His policies are completely out of touch with reality. Everything about his behavior screams "sociopath". The guy deliberately moved materials around in Mar a Lago to hide them from searches by government agencies with the authority to repossess government secrets, repeatedly spouts Russian propaganda that nearly every media organization in the world other than Fox News and a few even more far-right outlets agree is full of s**t, and basically acts like Putin's puppet when it comes to America's position in the world. On top of that, literally nothing I've ever seen him say sounds like a coherent sentence uttered by someone who is fully mentally competent. Listening to him makes me understand Van Gogh.

At this point, I've concluded that he is basically second-term Reagan; his strings are being pulled by powerful oligarchs, both at home and abroad, convincing him to vote for things that benefit them, and he is basically exactly what the Republicans accused Biden of being. Funny, that. The Republicans keep accusing the Democrats of doing things that they themselves are doing. Over and over and over again.

And yet you think that he is qualified to be POTUS. Even if he had not encouraged, or at least completely failed to talk down, an uprising against the U.S. government led by his followers in his name, even if the various commissions concluded not that he wasn't a Russian agent, but rather that he had obstructed justice to ensure that they could not prove that he was, even if none of these things were true, he still would be someone who inspires through hateful fear mongering, spewing anti-immigrant, anti-world trade propaganda that is contrary to the success of this nation financially, contrary to Christian values, and contrary to basic human decency, and he does these things precisely because he knows that fear will motivate a large number of people who don't actually understand how governments operate, how economies operate, etc. to look back longingly at "the old days" that are completely infeasible to return to because technology moved on decades ago, and vote for him based on downright absurd claims that he will somehow return us to those "glory days" (short life expectancy and all) because he somehow cares about them and their problems, despite ample evidence now from both his terms that he cares only about things that benefit him, either directly or by benefitting people with large amounts of political power in his inner circle.

No, people who believe that Harris, someone who spent most of her career prosecuting criminals, who has spent years in government learning how it really works, is more qualified to be President than Donald Trump, whose failed first administration was so toxic that he lost southern states for the first time in a long, long time, whose businesses are only successful in the "they haven't completely failed yet" sense of the word, who apparently doesn't even understand how tariffs work, much less how the rest of government works, and who has spent most of his time so far releasing criminals, violating the constitution flagrantly, and generally making a mess of everything he touches, are likely neither mentally ill, low IQ, nor necessarily folks who listen only to specific news channels.

Try again, this time with more than cheap ad hominem attacks, which in case you haven't noticed, will score you zero points on Slashdot.

What he means is that Tesla is not offering an upgrade path.

That sucks. We lost a lot of good people in those layoffs. Google is still trying to reduce headcount through smaller, incremental layoffs but mostly through attrition.

BTW, I work for Google, going on 15 years now. I'm not trying to defend Google; my job is writing code, not PR. But I worked a lot of places before Google, and Google's email retention policy isn't remotely unusual. If anything, at 18 months it's a little longer than most places. I'm not sure how the rest of the corporate world is handling chats; chat wasn't yet a big thing in corporate communications when I joined Google in 2011. It was used in many places then, but mostly with departmental chat servers (e.g. IRC, Jabber, etc.) and under the legal radar.

I'm not sure what the policies were in the past, but as of now it's 30 days for 1:1 chats, 18 months for group chats, same as emails.

Whose theory is that? It's not a law, and it's certainly not what the legal department of any corporation will say.

Indeed. Not just "evil" stuff, either. Anything that could be interpreted badly when presented out of context with the right spin. For example, basically all HR discussions everywhere (in the US, at least) are conducted by phone or video conference, then followed by carefully crafted written documentation, because HR is a legal minefield. This is true even when everyone is doing their level best to be fair and reasonable.

Sure. That's the reason all American companies have auto-deletion policies. It's not about saving storage space.

I haven't seen any allegations that Google failed to comply with contractual retention requirements, and that doesn't seem to be what the judges are complaining about. Have you seen anything like that?

Not sure who "The Cackler" is. If you mean Kamala Harris, she's a heck of a lot more qualified for the job than any twice-impeached convicted felon with a long history of sociopathic behavior and obvious word-salad dementia speech patterns could possibly be.

Ultimately, in the end, there may be no good candidate — only mediocre and bad candidates. I would never have voted for Harris in a primary, because her record is too Republican for my tastes in many areas. But she was clearly better than the alternative. And now that we're seeing President Trump doing all of the horrible things he said he was going to do, that his defenders kept saying he would never really do, those of us who voted for her are saying, "I told you so."

Remaining physically and mentally active in general slows the progression. And in spite of obesity being worse, we're doing more to combat at least some of the negative effects of that, and people are retiring later and working for more years, and people are doing more mentally because of tech. All of these things likely play a role.

Reduction in organophosphates also likely contributes (banned for in-home use since 2005). Declining use of trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene since the mid-1990s has also probably helped, as those are likely linked to PD. (They are also in the process of banning those completely in the U.S.; consumer use has been banned since 2016.)

BSE, scrapie, deer chronic wasting disease.... Officially, it is generally believed that scrapie isn't transmissible to humans, but this is likely false.

But nothing really interesting happened in that area until they banned using animals in animal feed in 1997, and a majority of the impact from that would already have been realized, because the incubation period is usually single-digit years, though it can be longer in some cases.

