I have to wonder what these unnamed foreign countries did to the Peace Corps that has made them want to create an entirely new branch within their organization for the specific purpose of inflicting AI on them.

The problem, as I believe the YouTuber 'Loyal Moses' (if I'm remembering the name correctly) has pointed out in his uploads, is that once a platform is put in place where there is a central clearinghouse where STL files have to pass review before they are printable, is that this makes it easy to add new categories of 'banned' object geometries, where the prohibition is extended from an issue of fabricated public safety and extended to commercial convenience -- putting in a provision to make the printing of objects protected under intellectual property provisions, so an STL for a bust of, say, Iron Man would violate the copyright on the likeness of the character, and suddenly fails validation and becomes unprintable. Washington's proposed legislation would require STL files to be submitted to a verification service to be approved before they could be printed. Suppose you're working for a company developing a product using 3D printing for prototyping; is your company going to trust that the 3D designs you're required to submit to this verification service couldn't be obtained illicitly by a competitor and used to get a competing product out the door faster?

Unfortunately, they don't need to know anything about the subject of their legislation. All that's necessary is that they push bills that they can subsequently point to as proof that they're "doing something about the [insert subject here] crisis". And in some ways, it's even better for them if their bills get defeated; that way they can point to the group that was most responsible for their loss and demonize them as being against [insert justification for the bills] -- that way, they get to puff themselves as being behind making it safer for the public and slap down their opponents for failing to recognize the seriousness of the crisis.

Despite the 2C number having been nothing more than wild-ass guesses in scientific papers before being seized on by politicians eager to be seen as doing something -- anything -- to address the existential crisis of "global warming". At least, until "global warming" began to produce colder weather, warmer weather, dryer weather, wetter weather, more storms, fewer storms... and "global warming" was rebranded as "climate change" and hooked into attribution studies so that any weather that deviated from a continual mild, calm climate could be pointed to as evidence of "climate change".

And if you go to the NOAA website to find the year-by-year graph of atmospheric CO2 level and match the graph against important dates in the fight against CAGW -- the launch of the UNFCCC, COP1, COP3, the Kyoto Protocol Treaty, COP15, COP21, the Paris Agreement, COP28, and COP30 -- you'll see that all the efforts of all the world governments to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions have done Sweet Fanny Adams to reverse, or even slow, the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. But, of course, if you follow the pronouncements of the CAGW adherents, it's still all our fault -- individual identical molecules of CO2 know whether they come from natural or anthropogenic sources, and the CO2 molecules from anthropogenic sources hang around in the atmosphere decades if not centuries longer than the CO2 molecules from natural sources.

Needs to be:

Microsoft Edge: "You are part of the rebel alliance and a traitor. Take it away!"

I have to wonder how many lawsuits would be generated from the "drunk driving detection" false-positive result from the driver swerving to avoid a road hazard incapacitating the vehicle at speed and causing an accident with varying degrees of injury or fatality...

...or sue other people for producing material that more-or-less, if you squint and look at it crosseyed through distortion glasses, might be construed as vaguely resembling something your company produces. (GW having sued a miniature designer for producing STLs of miniatures that 'can be used for playing Warhammer', a description equally applicable to Plastic Army Men or hand-drawn cardboard counters)

I wonder how much of this " 'unprecedented' demand " is Meta deliberately restricting production to whip up more interest by creating an artificial scarcity, and whether we'll quickly see an announcement that 'the first production run has sold out', and prospective buyers will have to wait until the second or subsequent production runs, fanning FOMO to drive more interest.

Depending on how deeply you drink the conspiracy-theory Kool-Aid, this is the preparation for Microsoft releasing a CD album and track subscription service that's an add-on to the new Windows Copilot Media Player, which will, with no way to disable the feature, automatically suggest other albums you might like based on the CD you have in the player (the Copilot-driven suggestions will be part of the base app, not the add-on; the base app needs to upload your CD usage to Microsoft for them to monetize your music interests to other companies). As part of this, Windows Copilot Media Player will require an active internet connection, and will not play music if it can't reach the Microsoft servers.

The Tesla semi is supposed to have a 900kWh battery, so even at the full 1.2MW delivery, it will still take 45 minutes to fully charge its battery. Assuming that, to preserve battery life, it's charged only to 80%, and recharged when between 10% and 20%, that's a half hour at the charging station. A large truck stop on an interstate can have 15 to 20 fuel pumps, with a fillup taking 10-15 minutes; that makes a recharge 2x - 3x the time to fill up with diesel (unless the jerk in front of you has gone in to take a dump or a shower while their truck is sitting at the pump). Now assume that the electric truck stop has 20 charging stations and a 10MW power feed; if it's full up, you're only getting 500kW; that pushes your charging time to 60-75 minutes.

And I have to wonder what the net efficiency of the process is -- i.e., if you're getting 200MWh of energy out of a fully-charged system, how much more than 200MWh did you have to put in to charge it?

And 10 hours of storage is enough to flatten some of the day/night cycle of solar power, but it doesn't do much for protracted low-production periods -- if it's overcast for three days, and the solar farms are producing 10% of their normal power, that's 72 hours where the pumped CO2 storage has to provide power, so a plant 10x the size would only cover the base 20MW with a cushion for another day, and if someone builds a power-hungry AI data center nearby in the expectation that they'll be getting reliable power, they can drain the storage pretty quickly.

I'm not sure that it's possible to come up with a way to throw AI systems out the back of a spaceship fast enough to make them viable as a propulsion system, no matter how much better they would be used that way.

They'll need something to keep the lights on during a dunkelflaute. Oh, wait; with Millibrain's wisdom, all the subjects can just sit in the dark when the renewables crash and take the entire country's grid with it -- it's the AI datacenters that are important enough to get continuous power.