Same. The other case in the summary has exactly the same issue:

"Florida was also the site of another Flock-related news story. ("Florida Deputy Allegedly Used Flock Cameras to Stalk 17-Year-Old Girl, Visiting Her at Work 9 Times".) The officer "was charged with official misconduct and accessing computer electronic devices without authority — both are third-degree felonies. In Florida, if he's found guilty on both charges, he could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison."

"Americans have no idea who's looking at that information, or why it has to be collected in the first place," U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday, adding "They deserve to know."

Schumer says Americans have no idea who's looking at that information, but they caught the cop and he's facing charges. If they didn't know, they wouldn't have found him. So this makes little sense?

Same as you, not a fan of flock and 100% agree with the 4th amendment concerns here. But if you're going to go after someone, use a story and an argument where the facts can't be easily explained away.

Or, perhaps, you could actually give some REAL benefits to off set the shit show this money suck is causing...

What does that have to do with the price of oranges in Somalia?

Seriously, you completely missed my point. At no point did I say that places with higher fertility rates have shared domestic responsibilities.

What I said was that flexible work schedules have shown to have some small impact on improving fertility rates in countries where the fertility rate is lower, but that improvement only shows up when the domestic responsibilities tend to be shared.

This paper published recently highlights that study, where in 38 countries studied (US, Canada, Brazil, Sweden, Poland, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, etc), countries with WFH options have a higher fertility rate by roughly .38, but in countries with a domestic or cultural gap in domestic responsibilities, like Japan and South Korea, the result was insignificant.

Man, you're like Senator Schmitt, thinking you have some gotcha details and then realize you had all the wrong facts.

Studies show only that flexibility in schedule actually improves birth rates, like remote work and the like.

And in general, it only works in countries who's cultures have shared domestic responsibilities. That isn't the case in Singapore, where women reportedly do twice as much domestic and household work while being expected to have a full time job as well. So instead of "pay people better", how about "Dads and Husbands step up".

Understand what this is. It's not about tech and it's not about criminal behavior, even though that's how it's being used.

The real issue is that they don't have a business model yet but financially their over their spurs. They need to justify raising hundreds of billions of dollars to keep the train going, to buy them time to figure out how people will pay for their offering. While in the meantime, Chinese models starting with DeepSeek simply pinged ChatGPT again and again and built models as good as ChatGPT for a tiny fraction of the cost.

That last one showed that frontier AI companies have no moat at all; once they spend billions building a new model and release it, anyone can simply ping the model's responses and build a copycat model for a fraction of the cost and compete directly with them. OpenAI has no answer to this.

So the answer is regulation and international treaties. I find it to be no coincidence that an "uncontrolled AI model breached a government website" at exactly the same time that AI and international regulation is being discussed at the UN. Because if OpenAI had an uncontrolled model that could do this, then a Chinese firm, which of course OpenAI doesn't control, can do this too.

Also, you know what needs to happen? We need to slow down AI Development because apparently what they built is so powerful that there is a 10% chance that AI can kill all humans. We clearly need to focus on safety first, and controlling foreign AI assets too. You know what we need? We need to give the frontier AI model companies more hundreds of billions of dollars to focus on safety because they clearly cannot generate revenue while they build in the right safeguards. It's not at all that the revenue isn't going to show up and there is no potential return on investment, no it's about safety.

It's all a ploy to keep the investor money flowing, or to get a government bailout, while trying to put in international regulations that will slow down the copycats that will drive down their pricing.

This guy's newsletter/blog, PeaceQuest, which is a Canadian newsletter focused on environmental causes (so understand the core message is very opinionated and not formally news) actually goes into some useful historical details about this. Whether you agree or disagree with his particular political slant, he did do his research and has a nice summary of the history.

I've used AI to create stories for myself, to see this exact thing. The most notable thing about an AI-generated story is how contrived and cliche they are.

Now is that a problem? In the right context, no. It's fantastically awesome in minimizing my workload as a DM for my DnD game, because every DnD story is contrived and full of cliche's, that's what makes it fun.

But for books or real stories? Not really. Let's use some fantasy and sci-fi as an example, and a lot of what I'm about to say is cribbed from Brandon Sanderson's lectures on the development of the fantasy genre. While there were epic sagas before Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings really started a movement in this genre. Others came up with their own takes like Moorcock or Zelzaney, but Tolkien really spurred a movement. Then there was a second generation of fantasy novels, which followed the Tolkien formula: a group of people on a quest to stop an evil bad guy to save the world. While there are many derivations of that, everything from the first DragonLance novels to the Shannara series essentially sought to emulate Tolkien. Now we're in a third generation of fantasy, with authors like Sanderson or Joe Abercrombie, where fantasy worlds moved away from a good guys/bad guys epic quest trope to a model to explore aspects of politics and society where the magic in the world can create a scenario that our real world can't really have, and through that explore very human experiences and character arcs.

