In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

Dupe or not, worth leaving this here as a reminder that no, China EV sales are not imploding. Debunked rubbish.

You'd be surprised how difficult that actually is. Take the role of a DJ for instance - a good DJ will know what genre they're doing, play well know things from that genre but also introduce new music to keep it fresh. They might also step outside the genre a little - not too far so it's not dissonant with the rest of their set, but just far enough to give a break and a moment of "ah, that's nice/romantic/gnarly/metal/" for the listener.

It's a skill, and if you haven't got that ability to start with then you're unlikely to be able to give the correct prompts to create it. You might well get a lot of identical things, but a listenable varied set is more than that.

A worry might be SteamOS as a requirement, rather than as simple support. You could imagine kernel modules being developed for 'anti-cheat' and them running under SteamOS but not some other distro that may (justifiably) block them.

This is the most (in fact only) interesting thing about the announcements to me. Must say I'm not sure about it - can't see how mouse+keyboard style games, which the original Stream Controller was explicitly designed to work well with, would pan out.

I have hugely customised layouts for several games to the point where I can't imagine playing them without it - they tend to be RPG games like Skyrim and Elder Scrolls Online. It's that style of game I'm trying to imagine mapping to the new layout, and to be honest gen1 looks more amenable to me at first glance. Hope to be proven wrong though.

Sorry but from an outside perspective that just sounds nuts. So let's take your 'worst case' - $129M overall cost making it $434 per entry - you're saying there are only 297,235 (129M / 434) tax payers in the US? A quick search from me shows the number of filings to be at 145M+. If everyone could file for free, that $129M would be 88c per person.

And I'm speaking from experience. I'm in the UK. I've recently filed my annual self-assessment tax. I used the free service on the UK government web site and the thing that took the longest was working out how much to put as charity donation. Whole thing done in less than an hour and a half.

I seriously cannot comprehend the approach where you have to pay to be able to pay someone. It's...well...it's nuts.

Motorola/IBM too, same time period. I talked to the head of their chip division at the time. POWER (not PowerPC) was doing investigation into vertical chips.

Mind you, this guy also told me there would never be a chip faster than 2Ghz due to thermal limits so...yeah.

This doesn't take away freedom of opinion, but it does let the viewer know whether the influencer has any credibility.

Think back to the time when America was "great", which may be the 1950s according to MAGA. If an average person didn't understand some scientific topic, they didn't pretend to. They trusted Jonas Salk and others because they got to see the horrors or polio and the they saw the effect of the vaccines. The children saw some students not come back to school in the fall because they contracted polio over the summer. The parents saw the same thing and understood just how important vaccines were, whether they understood how it worked or not. Now everyone pretends to be an expert, even if they're actually an idiot. Even idiots knew their limits in the "good old days" before social media.

Or laundering.

I'm not American, but I know there already is an asteroid defence programme. I was listening to people involved in it on a podcast, Science Friday, the other week. Interesting stuff.

On the 2.5Bn years bit - yes, but don't start don't finish. We have no idea how long it will take to develop the techniques required for this, and there will always be a good reason to put it off until tomorrow. Needs to start and just become so embedded over time that future generations don't even question why we're doing it - it's just patently obvious to them. Won't happen in my lifetime, but then a lot of things won't happen in my lifetime that are getting worked on today and that's fine.

There's often a "we should fix problems on earth before looking to space" theme. We can be as equal, progressive and fair as we like and an asteroid still wouldn't give a damn and wipe us out anyway. Should we survive asteroid attacks, the sun will expand and burn the planet dry anyway.

We have to do both. Defence of the Earth (dramatic phrase, but see subject above...) has to be studied, funded and run. Along side that a long, probably multigenerationally long, programme of "how do we survive when the Earth is uninhabitable" including the ability to leave Earth and live elsewhere. These programmes are fundamental to long term survival of the human race.

I think one of the problems is that it all sounds very dramatic, big and sci-fi. But it isn't - we have direct evidence that the risk already materialised once and wiped out most life. We also have evidence of the expansion of the sun. All these things are certain, so we have to look at them as reality and not fiction.

Interestingly, I would regard never learning how to write PHP over 21 years as one of my greatest successes.

Oooofff...

So AI ingests the text books to learn about the subject so it can...create text books?

Some is from London at least, because I ended up behind one of the training cars a while ago.

I'm sceptical, but I'm not on the "never" path. It was going through one of the most annoying parts of my drive - for those that know the area, just outside of St Pancras heading up to Pentonville Road. At that point you have a lane split, comically bad driving, buses overlapping the lane, psychotic cyclists ignoring lanes and red lights and pedestrians on a tiny sliver in the middle of the three lanes continually trying to kill themselves in ever more novel and entirely unexpected ways.

If they tested it there and they still want to launch - huh. I'll be very interested to see it.