Hilarious that this was modded "troll". I just didn't get around to doing one clock one year, and noticed that it was no real effort to add 1 to it, and that I need not bother with the other ones.

Because I do a lot of GNSS and time related stuff anyway, I tend to be working with UTC a lot of the time. During summer time I have to remember to add one to all the timestamps anyway.

Sure, and I wasn't saying that they are the same as human relationships. I'm saying that as an engineer I see this is a flaw in the "design" of humans, one that cats and AI are able to exploit. Affection is an incredibly powerful drug, and you don't even have to spike the victim's drink to administer it.

Have you ever owned a cat? Or more accurately, has a cat ever enslaved you with little morsels of affection in exchange for lavish feasts, on-demand massages, free healthcare and being generally treated like royalty?

Cats, by complete chance, evolved to a form that humans find more than just pleasing. Socially, they have little shame, are demanding, and affection is used as a tool to get what they want. If they were humans, they would be an abusive partner who takes advantage at every opportunity.

Something about humans craves what they offer, and chatbots too apparently. Maybe a good comparison would be nicotine. It's easy to become dependent on it. Some people are obliged to use AI for work, they can't even choose not to start smoking in the first place.

Europe is developing P2P payment systems, and IIRC Brazil already has a very successful one.

PayPal used to be the way to pay for stuff on eBay, but it was terrible, and now thanks to Trump efforts to remove US processors from the loop are accelerating. It seems like the future for PayPal is uncertain at best.

The way it has worked for many years on Android is that even when you enable "install apps from any source", you still have to enable each app that wants to start an installation separately. So your would authorize the app store of your choice, and random .apk downloads in the browser (which Chrome and Firefox will shit a brick over anyway) are still blocked.

To be fair I don't think Google is being accused of using BitTorrent, that was Facebook/Meta. Google actually scanned a large number of books themselves, for the Google Books project. That was found to be legal, although that only covered scanning, searching, and making excerpts available, not AI training.

As for your Sleeping Beauty example, since that story dates back to the 1600s, and appears to be a based on an even older story going back to the 1300s, any copyright protection it may have enjoyed has long since expired.

I'm having difficulty finding good data, but what I did find suggests that the US has not been doing very well for a while now.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-s...

Well behind Europe and China, and especially Japan. Note that Japan has very difficult terrain, frequent extreme weather, earthquakes, and suffered the loss of all nuclear power in 2011, most of which was not back online in the time period covered by that data.

Yeah, there's two main problems:

1) People entering the wrong fields. For example, medicine really needs workers, at all levels, but not enough people are going into it.

2) Certain manual labour fields, like field work and home construction, because... well, I think we all know why there's a shortage of workers in those fields.

You can't really say it's bad code when nobody else has managed to do any better.

It's bad, but Microsoft has a awfully large number of lines of code to run through Mythos or whatever (whether they need that many is a whole other discussion). A more useful metric on overall code quality would be how many bugs are being found per 10k lines of code compared to their peers (including FLOSS); e.g. if Microsoft ran 10m SLOC through Mythos to get those 570 bugs, and a smaller project ran 1m SLOC and got 57 bugs, then you could reasonably argue that their code quality is about on a par with the smaller project. It's still Apples to Oranges though, because some coding solutions are going to be much more challenging to code, and therefore more likely to contain bugs.

On the upside, we're probably going to get several months of this while everyone with access to Mythos et al runs their existing code through it and integrates into their release processes for new code, and the end result will be things being much harder for all the bad actors in the world. Even if you don't use the improved code yourself, that's hopefully going to have a significant impact on the number and size of all the botnets out there, and that's a net benefit to everyone apart from the bad actors.

Ideally we should adjust clocks/schedules so that peak electricity demand lines up with peak solar output.

Beyond that, human beings need sunshine to stay healthy, so there are probably some limits on how much we adjust schedules relative to daylight.

It doesn't, they just turned AI on it for the first time.

Linux is going through the same thing, only with less good AI and more slowly.

By "calculate" you mean add one? To be honest, the mental burden isn't that great.

It has screens everywhere, but the primary interface is voice.

From OpenAI's perspective, developing the tech to format information for that screen would delay the release. ChatGPT often screws it up.

My phone and computers let me set the timezone to UTC. For interacting with everyone else I just remember the offset.

I'm working on a pirate low frequency time signal transmitter for my house. If that works out I may switch back, if I can be bothered to replace a couple of dumb clocks with radio controlled movements.