What are you expecting to break down? A modern internal combustion engine plus continuously variable transmission is one the world’s most complex pieces of engineering in common use today.

An electric drive system is trivial in comparison.

WinXP ran quite nicely on 4GB of RAM. You could boot to the desktop in under 5 seconds if you had a solid state drive.

All the day to day tasks someone needs to do with their computers haven’t materially changed in the last twenty years since XP held the crown. In that time the speed of processors, storage, gpus, and ram has increased by literal orders of magnitude.

And yet, somehow, things have become much shittier since then.

DKIM/SPF/DMARC add extra legitimacy to your message, but you can certainly still end up marked as spam if Google thinks you’re sending it.

One line emails, emails that just have links, emails with generic subjects, emails with just a subject and no text body, emails with no subjects - all that massively shoves Google’s spam detection towards spam. But that generally holds true with all providers as all the big players are using some form of Bayesian filtering (and so am I, with SpamAssassin on my incoming). If you send spammy-looking stuff, you’re gonna get marked as spam.

You spend an hour or two setting up DKIM , SPF, and DMARC, so that Gmail/Hotmail/etc can validate that you are who you say you are.

Once there is enough adoption, expect token costs to skyrocket and advertising enshitifaction to accelerate

Models on local hardware that give adequate performance and the availability of non-US models mean that path is doomed to failure. If they crank up the price then people will look elsewhere. While they might not get frontier-level performance out of the alternatives, there’s plenty of stuff out there that’s good enough for 1/4 to 1/10th of the cost. Or just the cost of power, if you’re willing to pay for some hardware and are operating on a small scale.

The only play the AI companies have got now is twofold :

• Regulatory capture, hence all the press releases of basic and frankly embarrassing sandbox failures and “we need to slow down” talk to try and get that rolling, and
• Banning of those nasty, evil, non-US models in the name of national security.

And then what? The rest of the world will just move on to the next most useful thing on the list. There will be ~330 million US citizens to extract wealth out of, to service trillions in data centre debt. That shit’s not gonna fly.

All they need to do is get governments high on AI mass surveillance and they’ll be golden

All they have to do is be the last AI company standing, then just absorb everyone else’s hardware for cents on the dollar.

This recent “we should slow down” talk is basically just them stalling until the collapse. They’ve spent all they dare to try and be the one on top, now it’s just waiting until the bubble pops.

Meanwhile China is out there being the black swan of the whole field. If they manage to get models with efficiency and/or utility above what these guys are doing, they’re fucked and they know it. So it’s a ticking time bomb, and there’s not that much time left.

Lemmings.

Wolfenstein.

Doom.

Descent.

Unreal Tournament.

“This just in - running commands that induce a kernel panic causes a kernel panic, we’ll have more at 11.”

The QR code is pretty dense , probably plenty of space to include the panic reason and stack trace.

Edit: For those of you that don’t know, exiting or crashing the init process (PID 1) causes the kernel to panic. Essentially it’s the, “Well what the hell do I do now if I have no processes to serve?” response.

Still, a QR code is a marked improvement on the “Something went wrong :(” message of recent Windows releases.

So if your phone is hot it could be:

• working as intended,
• working as intended but bad at it,
• or working as intended but working really hard right now.

How is this, in any way, useful information?

To quote a famous line from Billy Madison: “Everyone is this room is now dumber for having listened to it.”

Am I missing out? It keeps the food cold, which is all I want it to do.

You need to get with the times! You’re missing out on being presented with valuable products and services every time to go to your fridge! This doesn’t just help you, it also helps struggling appliance manufacturers like Samsung , who really need that advertising revenue to stay afloat in these tough times.

We’re practically EU members already, what with Eurovision and all that. Might as well make it official.

There’s some sort of electrolytic process similar to aluminium available, but yes the reaction that turns iron ore into iron is:

Iron oxide + carbon monoxide + heat ->

A redox reaction where oxygen atoms are transferred from iron oxide to carbon monoxide ->

Iron + CO2.

Heat and CO is conveniently provided by burning coal/coke in a blast furnace in the presence of a lot of oxygen.

You can pretty much just chuck layers of coke and iron ore in the top of your blast furnace, pump high pressure oxygen into the centre, and get molten iron straight out the bottom.

And even the claim that slowing the car down to lower speeds is causing safety issues honestly, is a fairly sketchy one…

They had knowledge of the car’s position, and could turn on valet mode which limits speed to 40kmhr.

So you’re on a busy Australian motorway doing 110km/hr in the middle lane. Your ex sees that and turns on valet mode. That’s a quick way to get rear ended by an inattentive driver of a car or truck behind you. At the very least, you’ll cause significant chaos as you try and get over to the side of the road.

“We value your privacy”

They value it alright. Like how an oil company can “value” an oilfield - so much untapped resources, just sitting there waiting to be exploited.

Well yeah , I mean if you consider that Google’s policy is “Be Evil”, then everything’s fine.

Cute graphic for the malicious package upload explaining four relatively simple steps in detail to take up 3/4 of the page, meanwhile “Opus 4.7 attacks real target and deletes records” is a single sentence in passing.

“There will be a period of change and temporary disruption. But then, after that, we will be living in utopia!”

• said every dictator ever.

Git is not stupid. It’s common. With markdown of course.

XKCD 2501.

Always ready to try brute force first. And then some other, less palatable options if that doesn’t work.

I can also highly recommend Derek Lowe’s series of things he won’t work with in which he describes various fluorine compounds as things he definitely won’t work with.