Plenty of businesses spread one city at a time. They seem to have solved one, the next is a different challenge. It's not all or nothing.

I see this new stuff as essentially similar to spreadsheet software when that first became widespread. I've heard of a trade show in the 70s or 80s where accountants wept when they realized the years of time they would save. But you still had to be an accountant -if you enter the wrong formula in a spreadsheet and drag it down the workbook, it's all going to be garbage. There are many types of things a spreadsheet program can do well, and others which may technically be possible but are increasingly hacky and run with abysmal performance. Generative AI is just another tool in the box. It does some things great with little effort, but using it to solve some problems starts to resemble trying to get Doom to run inside excel. Maybe you can make the tool do it, but it would be worse than other tools, and in some cases laughably worse.

Pieces fell to ground after launch were intact, so much so that they were identified as Russian based on writing on them. This is no ordinary spacecraft. The lander made extensive use of titanium and inconel, and was designed to withstand 300 G's of acceleration and 100 atmospheres. Sizeable chunks will make it to the surface. It's a near certainty.

I use perplexity, which uses many of the major models. YMMV.

For me, there is a huge time savings for most of my searches. There was a winner of a chocolate chip cookie contest recently who basically gathered all the cookie recipes they could find, and then took the average of all the ingredients, cooking times, etc. It took them a while and involved a spreadsheet and manual data entry. But apparently it was worth the effort and made for a good cookie. Generative AI can do that in seconds, and for all kinds of topics. What dimensions should I use to build a Carolina Wren birdhouse? Paid search gives the direct answer, with links to the references in case I want to check them. It is a huge time saver for everyday tasks where exact precision isn't necessary.

It can also easily create tables comparing products when I'm looking to buy something. Obviously it is just pulling from the marketing copy and specifications, and the data is only good as what is posted ("this product offers superior xxx compared to yyy", even if that is just a marketing claim), but that's the same data I would be trolling through and trying to make my own comparison. Burning a nickel or dime worth of electricity per query doesn't really concern me, my time is valuable and a product which does more than just indexing websites and listing the most relevant ones is worthwhile. Most of the time I just want the answer, not a list of places where I might or might not find the answer.

Maine is a very unique case in the US. Electricity costs are high, but other fuels are also expensive because heating fuels are generally delivered to each residence by truck, not pipeline. In huge areas of the US, natural gas is stupidly cheap. In my city, even the most efficient heat pumps would be 2x the operating cost of a natural gas furnace. The article is specifically about the UK, electricity in the UK costs 2-3 times more than the US average. They've also had recent supply shocks for both natural gas and electricity which saw prices skyrocket. People there may be looking at their already high electric bills and choosing to go with what may be the cheaper option for both the short and medium-term.

The theater licensing is completely broken. For just one example, there's a reasonable demand to screen Independence Day (1996) in the US around the first week of July. Why doesn't that happen then? A couple years ago I asked two theaters nearby (one a large chain) and was told it was impossible to get the rights.

Tons of other companies already have their own loader software. Adobe just off the top of my head but there are lots. Microsoft could easily make the case that they're merely joining a trend that their competitors were already on.

That's just not true. China exports a lot of stuff, but only 15% of their exports go to the US.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.visualcapitalist.c...

Their economy is also larger than just exports. Exports make up around 20% of the Chinese economy.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdata.worldbank.org%2Find...

There are other factors, but on a cowboy calculus basis, Chinese exports to the US make up only 0.15 x 0.20 = 3% of Chinese GDP. The US is certainly a large customer but China would not collapse if those sales didn't happen.

I recently set up an AOL account. They offer free email nowadays. It's unashamedly targeted to old people, but most of the interface design decisions are decent. In some of my business interactions, it's a positive to signal that I've been around a long time. Free email is about utility, vanity, and how much one trusts the vendor. I've lost trust in Google but shifting away is as difficult as changing banks, if not more so.

It's like giving a user a command line prompt with little or no documentation or instructions. That was borderline acceptable 40 years ago but the broader population just isn't going to have a good time with it. A lot of generative AI falls into this but Apple's implementation seems to be particularly awful.

I think there is not much change here other than formalizing policies which were already in place. It's common knowledge among guidance counselors and those considering college that the top schools provide enough financial assistance so that anyone with the grades can afford it. Harvard may not have been communicating that clearly, but it has been the case for decades. The transparency is a good step though.

It's also not uncommon for chips to have undocumented circuits used for diagnostics at the factory either.

In the previous article, several people estimated between 4 and 50m accuracy on this basis. Seems to be in the ballpark of what they are getting. Whether or not that is useful enough I will leave to those who know better.

Billionaires have been whipping the serfs a lot lately. More than usual.

Even if banks paid interest on such a short time period, that would be the equivalent of taking back the ice cream but letting the accountholder keep the sprinkles. They wouldn't be able to keep the interest.