I have learned to be very deeply sceptical, of statements like that about China, specifically. People tend to take information from the CCP's official state-run media, at face value, and repeat it as if there were any chance at all of its actually being accurate.

If the government of Venezuela or Iran or North Korea makes press-release-type grandiose positive claims, everyone just assumes they are lying. But none of those regimes blatantly lie anywhere near as often as the CCP, and yet lots of morons ("people" if you want to be diplomatic) keep accepting Chinese government statements as fact, no matter how many times they get caught lying about every single thing ever.

So my question is, where did Carbon Brief (whoever they are) get their data on Chinese emissions? Because if they got it from official Chinese government sources, as almost everyone seems to want to do, then it's basically guaranteed to be a big steaming heap of lies. I want to see a paper trail that shows they got the data from a source that did some kind of actual measurement or calculation, independently, a source that _didn't_ ultimately just accept whatever the Chinese government said about the matter.

If possible, I'm even more cynical than usual about this particular claim, because we know for certain that China was still building new coal-fired power plants last year.

Yes, because no kid has ever set a math book on fire. Especially not in fifth grade, round about the middle of March.

What?

Yeah, I gave up on Google a few months ago.

The problem I'm having, is finding a substitute that's worth beans.

Wikipedia is great for certain kinds of things, but it's not a general-purpose solution, as much as we might want it to be.

I've looked for other search engines, but they all suck like it's 1997.

Do *not* talk to me about Bing, or anything powered by its index (e.g., DDG). I don't want to spend five minutes crafting my search terms and then comb through twenty pages of results, just to find one little piece of information.

I want Google back. I mean, not the Google that exists now, that's useless. I mean I want the old Google, the one that still actually indexed the web and was good at relevancy ranking. I want that.

I think I might have to start mass-memorizing information again, like back when I was still in school. Or else give up on actually knowing things.

Gros Michel isn't extinct as such; it just isn't commercially cultivated any more. Live plants are still maintained in a number of locations, typically in isolation from other banana plants to prevent introduction of the disease.

It's from the AI-generated summary of what he said. Do try to keep up.

> Human touch is inversely correlated to anxiety, depression and stress.

Umm, no. Personal space, man, personal space. Respect the boundaries. Do not *touch* me.

> AI friends sounds like the stuff of a dystopian sci-fi movie.

I'm with you there. AI is worse than humans at basically everything, and friends are pretty not great in the first place, as they tend to constantly want to *interact* with you, and who wants that?

Therapy won't help. It almost never does. Pretty much the only circumstances under which a therapist can actually help you, are if you either are already motivated to change and just need some kind of framework or schedule or accountability to keep you on track, or if your main problem is bottled-up feelings that you just need to vent. If your problem is that you are a sociopath with no significant capacity for meaningful human relationships, a therapist isn't going to do squat about that. Honestly, it may make things worse, if it cuts into your already scarce "alone time".

Yeah, I came here to say pretty much exactly this. You beat me to it.

I mean, on the one hand, parts of that sound pretty great.

But I don't want to have to kill people, to keep them away from me. Can't they just, like, go away on their own, and mind their own business, and leave me alone?

Lots of humans are still creating content.

You just can't *find* most of it, because Google has de-indexed it to focus on "established brands" (i.e., on paying advertisers). And none of the other search engines that I'm aware of, were ever really worth using in the first place.

I don't think that's enough. In addition to re-enabling it, I think we also need to re-pin it to taskbar, and pin two different versions of it (regular and 365) to the Start menu, make extra sure it's set to run at login, and add some periodic notifications. Hmm, anything else? Can we bind a key combination that gets accidentally hit a lot, to open gaudily-animated Copilot window that takes several seconds to render in? That'd be great.

Who the heck uses *any* version of Windows, within the first six months after its release? That's completely insane. Honestly, I think Seven is the only version of Windows that I ever *have* used in its first year of existence. At the time, my analysis predicted that Seven would have very few disruptive changes or major buggy new features compared to Vista, giving it roughly the same deployment desirability as a service pack. I started deploying new computers with Seven in 2010, just a few months after its release; but I think it was more than three months.

Seven was by at least an order of magnitude the *least* buggy and *most* stable initial release of an operating system, that Microsoft has ever managed[1]. XP needed two service packs just to achieve basic levels of non-horribleness. Eight and Ten never got there at all, and Eleven, let's just say it's not there yet. Win2K was not quite as bad in this regard, but even it was pretty shaky before the first SP. NT3 and 4 were strictly worse than Win2k in this regard, and it's not even fair to compare the 95/98/Me product line, that's just a different animal altogether. (No memory protection of any kind, means that if you run any third-party software at all, stability is completely at its mercy. Same thing with DOS. So you can't even really evaluate the stability of one of these system, outside the context of the complete list of all the software it's going to be running.)

Footnote 1: PC-DOS 3.3, which may arguably have been less buggy, was released by IBM. Also, as discussed, it's not a fair comparison.

That isn't really the big problem. I mean, yes, that's an issue too, but it's secondary.

The main problem is, people don't want to use these cars on their own separate system of roads; they want to use them on the _same_ roads as existing human-driven cars. Consequently, it's not enough for them to be better drivers than a human. They also have to be able to _interact_ reasonably with human drivers and not unnerve them or cause them to behave more idiotically than usual. Humans have a marked tendency to respond to unexpected situations by suddenly deciding to panic and flail about, and it's important that any new stimuli introduced into the system, don't trigger that sort of behavior. Additionally, human drivers rely fairly heavily on a number of poorly-documented informal non-verbal communications mechanisms to communicate with one another, to the point where people get *more* upset if these conventions are violated, than some of the actual rules (like using a blinker light to signal a lane change, for example, which human drivers fail to do pretty often). Some of these informal communications mechanisms are things a driverless car could theoretically be programmed to do, but others, like making eye contact, are really not. The design and implementation of the driverless cars need to take that stuff into account, and so far they mostly haven't.

When I think of long-haul trucking, I think of drivers being away from home for multiple days at a time. Dallas-to-Houston is a single-day round trip; you could be home every single night. That's a much less undesirable job for a human driver, and not really what "long-haul" means at all, IME.

> Even CVS was better for the masses.

You're out of your chair. CVS was literally more of a hassle to use, than just making a fresh full copy of the entire codebase periodically ("cp -r version control").

git isn't perfect, but comparing it to CVS is disingenuous.