, etc.

One of the driving factors behind showing power in mAh is that marketing gets to print a more impressive big number on the box.
Although Wh would be preferred, I'd be happy if they even just changed to displaying mWh on the box - and it should be a win-win. they get a bigger more impressive number to display and I get a unit of measure that actually gives the total amount of electrical energy the device can store, instead of trying to guess whether the rating is based on whatever the battery cell voltages are, or the output voltage that could be anything from 5v to 20v, for USB-C.

If it's radioactive enough to be a problem I would imagine it's easily detectable, considering that there are solid state sensors that can detect as little as 1 nSv/h of radiation and are apparently sensitive enough to be sometimes triggered by bananas.
If it's so radioactively inert that it can't be detected, then is it really a problem?

I forgot to mention that although it is possible to set some content rating based restrictions on some sited, there isn't any browser level standard. I think ideally what you would want is a way you could set your browser to be in "PG" mode for example, and then all websites (or content on websites) would be filterable accordingly.

Of course some websites might not choose to apply ratings to their content, or would apply inappropriate ratings to the content, but search engines could quickly down rate mis-rated content so it doesn't turn up in searches.
  It also goes without saying that the content filtering should be completely at the control of the individual user, with parents being responsible for setting appropriate filter levels for their kids, but only having to do it at the browser level, not each individual possible site their kid might visit.

I would love it if there was some kind of mirror site for YouTube that would convert all the long video tutorial type videos into well formatted text with appropriate illustrations extracted from the video where necessary.
scanning the transcript sometimes helps, but it's not in a very easy to read format.

It's especially frustrating when I want to see how to do something or other in say, Unreal Engine, and nearly all resources available are YouTube videos instead of reasonable documentation or written tutorials.
Even playing the video at double speed to scan for the meat of what I want only goes so far to reducing this problem.

Of course it would be far better if there was just good documentation and example, but that's probably wishing for too much.