Dragons like nerds too.

Flambéd. With ketchup.

It's laughably full of hyperbole and overlooking of practicalities too - like "millions of alternative browsers". Hundreds, maybe, and mostly toy projects based on a handful of opensource engines, which often don't work reliably because some dumb websites have coding didn't include the browser ID amongst those they're customising their UX to and don't simply default to basic standards compliant code when that happens, so that "millions" is actually more like "tens" in practice, and good luck getting traditional corporate IT to install something they haven't heard of too, so we're down to three, maybe four, depending on the OS's in use.

Which brings us to the likely real reason for this plea. He codes Ruby on Rails and webapps. If you did that, wouldn't you like to only have to worry about supporting one defacto standard browser engine and fsck anyone that doesn't toe the line? Oh, wait, we do! There are standards for HTML, CSS, and all the other web technologies - albeit standards that don't evolve as fast as some might like - but there is still a perfectly acceptable baseline you can code for and be (more or less) guaranteed to have your page display as expected in any sufficiently compliant browser. If you decide to go and code your site for some proprietary extensions or tags by one vendor or another based on brower ID, that's *your* problem, not the user's.

"Microsoft fought the web tooth and nail back in the 90s because they knew that a free, open application platform would undermine lock-in -- and it did!"

Open source or not, Chrome/Chromium or the highway is still lock-in. And I can guarantee you, if we get to that point and Google still controls Chrome/Chromium, they'll come up with some creative, yet totally bogus, reason why it's absolutely essential for Manifest v4 to further cripple ad-blocking and privacy protecting extensions.

Close. REN (the Portugese operator) is now putting the cause down as "due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 KV), a phenomenon known as 'induced atmospheric vibration'".

I think that means rapid changes in ambient temperature causing sufficent expansion and contraction of the HT cables to cause enough physical vibration in the lines which then presumably either led (via a disruption in the transmission frequency?) to protection devices tripping at the substations.

Maybe not.

For such a widespread outage they've probably had cascading failures, very rapidly, across a large part of the Iberian power grid. Some of those may have caused outages at different substations, ranging from tripped relays that can be easily reset to things that have physically blown and need replacement. It's entirely possible they have a pretty good idea of what needs fixing or resetting, but no idea yet what and where the cascade started from. Just because one site failed first doesn't mean that wasn't in response to an issue at another sending too much current, and so on.

Also, after the accusations and counter accustations of the recent LHR outage, I suspect they don't want to go off half-cocked and start an avoidable blame game so are making sure they've got all the facts before they start making any firm statements.

That was in reference to ElevenLabs, not CADA. They have what appears to be essentially just a text-to-speech engine, but it's being talked about as if it were AI, and was presumably marketed to CADA as AI - hence cashing in. TFS is a bit light on what it was actually doing, but probably 90% of daytime radio music shows boil down to announcing songs, playing them, and then announcing the next one when it finishes with a bit of fluff and occasionally inserting some ads in-between. Any half-competent programmer could script nearly all that using their pick of any number of languages and their TTS engine of choice, no AI required:

Select song (random or next on playlist)
Read in metadata
Announce metadata through TTS in one of a number of randomised formats ("Song X by Act Y", "Act Y's Song X", etc.), combined with some semi-random filler drawn from another list
Play song, then fade out to:
If {some test} = true, insert some random non-song announcement filler from a pre-set list piped through the TTS
If timer > 15min play some pre-recorded ads, then reset timer
Go to start

You'd kind of expect at least some airing of suspicions and discource on social media, at least. Perhaps not to the extent of Kate Middleton's photoshopped family photo, or the more recent suspicions around Joe Biden's Easter Gathering photo, but at least a few posts. TFS makes it seem that until Stephanie Coombes started asking questions this flew completely beneath the public radar during daytime radio in Sydney for several months, so it's not like we're talking a handful of Aussie rednecks working late in the outback and presumably a reasonable cross section of listeners from different demographics who didn't suspect.

Also, what seems to have piqued Coombes' interest wasn't the audio content, but rather the lack of a social media profile or obvious bio for "Thy" raising some rather obvious red flags. If CADA has taken the time to created a plausible background and social media persona for "Thy" that could be interacted with, it's entirely possible she wouldn't have followed up on it and "Thy" would still be broadcasting with no one being any the wiser. Sure, it's daytime music, so quite likely it's just going to be playing in the backgound in the workplace or whatever, and listeners not really paying all that much attention to it that might lead them to pick up on any audio cues it's actually an AI, but that's clearly the whole point of this "experiment", isn't it?

For that usage case the tech is clearly now good good enough for mass market, and even if they have to stick a "This is AI" disclaimer on it, I don't think that's going to worry them, or their background-muzak wanting listeners, too much, and you can bet this costs an awful lot less to kit out and run that a full-fledged radio recording & broadcasting studio. As the tech improves, I think we can absolutely expect to see it being deployed by more stations, and in more interactive shows with people actually calling in (and no doubt hilarity will ensure when some wag calls in and gets another AI talking to the radio station's AI).

ElevenLabs -- a generative AI audio platform that transforms text into speech

And write, apparently. Someone needed to produce the "script" that the AI host used, which may also have had some AI involvement I suppose, but ultimately this seems to be just a glorified text to speech engine trying to cash in on the AI bubble. Or maybe they took it to the next logical step and just feed it a playlist and it generates the necessary "filler" from that and what it can find online from a search of the artist and title, plus some randoms chit chat from a (possibly) curated list of relevant current affairs articles.

