Their population absolutely dwarfs Canada and the US as well, so that isn't much good, is it?

BTW, remember the secret of Ti Kwon Leap- Anger is a weapon only to one's opponent.

I still think we need, given the microamps involved, a hamster powered cell phone charger.

Yes it is. Radioactive materials are made in the planet's core, and float up in the magma. Radon Gas is a normal and natural resource from decaying uranium.

It's as renewable as sunlight and wind.

You see it in the stores as well, when was the last time you saw a PC or Computer store on every corner.

Now there is a Mobile phone store on every corner instead, so it's very visible
If you think that argument is not convincing enough, you weren't born in the 80-90s or a young adult then, or you never had the need or wish for owning a PC, and why should you? Times and needs changes over the years.

On top of that, PC's are kinda crazy expensive in comparison to everything else, most people get their gaming needs with perfectly fine consoles (albeit with exorbant gaming prices, and the death of physical media - which makes collecting those kinda redundant, sad but true - a lot of you-shall-own-nothing here and people are sadly getting used to it).

It's not PC alone, it's all the streaming services, they are convenient and offers no real incentives to collecting, and they offer a true silent enshittification because you don't truly collect anything anymore, sure there are exceptions (me and probably a few of you who reads Slashdot), and we're becoming increasingly rare, so we pay the extra costs of a traditional albeit modern PC.

A modern PC is kind of a supercomputer too, if you have the top of the line Graphics card and a high end multi-core computer, you're sitting on a computing superpower, and that has costs with it.

We're often kind of autonomous, meaning we don't like to be "controlled" but rather in control of our own hardware, so you lose some of those customers loyalty because you offer the same kind of "lack of control" over your system as you do with the mobiles per default, so we're actively seeking other solutions.

Today it's not that unusual to pay the price of an entire small cheap brand new car for a decent Desktop Pc, but the capability of such a device is beyond most home users in reality, we're not using those at capacity because we're used to lazy programmers and all-in-one development software (such as game engines) were the code is rather sloppy because the PC's are "fast enough" to get desent results without a slow experience, but it could be 10+ times faster if coded efficiently, it's kind of the old "compiled vs hardcoded" dilemma, but I will stop here for the sake of sanity.

Difficult is not equal to impossible. Heat can be used to boil working fluids, which can be used to drive turbines, which can create energy, which can in turn be used to run AI chips, which give off heat, which can then also be harvested to boil working fluids...Not really a perpetual motion machine, but the inefficiency in the system can be used to suck more heat out of the heat pumps anyway. Inefficiency in this case is a feature.

My answer to environmentalists claiming this is "You first". Stop being hypocrites, eliminate your own fossil fuel usage- including wasting fossil fuels storing articles like this in data centers.

Would this be the same China that is building coal fired plants at a rate of 95MW a year?

Nuclear power is a renewable.

Fission and fusion are replacements, carbon free.

Not the solution. Heat is energy. Energy is needed to feed AI. The clear solution is to figure out how to harvest heat directly, cooling the planet by feeding heat to data centers as electricity.

What we need is a 2nd study, using 400 students, separated into four groups:
1. Using Google ONLY by looking at the 3rd page of results (the first two pages are now taken up with Gemini AI and targeted advertising).
2. Using ChatGPT Only.
3. Using inventory computers in a large metropolitan library
4. Using old fashioned card catalogs and books.

I wonder if we chose a significantly esoteric subject, with a 100 question exam given after a week, if any useful clustering could be detected.

" could seep upward into the Alsace aquifer," implies that the aquifer is *above* the depth of the mine. So the question becomes, what is this magical mine where gravity works backwards?

Where on the planet is not near groundwater?

And yet, the discovery of an anti-gravity mine where contaminants flow UP to the aquifer, should be worth billions.

Yes, everyone is scrambling towards AI now, and they're tossing money at anything AI. Everyone is also trying to put "AI" on every product they can, even if there's no AI at all, just as long as some AI has been used to generate something, could even be a logo on a product, then it's AI supported.

No, your jobs are pretty safe - with one small caveat:

If you suck at your job, and you refuse to use your AI LLM tool help you learn and extend your knowledge, yes - you'll most likely lose your job to those who are useful and resourceful.

If you use LLMs and AI to make your job easier, yes - you're using it the way it was intended, it's a great learning tool, and it's even better at doing mundane tasks, guess what - they used to call that automation, AI is exactly that - it's more intelligent automation, but still nowhere NEAR capable of replacing a human fully.

Sure, a lot of companies will lay people off due to AI, but that's because they were dumb enough to buy into the hype, they actually think that AI can replace humans, well - sort of, but not really. AI and LLMs hallucinate a lot. LLMs demands a VAST amount of computing power to get even the simplest of stuff predicted correctly (in other words, it cost a fortune to train a database), in fact - it's so darn expensive that if anyone of you have been using and following OpenAI's adventure into this success, you'll notice that they had to DIAL BACK their latest models, because it became to expensive to provide to the masses, in other words, you got thousands of people on Reddit proving how "dumb" LLMs have become after the dialback, they met with MASSIVE protests because of this.

But think about this, if its THIS expensive, how much of a HYPE bubble dont you think we're in right now? This is why I think your jobs are still safe, at least for the next 10+ years until we have better GPUs, which in turn will have to be a lot more energy efficient. So you're safe for now, if you use it as a tool and don't freak out because of it, that is.

What's worse is all that A.i. slop we're facing, all those "let's get rich of VAO 3" scheemers on Youtube that now automated the process of "Cocomelon" stuff, aka AI videos made for content, mindless drivel content, but they just copy anything in existence, and make AI content out of it, untill we're so swamped that we don't know how to find real content anymore, youtube don't care because it means more money, the Scheemers don't care, because the more AI slop they make, the more money they make.

And ofc. this ends up in a sea of AI garbage, now that is a FAR bigger problem in the future than joblessness. because you aint gonna be out of a job, as long as you're creative and willing to change.