AI could never do that. AI could make a 1,000 derivative copies of Shakespeare, or Tolkien, or Robert Jordan, but it can't make the first one. It's only got what it's trained to do. And more importantly, Tolkien had the influence he had because people bought it, found it interesting and it was very successful, leading to a movement. People decided it was good, and so the genre was born.

When I need a fast hack-story to make my DnD campaign, or give my kid 5-10 different ideas for a story prompt to write about for his narrative writing homework, AI is fast and easy because it doesn't need to be good. But good novels, good literature, and new ideas, they can only come from humans and only humans can decide if it's good or not. AI can simply regurgitate what's there, often in a way that is somewhat less than the sum of it's parts. Is there a place for that? At my gaming table yes. But I do like Sanderson's views on this: books are an art that is participatory; the author writes 80%, and you the reader fill in the visuals, the voice, the tone and make your experience unique in collaboration with the human who wrote it. There is a soul to a well written book by a good author, you can just feel it, and what AI writes just does not have that soul or same experience; it simply isn't there.

It's tiered, with the tiers generally being for people of lower income status or other HUB zone-style areas to incentivize more solar. So you don't get much if you're the classical buyer of solar which is middle-or upper-middle income, but it's not nothing and yes it was on top of the Federal one before the Federal one expired in 2025.

The payback rate is pathetic; almsot negligble. But the rebate is 30% of the cost of the battery as a tax credit; 20kW runs around $15-$18k, so a 30% rebate is around $5,000+ tax credit (not deduction, tax credit), so it's worth it.

From the numbers I posted, you can see the grid operators are about 80-85% grid storage, so as some else posted, it's mostly for demand shifting. My colleague who lives in California and I were discussing it; essentially he charges his EV at night during Super off-peak (which his rate is around 10-15% of peak). He then charges up his batteries on his home solar; by about noon it's full even if he's running A/C and all the household appliances for the day. California will then draw off his system in the afternoon, between 15-25 kW per day; some days it's less than 5 and it's been as high as 28. He's got 20kW in storage, but has sun going to around 6 to 8 PM depending on the time of day, so his battery is right around 50% or less. The battery will run everything in the house, and often have enough left over to charge the EV again down to around 20% of the battery storage by the time the sun comes up the next day.

You just need to do it most days, but not all, during a given month, so you can have a few off days if you need the power for something. But in essence between the high incentive for super off peak's very low rates and the battery rebate to export to the grid, his behavior has shifted most of his demand to the off-peak times and the residential batteries are essentially an "overflow" or "as-needed" for the grid to supplement the grid-level storage. I imagine many Californians with home solar do the same thing as it makes economic sense and the batteries are easily controlled.

The California State government deserves many of it's very legitimate critiques, but in this case it did something right.

You're right the article is light on details. They did install 17,000 MW worth of batteries; ~13,500 was grid-scale storage and the rest was residential supported through rebates. The rebates on the batteries you earn over time, and to do so you must export some of your stored battery power back to the grid during peak hours. So about 15-20% was residential people incentivized to use their home batteries as storage and the rest was grid storage.

The article doesn't point out that California also added 27,000 MW of generation capacity also but good news it was almost entirely renewables, wind and solar mostly; natural gas power generation has been flat in it's power generation capacity. They still need the NG to help deal with the hourly volatility of the grid, but they didn't need to add any and overall usage is down around 50%.

And to your point, the other thing they did in the interim periods is halfway through this (2022) they asked people to voluntarily use less power via these Flex Alerts, sending the population alerts to limit usage. 2023 it was a colder year on average so they didn't have to go that path.

So overall it is a pretty good success story.

It's so hard to feel bad for these thieving companies complaining about theft. Add on top increased utilities the data centers are costing us, the jobs they keep promising to take from us, and the risks of AI they continually warn about - despite marching stead fast towards the cliff. phuck'em.

It means Iran has severely limited the capacity of the Strait of Hormuz. It's a hostage situation. No one is winning, but the objective isn't to win in the sense of completely closing the Strait, the objective is to create a sufficiently long period of pain that eventually the US and its allies walk away. Christ almighty, force multiplication is hardly a new concept.

There are plenty of places in North America without coverage because there's so little to cover. The Los Vegas metropolitan area has about three million people. So yes, that would be a place with cell phone coverage. By the same token, coverage in states like Montana, particularly in mountainous areas is spotty because, well, there's not a lot of people.

One thing that never happened was any country saying they wouldn't adopt electricity.

Some municipalities were slower than others to roll it out, for example many had plumbed gas lines already and the early days of electricity were seen as a luxury when they already invested in lighting, so rather they adopted it eventually but not right away. However it was also at the time proven with a clearly useful application (light) replacing an existing application (gas-powered lanterns) where people already had an expectation of the value and the cost. It's beholden on the AI labs to show that value to those they intend to sell to (and replace apparently), they haven't done so.