Frankly, if people couldn't tell for six months, then whatever they are doing is clearly good enough and the smarter radio DJs are probably already thinking about looking for other work or adding more interactive content like interviews into their shows. Talk Show type presenters probably have a little longer, but it's probably just a matter of time for them too.

Metric tons of *carbon*. It's two different statistics that are totally disconnected in TFS which, despite the headline, gave more details on the carbon production stats than the water consumption ones. Welcome to Slashdot & editors that publish content even worse than AI summaries...

Also, it's not like the water is "spent" like fuel and can't be recycled; it's still the same H2O that went into the system, just somewhat warmer. If you're being efficient, then it would be possible to reuse or reclaim at least some of that heat in a co-located "partner facility" that can use it, or send it through a heatpump to generate some electricity. Assuming it's potable, then feeding it into hot water systems as partially heated water will make those more efficient, otherwise it can go into industrial systems that needs heated water. Another solution already deployed by at least one DC was to send it to a local theme park to help offset their water heating costs for waterslides, logrides, etc.

Coral only grows in shallower waters and, although there have recently been a few reefs found a bit deeper than expected, you can still pretty much rule out any areas of open ocean beyond the litoral waters of the continental shelves. There are occassional finds of new reefs on sea mounts and in mostly uninhabitted archipelagoes, but that's awfully rare now, so it's pretty likely we're within a rounding error of knowing where every last one is.

UK too, although it's not so obvious. Two of the letters in the block of three are a - sometimes quite cryptic - reference to the location of the original registration centre back before everything got computerised, but the regional allocations have still been retained. There was a slight change when we moved from the two previous formats to the next one, but there are lists available online if anyone is curious (or just want to know where to go to showrooms in order to get a vehicle with their initials in the plate).

Sure, but as far as the court goes, I think this is probably comes back to establishing intent around Google's modus operandi and internal corporate interactions in the ad market. Even without an exclusivity clause, the likelihood it that Samsung are going to bundle a second AI tool, besides (possibly) their own is probably around zero, so that squeezes other players out of Samsung's sizeable share of the market. Plus however many other vendors bundle Gemini under similar agreements. They've already been found guilty, albeit subject to appeal, so my sense is that they are now trying to draw some lines along which Alphabet could potentially be broken up.

Ultimately, this isn't about destroying one or more of Alphabet's business units, it's about breaking them up so that the constituent pieces can each survive, either an independant concern or as part of another corporation, but also preventing any one of those parts from being able to similarly abuse their position in the market. For me, one way to do that (allowing for the fact they are not going to destroy Alphabet's ad business or stop them capturing user data, no matter how much we might want that), is to split the data capture / user tool parts from the ad-selling parts. Google (user tools) gets to provide data to anyone prepared to pay for access, as they do internally now with their own ad business, Google (ads) get to buy that data, and/or anyone else's, in order to place their ads. There are other potential units that could be split off as well, of course, but the fundamental issue here seems to be the union and dominance in data capture and selling ads based on that data within the same corporation.

Yes, it's pretty standard practice, but this has come to light as part of the abuse of monopoly / antitrust trial. Remember, if it's free, then *you* (or your data) are the product, so that Google is apparently paying an "enormous sum of money" to have this preinstalled means that your data it's hoovering up is going to be worth even more than that to Google when it comes to selling ads based on that data to their real customers.

Think about the kinds of stuff people feed into GAN tools, now imagine how much of that data could be used to better target ads, especially since it's linked to a specific hardware device, and from there to a specific person or very small related group of persons in the case of a tablet shared between family members. What's wrong here is that Google is, once again, leveraging one of its tools - Gemini - to help it dominate the ad-business because it has so much user specific data they've become pretty much the go-to place to place ads (along with Meta). It's that kind of abuse of market position to try and snuff out competition with search that led to the anti-trust case in the first place, and this just helps demonstrate to the court that it's Google's BAU.

I'm assuming they'd grab it in orbit, then reel it into a small capsule like the ones that have returned samples from the moon and the proposed similar mission to Mars. Once Vanguard-1 is safely inside, it's a re-entry burn and either a parachute assisted splashdown or touchdown as normal for returning capsules.

And the Sci-Fi horror movie you are looking for is probably The Andromeda Strain.

She won't have to shut it down. It'll go like this:

Site gets launched
Site gets flooded with far right hate speech
Site gets flooded with legal take down requests - that they have to ignore because "uncensorable"
Site gets shutdown by OFCOM (the UK's regulator) using the UK's anti-hate speech laws
Truss & Trump both blame the "deep state" and decry the lack of free speech in the UK[1][2]

1. Which is probably the whole point, especially since any funding will no doubt disappear at this point too. 2. As a reminder, the UK does not *have* any legally codified right to free speech; at best there's a tacit "gentleman's agreement" type thing that you are free to voice your opinion, but there are absolutely a whole bunch of things that you legally cannot say while doing that.

Certainly. I'd expect a lot of people to be reviewing both corporate and personal {x}aaS and other subscription type costs at the moment, either because they are already feeling financial pressure or in case circumstances change. I fully expect the likes of Adobe, Amazon Prime, Microsoft, Disney, HBO, Netflix, etc. as well as traditional printed media and things like mobile services, to see a reduction in their active users while there's so much financial chaos going on.

It's actually a good idea to that periodically anyway as you'll nearly always find a few zombie subscriptions you can't justify any more, and while they might only be a few bucks a month each, they can quickly add up to something much more meaningful. That applies to the corporate world too; some years back, I did a review of software licenses on a niche product that used FlexLM floating licenses and found there were *far* more licenses in the pool than were ever actually used at one time - that translated to an annual OpEx saving of around $250k.