eVTOL man-carrying craft (flying taxis and flying cars) are not yet economically viable -- and won't be until we have a whole new generation of batteries with higher energy densities and cycle-lives. At the current cost of operation, these are a solution looking for a problem.

Hell, China can't sell all the EVs it makes so the chances of them selling any of these is....

Dupe or not, worth leaving this here as a reminder that no, China EV sales are not imploding. Debunked rubbish.

You'd be surprised how difficult that actually is. Take the role of a DJ for instance - a good DJ will know what genre they're doing, play well know things from that genre but also introduce new music to keep it fresh. They might also step outside the genre a little - not too far so it's not dissonant with the rest of their set, but just far enough to give a break and a moment of "ah, that's nice/romantic/gnarly/metal/" for the listener.

It's a skill, and if you haven't got that ability to start with then you're unlikely to be able to give the correct prompts to create it. You might well get a lot of identical things, but a listenable varied set is more than that.

A worry might be SteamOS as a requirement, rather than as simple support. You could imagine kernel modules being developed for 'anti-cheat' and them running under SteamOS but not some other distro that may (justifiably) block them.

This is the most (in fact only) interesting thing about the announcements to me. Must say I'm not sure about it - can't see how mouse+keyboard style games, which the original Stream Controller was explicitly designed to work well with, would pan out.

I have hugely customised layouts for several games to the point where I can't imagine playing them without it - they tend to be RPG games like Skyrim and Elder Scrolls Online. It's that style of game I'm trying to imagine mapping to the new layout, and to be honest gen1 looks more amenable to me at first glance. Hope to be proven wrong though.

Why does Microsoft care what browser you use? Why do they even make a web browser? Revised: Why do they bother taking someone else's open-source browser and rebranding it with their logo?

So it's good.... except for the bad shit.

Nothing would make it “help get a little closer to making it a reality” if it’s not physically possible, and there’s a very strong argument that that’s the case. If nothing else, the maximum specific tensile strength allowed by covalent bonding - which is fundamental physics that we can’t change - combined with the reality of defects in a 36,000 km cable - is far below what’s needed to build a space elevator in Earth gravity. It might be possible to build a space elevator on the Moon or even (in the far future) on Mars, because their gravity is such that real materials could potentially do the job. But doing that involves bootstrapping an entire offworld industry, which is far beyond anything even the most advanced nations are capable of currently, let alone a technologically stunted oil state.

There’s no chance they’d actually succeed in building a space elevator. The Line is at least theoretically physically possible with current technology, even if it was always an obviously spectacularly bad idea. A space elevator is not.

When I was in college circa 2000, my undergraduate macroeconomics professor pointed out why the US is so attractive to corporations. "If you want to setup shop in China," he said, "you will need to pay for your own backup generator because the power grid isn't reliable like it is here." He went on to explain similarly about labor - how the US constantly produces a supply of educated people (referring to us in the classroom). So when you incorporate in the US, you have everything you need.

For decades people have predicted this would change, and the time has finally arrived. From 2010 to 2020, the US built 1 new nuclear reactor, while China built 30. Education? While we debate subsidies for solar, China covers entire mountains in solar panels. Foreign student enrollment dropped 15% overall, with big universities seeing as much as 63% decline (DePaul University). The foreign students paid disproportionately more tuition, so universities are going to experience a budget declines next year.

We are digging our own grave.

The solution is to do their own work! Or at least check it! This use of AI is like when people just Google for something and copy/paste the first hit.

What the news doesn't show is the millions of people using AI successfully every day. We know that every day people incorrectly use hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, drills, cars, and guns. Yet they are not declared useless. AI is a tool, and in the hands of a someone with genuine interest in using the tool appropriately, it is a useful one. The best path forward is to continue to make fun of the lazy fools who use it as a crutch and don't even read their own court filings.

Sometimes ChatGPT does search the web, but I believe it uses Bing not Google. Microsoft has a private Bing search that comes with privacy contracts to prevent leaking of corporate secrets.

I suppose ChatGPT could use Google sometimes too, or it could be that some researcher at OpenAI took conversation excerpts and put them into a Google search box.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

But three lefts do.

I think they mean sink.

Sorry but from an outside perspective that just sounds nuts. So let's take your 'worst case' - $129M overall cost making it $434 per entry - you're saying there are only 297,235 (129M / 434) tax payers in the US? A quick search from me shows the number of filings to be at 145M+. If everyone could file for free, that $129M would be 88c per person.

And I'm speaking from experience. I'm in the UK. I've recently filed my annual self-assessment tax. I used the free service on the UK government web site and the thing that took the longest was working out how much to put as charity donation. Whole thing done in less than an hour and a half.

I seriously cannot comprehend the approach where you have to pay to be able to pay someone. It's...well...it's nuts.