Viable solutions with sand or rock have been developed and I expect over the next few decades a large number of such projects will be produced.

A lot of energy storage solutions do exactly that - use heat as energy. i.e. solar heads rock, sand, salt etc. and then later on that heat is turned back into useful energy - either pumping water around households to heat them, or to drive a steam turbine. The bigger the volume of rock / sand / salt, the more efficient the process is.

If only there were some way to take energy made from sunshine and store it in some form for later. Like in a battery. Or as heat. Or in a flywheel. Or just use the energy for something we’d really like to do as cheaply as possible. Like sequester CO2. Or desalinate water. Or run industries that would otherwise use natural gas.

People pay YouTube instead of using an adblocker?

Nvidia is worth 42bn USD and employs 30,000 people.

Nvidia’s has a market cap 30x of Intel’s. So it could issue more stock to raise capital for a buyout. It’s not the company equity but the market cap that it needs to have money to purchase. Even a controlling stake of > 50% would give them defacto control. Of course governments & regulators would probably block it or force Nvidia to divest bits of itself, and that’s probably the greatest protection Intel has against such a scenario.

But if Intel weakens further, it may well be someone else tries to acquire it. I bet a lot of companies would love to snaffle it up. It’s kind of ironic that Intel used to be the big dog in the semiconductor space but even AMD is bigger than it these days and are potentially many others who’d like buy it out. In fact, for all we know Intel might be shedding all these jobs to make it look more attractive to potential buyers.

The US and Europe has become acutely aware that too much semi-conductor manufacturing has been outsourced to China and other Asian nations and they’re trying to build some back domestically. So that’s the geopolitical reason for it.

How long before Nvdia buys them, or at least tries to. Nvidia tried to buy Arm but got stopped by the UK government.

They have to have a human respond to each and every complaint about that ad. Seems more sensible to automate and flag suspicious ads before the complaints happen.

There are other considerations here though. Google suffers reputational harm if users become victims through their platform. It becomes news, it creates distrust in users, it generates friction with regulators and law enforcement. Users may be trained to be ad averse or install ad blockers. In addition, these ads generate reports which costs time to process even if the complaints are rejected.

At the end of the day these scammers are not high profile advertisers and they’re not valuable. They’re burner accounts that pay cents to deliver their ads. They’re ephemeral, get zapped, reappear and constantly waste time and resources. Given that YouTube can easily transcribe content and watermark it, it makes no sense to me that they wouldn’t put some triggers in, e.g. a new advertiser places an ad that says “Elon Musk”, or “Quantum AI” or other such markers, flag it for review.

I’ve disabled personalised ads on YouTube and I see this sort of shit all the time. I’ve given up reporting them because 90% of the time the report is rejected. I don’t even understand the rationale for rejecting it because it’s an obvious a scam as a scam can be - ai impersonation, fake endorsement, illegal advertising category. It’s a scam YouTube.

I don’t even get why these ads even appear. YouTube has transcription & voice / music recognition capabilities. How hard would it be to flag a suspicious ad and require a human to review it? Or search for duplicates under other burner accounts and zap them at the same time? Or having some kind of randomized audit based on trust where new accounts get reviewed more frequently by experienced reviewers.

Protectionism only works in the VERY short term. If the USA doesn’t pull its finger out of its ass and make affordable good EVs, then its automotive industry will crash and burn. Because the rest of the world unaffected by tariffs will be buying Chinese (or Korean / European) EVs and not American ones because they’ll be expensive and suck.

I hate local file search in Windows. So many times I’ve wonder why my machine is crawling and I go to the taskbar and discover Windows search indexer is killing my machine.

For the other stuff in Windows 11, I wonder if it knows I’m in Europe because I’ve not seen any egregious advertising - it has the default shit they set up for you like the MSN home page in Edge which is annoying but it can all be changed.

I have Windows 11 on a couple of machines and honestly it’s just Windows 10 with a somewhat slicker taskbar and control panel. Functionally it is almost identical. I’m sure there is a random bunch of changes on the periphery but it’s really not a compelling proposition if someone has Windows 10 and is happy with it.

When you have a narcissistic sociopath for a boss don’t expect job security. All these layoffs and his insane letter will do is cultivate toadying, fear, distrust, cliques and a culture of backstabbing within Tesla.

If they weeded out some of the shittier ideas they’d be one in nine or eight.

I saw the Marquess Brownlee review of this thing last night and I wonder why companies make this crap and who is fool enough to fund it. It’s obviously doomed to fail, as are most “smart” gadgets & devices. The best that can be said for it, is at least there is no subscription to use it and it’s not outrageously expensive but that’s damning it with faint praise.

Because they are. Groups like PETA, or Just Stop Oil are clowns who hurt their own cause. Performative protesting might win people a participation prize but to everyone else it’s just “look at meeeeee!”. At a certain point it actually becomes toxic to the cause. I know if I wanted to harm environmental campaigning then I’d invent Just Stop Oil.

Meanwhile big business are sending lobbiests in to change politician’s minds, to make arguments that appeal to their rationality, or self-interest. THAT is what environmental campaigners should be doing - lobbying, extoling the benefits of environmental action, changing minds. Getting arrested in front of cameras over and over just becomes pathetic and performative.

No change doesn’t happen by asking nicely, but I think some joined up thinking by these groups would get them further than performative protesting and getting arrested. If you want change then you lobby politicians on the positive benefits of change, and businesses on the potential profits to be had from implementing it.

I think climate activists would just be better off doing what everyone else does - lobbying. Identify politicians who represent areas who would benefit from pollution controls, or green investment or whatever and push the message. Performative acts in front of cameras might feel good but it’s a blunt tool to change policy. Some protestors such as “just stop oil” campaigners are so stupid that they actually help the causes they supposedly oppose.

It doesn’t work like that. UTC goes forward always. Leap seconds are scheduled and known in advance. NTP time services will just smear time advancement a little to account for an additional second. Time never has to go backwards. This is how Google does it.