Alzheimer's and Parkinson's both involve misfolded proteins. Call them prions or don't, but that sure sounds like a prion disease to me. And tau proteins exist in cows as well. It wouldn't surprise me at all if differences in the way beef is slaughtered has reduced the risk of transmission of these proteins contaminating the food supply and reduced the rate of those diseases over time.

In particular, I think the age at which cattle are slaughtered has decreased over time, and the level of prions in a diseased animal increase over time, so that decrease in slaughter age means reduced risk of transmission to humans.

So... maybe that might be part of it.

The auto-deleting chat criticism is a bit weird to me. Every big corporation I've worked for (four of them -- including Google -- as an employee, and maybe two dozen more as a contractor/consultant) has had automatic email deletion policies, and before that they had policies requiring memos and other written communications to be shredded/burned. Offices had boxes with slots in them that you dumped documents in and the contents were collected and destroyed daily. Automatic deletion of chats seems like a straightforward extension of typical American corporate policy. I'm not saying such policies are "right", just that they're routine. They're routine, of course, because the US is a very litigious country.

The flip side is that American corporations also have document preservation processes in place, so that any employee whose job might touch on a topic of active litigation has their documents and communications exempted from automatic destruction. There might be legitimate criticism of Google if Google didn't have those processes or didn't use them appropriately, but I've never seen any claim of that in any of the news about the court cases.

But maybe there's some nuance to Google's actions that I've missed.

Where I find current-generation AI helpful in writing code is not in writing it so much as modifying it. It's especially helpful when you decide to make some change that requires updating dozens of lines of code over several files. Sometimes such changes can be performed by a simple search and replace, but often you have to examine and edit each one individually. It's tremendously helpful to be able to tell the LLM to go find all the places a change is required and make it. You still have to look at each edit performed by the AI, but nearly all of them are usually right, and this takes a fraction of the time.

Another way AI is useful to me is due to my particular context: Android (the OS, not an app). Android builds are slow. Even incremental builds that don't touch any "Android.bp" file (a Makefile, basically) take 2-3 minutes, minimum, because that's how long it takes the build system to determine that only the one file you touched needs to be rebuilt. Anyway, this creates a situation where the typical edit/compile/test cycle takes several minutes, most of which is just waiting for the machine. If you touch an Android.bp, it's more like 8 minutes. If you context switch during that wait, to read email or edit a doc or whatever, the context switch overhead begins to kick your butt.

But what I've found is that I can give the AI a task, like "Write unit tests for feature X", then start the build/test and context-switch away. The code the AI wrote won't compile or work, but that's fine (and also true of my own code, which rarely builds and executes perfectly the first time). When the build/test run is complete I don't mentally context-switch back into the coding task, I just copy-paste the output to the AI, which will make some changes (I don't bother looking at what), and I start the cycle again. After a half-dozen iterations of this (~20 minutes), the AI will have something that builds and passes, and then I actually switch back to see what it did and determine what needs to be improved. Usually I find some small tweaks that need to be made. Depending on their nature I either make them myself or tell the AI to do it.

This would be vastly better if the AI could run the build/test script itself and iterate to a working state without my input. I expect that will be possible soon -- and probably works for some environments now. But even as-is, the AI makes it so that while I don't actually produce the code any faster (maybe even a little slower), I'm more productive overall because I can take care of other things while the AI is working. The small interruptions to copy-paste output don't require a context switch.

I find that current LLMs are roughly equivalent to a smart but extremely inexperienced entry-level programmer who just happens to have thoroughly read and absorbed the language manual and all of the available APIs. If you use them the way you would a such a junior programmer, it works pretty well. You don't ask them to write the tricky code for you (or if you do you expect their work to need significant improvement) and you don't expect them to have a good sense of what good design or architecture are. But they can still be extremely useful.

And, of course, they're still getting better. Fast.

Actually your third link says some residential consumers were paying wholesale rates in 2024. I don't have a lot of sympathy for them, though, since they knew what could happen after 2021.

I think those 2021 events are why you can no longer find market pricing plans for residential consumers. It's all fixed rate (though it can vary by tiers, it's still fixed for a given amount of usage).

You don't need to simulate all that, at least initially. Scan in the brains of people who are at extremely high risk of stroke or other brain damage. If one of them suffers a lethal stroke, but their body is otherwise fine, you HAVE a full set of senses. You just need to install a way of multiplexing/demultiplexing the data from those senses and muscles, and have a radio feed - WiFi 7 should have adequate capacity.

Yes, this is very scifiish, but at this point, so is scanning in a whole brain. If you have the technology to do that, you've the technology to set up a radio feed.

If someone can log in, they have your password, which is a concern in and if itself. But I agree about 9 of 15. 90 of 150 distributed globally would be a more practical number from a data loss perspective, because it is awfully easy to take down 7 servers, but much harder to take down 61. I assume that makes the crypto harder (but I hope not less robust), but if you are just decrypting a key that you then use for the real decryption work, that might not be a big deal.

The Koch Brothers paid a bunch of scientists to prove the figures being released by the IPCC and clinate scientists wrong. The scientists they paid concluded (in direct contradiction to the argument that scientists say what they're paid to say) that the figures were broadly correct, and that the average planetary temperature was the figure stated.

My recommendation would be to look for the papers from those scientists, because those are the papers that we know in advance were written by scientists determined to prove the figures wrong and failed to do so, and therefore will give the most information on how the figures are determined and how much data is involved, along with the clearest, most reasoned, arguments as to why the figures cannot actually be wrong.