This means they didn't just take the old files and upscaled them.

Hear, hear. On the desktop it can at least be be made somewhat configurable via extensions, but on Android TV we're stuck with the mess YT decides to saddles us with. I just don't get why they don't give us tons of options to customize it to personal preference. Well, I guess I somewhat get it for non-premium, in that their incentive there is to keep people watching in order to generate ad revenue so that's their sole focus (and presumably the annoying choices they make serve that purpose), but for those with premium there's just no excuse.

According to Agora Energiewende, Germany has been a net importer since 2023.

Phasing out nuclear power before replacement sources were built, was probably not ideal. It's one of several reasons electricity prices across Europe has shot up since 2021, after being stable since 2008 (as far back as I found statistics for in the time I wanted to spend digging).

I see. As long as you can think of cities that are not affected by a heat wave, heat wave does not exist? Looking at the weather map, it seems to affect about half the continent. Just because you're not in that half, does not mean it doesn't exist.

Do you live in every area of every country in Europe, or just one that happens to not be hit by a heat wave? Because I'm in Norway, and the place has been melting for a while now. Here, heat wave is defined as five consecutive days with temperatures above 27 degrees, we've been getting 35 at times. Today's peak where I live was 30. The forecast currently indicates it might drop to 25-26 next week (which is still above normal for anything but a day or two across all of summer). Making it extra special, it has been hitting the entire country at once, something that's almost unheard of.

As for the general trend, the statistics point in one direction. The frequency of heat waves here have doubled compared to thirty years ago. Areas that have never before recorded a heat wave, are now getting them.

Thankfully, I have a heat pump, otherwise my life would have been utterly miserable for the past few weeks.

Thanks for the input.

What mainly caught my eye were phrases from the summary like "The problem is that the AI being used here makes human voice actors obsolete," which just doesn't seem to be applicable to this use case at all. There's just no conceivable way this feature could exist without TTS. If the summary had indicated it was over whether or not the estate had the authority to agree to the use, or that this wasn't cleared with the estate, or something along those lines, I wouldn't have thought much of it.

But, it seems JEJ had licensed his voice specifically for this type of use, and got paid for that. Based on other bits in the summary, where they claim to support the actor/estate's ability to do such licensing, this seems like it should be a non-issue. In the end, I don't care enough to dig into it. I was just wondering if I was missing something obvious.

From what I've seen, it's an LLM with a Darth Vader text to speech on top of it that players can interact with by voice. Are they arguing that they could provide a hundred thousand Darth Vader voice impersonators to interact with players real-time? Or is it a more generic "there is a voice there, give us money now" sort of thing?

Curious, I have no idea why someone would label that as trolling. I'm referencing events that have been in the news recently. Oh well.

I don't pay all that much attention to these things, but from what I've read they wouldn't be the first country to sign a Starlink contract in the apparent hope that being nice to Elon will make the trade war easier on them. If so, yes, bribery.

That seems like a bold claim to make. An entire country's grid goes down and you figure they instantly understand the root cause?

I mean, it would have been great if someone back in 2003 had stood up after a few minutes and yelled "there's a race condition in the management system!" when the US north east went dark, but that really only happens in movies. In reality, things like this can take months to investigate. Of course, the cause here might be a lot less subtle and more readily identifiable, but still.

In what way is this caving? If it's local law, they have to comply or leave the market. They're obviously not going to just pull out of the UK as a market, so instead of making data insecure for all of their customers by building a backdoor, they chose to comply by removing that feature in the UK. That is clearly the lesser of two evils, and the only ones in the wrong here are the UK government.

Being an early adopter was always a risk. There have always been products that did not materialize, or turned out to be crap, or that stopped working shortly after launch. It's just so much easier to reach a lot of people now, and the critical thinking abilities of entire nations is at an all time low, making for easy pickings.

I've backed a few projects, and I've been happy with them. I did not blindly back "this looks great!" projects, though. I did some research. I gauged the complexity compared to the proposed timeline and what they already had to show. I judged the amount of money they asked for up against what I thought seemed reasonable for the project goals. I evaluated whether the current state of technology seemed to even support the proposed features. There will always be risk in being an early adopter, but engaging brain before parting with money does mitigate things quite a bit.

The Humane pin was not hard to spot as high risk. Heck, anyone asking for money for anything "AI" should raise immediate red flags for everyone. I don't remember anyone being surprised when it released and was absolute crap. On the other hand, they did make an actual product of sorts. So, there's that. It's rather telling that in the world of AI products, the Humane pin is a bit of a success story in that it wasn't a complete scam.

My phone's information screen on this setting doesn't specify that, but if that's true then you're right that biometric unlock would not work, which would increase the hassle level a bit.

I have a somewhat similar issue with my smart watch. It runs a backup to the phone, which then further backs that up into the cloud. The problem is, they designed it with "no one ever turns off their devices" in mind, so it will only run a backup in the middle of the night. Which is when both my phone and watch are shut off. There's no way to trigger the backup manually. So I either leave both on overnight once in a while, or live with "watch not backed up in over 7 days!" warnings. Sigh.

It just locks the phone, it doesn't make it explode. It's up to each user to decide if the extra hassle of unlocking after any false positives outweighs the added security of having the feature enabled.