Bingo. No-one really thinks this is about "protecting the child-run!" do they?

It's about imposing digital ID on social media. That's it.

Is there another way to get music on my phone that doesn't come from the Apple store?

Tell me that every time I spend half an hour trying to figure out why iTunes won't talk to my phone before I realize I accidentally picked up the charge-only USB-C cable again...

Any MBA who doesn't go all-in on AI at this point stands to lose millions on their stock options for not following the fad.

It doesn't matter whether it's a good idea for the business because the MBA will be gone before the consequences appear.

I am legitimately shocked that the US government hasn't declared the enshitification of Windows a National Security issue yet. So much of the economy relies on their shit and it's only getting worse.

Not sure how sending all my stuff to Microsoft is a security feature.

Physics students have one of the highest IQs out of any subject taught at British universities. Britain has a massive oversupply of universities, so high-IQ kids aren't going to study Physics at some third-rate university which exists only to rake in tuition fees when they would legitimately qualify for somewhere much better.

Tony Blair decided that 50% of British kids should go to university because it would improve the youth unemployment figures and funnel large amounts of credit into the economy through tuition fees. Now there are far, far more kids with degrees than are needed in the economy so as with the US they're paying off their debt by working in Starbucks; though unlike the US I believe their loan just gets written off after a few decades if they can't afford to pay it.

Britain needs probably 80% of its universities closed if it wants the number of kids with degrees to match the real demand for degrees, beyond HR saying 'you must have a PhD to make coffee in Starbucks'. It's a huge scam and "international students" only make it more so.

Maybe. People who bought gold in the 1970s bubble thought the same, but they probably still haven't made their money back in real terms. This time may be different, but gold still looks expensive to me.

Quite possibly. I suspect some forms of AI software will continue regardless because much of it is useful; if nothing else, I've used local AI software to restore ancient VHS home movies into something that looks decent in HD... but it can take days of running the GPU flat out.

The big question is whether big AI models can be financially viable if Moore's Law no longer applies. If the cost per computation doesn't drop substantially then it may never be profitable, particularly as they keep making models bigger and bigger.

I like Banks' books, but the stories only work if you ignore reality and believe everyone can just live happily ever after and the Minds will never decide to eliminate all the humans and fight over controlling the entire resources of the galaxy.

Claude can write some interesting Banks-style prose but I haven't tried asking for an entire story.

You're stuck in the Old Narrative. "Climate Change" is being binned because the AI God demands all available electricity no matter how it's generated.

I saw an article the other day claiming that someone wanted to build AI data centres in northern Canada because it eliminates much of the cooling needs. For all I know it may have been made up by AI but it makes a certain amount of sense if they don't need to rely on solar panels to power it and have reliable power from somewhere like a nuclear reactor.

A couple of years ago I was given a box of 1960s Canadian money and it turns out the coins were worth about 20x as much as their face value at the time because they were around 50% silver. Given silver has been spiking too it's probably closer to 30x today.

So someone literally just had to put their coins in a box in the 1960s and they'd be worth 20-30x as much a few decades later. No need for investment funds, paying fees to bankers, just put it in a box under the bed.

The paper dollars in the same box might be 2-3x just for collector value.

I wouldn't buy gold or silver at current prices, but historically gold and silver in a box under the bed has done better than putting paper money in a bank account. I only buy gold when the Bank of England is selling, because that's a clear sign that the price has bottomed out.

Yes. Where I live we get about 1/4 as much power from solar in the winter as summer if using the year-round optimal alignment for the panels. By biasing it for winter use we can boost the winter power a bit but at the cost of losing summer power. We can also go 3-4 days without decent sunshine so that means sustaining power usage requires 3-4x as many batteries as you might otherwise calculate in order to cover those bad times.

Also don't forget the losses in the system which mean you probably then need to add some more to compensate for those. I don't know how big commercial systems compare but it's at least 20% in my home battery backup between the cables, charger and inverter.