That's over simplifying things a bit, but yeah, we have fundamental infrastructure issues in the UK with any proposed mass rollout of AI DCs. While we do have surplus generating capacity, to the point that we occasionally need to pay people to use it, and more generating/storage capacity (especially local domestic, which frees up baseload capacity for industrial uses) is being added all the time, there are some other more fundamental UK issues. Firstly, the national power distribution grid is in need of some serious upgrades to support some of this. The South West in particular is on a very thin high tension thread that currently has insufficient capacity for the the planned relocation of the UK's nuclear deterrent subs to Devonport and associated growth, for instance. Secondly, and this seldom gets mentioned in the context of all these new AI DCs that are being planned or the "shouty kids/let's save water" adverts currently being run, is that we have some severe water supply pressures as a result of climate change combined with a decades long lack of investment in new reservoirs and upgrading leaky Victorian era distribution networks. Care which part of the country is currently experiencing the brunt of a "once in several decades (but is now expected to happen every few years)" severe drought event? Yup, it's the home counties, where most of the planned DCs are supposedly going to get built!

Those all have technical/construction solutions though, the third does not, and that is that the home counties in particular are notorious for the NIMBYism, although they are far from alone in that - just a few days ago a massive planned solar/storage facility in Scotland got pushed back, and possibly nixed, because of it. Sure, there are totally valid arguments against concreting over large expanses of what is currently greenbelt to some extent, even before you get to water/power shortages, pollution (including noise), additional traffic, and all the other impacts, but there have to be some limits. One solution I like for this (albeit not without some quite complex zoning issues due to suitable areas for building supply not being equal to where the supply is needed) is to make supply, or cost of supply, proportionate to acceptance of local capacity build outs. If you want your power to be generated in someone else's backyard, then you'll pay more for the privilege while they get a rebate. If you object to that proposed new local reservoir, then you don't get to complain if you need to start buying potable water in bulk during the next drought. If, as in the case of DCs, you are putting in disproportionately high demands for supply, then you either pay - up front - for a suitable proportion of the required upgrades, or commit to some other form of reimbursement with suitable early termination clauses if you want a longer timescale.

Then again, this *could* just be Microsoft wriggling off the hook because they're starting to think the AI bubble might be somewhat overinflated and therefore they might not be needing all that capacity they've been saying they are going to build afterall, but don't want to start the stampede for the exits until they're already through the door.

I don't want to reinstall Windows.

I'd rather use an app that disables those features without fully reinstalling my computer's operating system.

I feel like the government might step in with a lawsuit about that.

I'm not a fan of Firefox's new two-week release cadence, to be quite honest.

On Windows 11, Copilot and the News Widget forcibly use Microsoft Edge no matter what you set your default to and it simply can't be changed.
It's annoying and unfair.

Thanks for the advice.

I think I'll move to Kubuntu since both personally and professionally I have moved to Ubuntu.

Do AI agents ignore robots.txt?

Asking for a friend.

Yeah, it was rather disappointing. I think they missed a few checkboxes on the KDE neon release.

Hmm, I downloaded and installed KDE neon and it turns out to be still based on Ubuntu 24.04. When it offered to upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 it failed with hundreds of errors.

What's the best Linux distribution that features KDE? Kubuntu?
Something else?

Damnit! UCT != CUT either, which is yet *another* standard timezone, using the same three letters. Cue oblig. XKCD on standards...

Above should have used CUT, not UCT.

It's more likely to be much ado about nothing for almost everyone apart from a few astronomers, rocket scientists, and similar groups, all of which you'd expect would have the braincells to figure it out, but will no doubt have a few in the mix that don't. Other standard timezones exist (the various UTCs are != UCT), so if your system is working fine on one of those then it will continue to do so.

UCT also moves backwards *and* forwards continually, mostly due to gravitational variances due to other celestial objects, changes in the Earth's spin, and all the other things that effect planetary orbits; some years Earth (and all the other things going around the sun) will orbit a little faster, others a little slower, so it's not a cumulative year on year increase to the delta, although there can be a run in one direction or the other for a while. Assuming it averages out OK, then there's a distinct possibility that by the time an adjustment really is required no one will be left around to care about it, let alone do it.

The general expectation in industry is that the number of bugs must be finite and, even though every change might introduce new ones, as the AI models find new ones and they get fixed the total number of yet to be be found bugs will come down. As with Microsoft's recent run of consecutive record breaking Patch Tuesdays, the conclusion being drawn is that sooner or later the number of bugs being found and fixed after each analysis session will start to fall and, subsequent to that, normal patching service, albeit on a hopefully much more robust codebase, will resume.

Where it gets a little more sticky is that, while finite, the number of available bugs to find and fix could still be extremely large, so the time required to regress back to previous, or even better than previous, bugfix development volumes is unknown. If your bet is that duration is quite short (less than a year, say), then why would you want to encumber your business with a raft of new full time employees all wanting things like health benefits and severance protections, when you can just bring in some contractors and dump them at will when they are no longer needed? If you're thinking it's a long game, then at least some full time employees is probably a better option because eventually they will be cheaper than using contractors, with how long that is dependant on your typical salaries for each. BoA is presumably betting on the former scenario based on what they understand of their codebase and whatever additional volume of bugs AI has found in it so far.

Using AI, especially. One thing that struck me in the last few days was in relation to comments on the story about the person who has used AI to vibe-code clones of part of the Adobe graphical tools suite and has since (within a few days!) gone on to close the core Microsoft Office apps in the same way. Apparently (I have not checked it personally) this software, albeit still in "beta", runs like a bag of spanners and while, it might superficially look like the tools it's emulating, lacks the depth of many features and some are missing entirely. The code is also impenetrable, so the "it's open source, the community can check for malware" argument is even less practicable than it usually is. It's an interesting demo of where things are currently at, but ready to go, drop in replacements, they are not.

Sure, there was the obvious flame war about the pros and cons of "AI", implications for copyright, potential to be sued, etc., but what was almost completely absent was any kind of reality check about how coding works in practice when a PHB is in charge. You know, the kind that totally sees the OpEx of some license or other going out, has read about this AI-driven vibe-coding stuff, is *totally* on board with the concept of "ship it and let the users find the bugs", joins the dots, and tasks some hapless AI-literate (that's what the CV said, anyway) intern on vibe-coding a replacement. You just know that's either going to start happening Real Soon Now, or already is, in all sorts of places that should know a LOT better than that, especially given the issues with the code shat out in the examples above.

Many of them, and quite likely many of their clients/users too, are going to get quite badly burnt, I expect.

Game consoles are a step above laptops and a step below desktops.

The way I can play games without endlessly tweaking options makes the game consoles win for me.