Before the Dot Com era, startups that succeeded transitioned from growth stocks in to blue chips. They settle down, focus on becoming more efficient at executing what is now proven business mode.

But modern tech stocks are expected to act like growth stocks *forever*. When they grow to their natural potential, they begin to turn to dubious practices to generate the next tranche of growth. They undermine their services in order to squeeze a bit more revenue out of them. Or they let their successful business stagnate while the rock star founder beguiles stockholders with visions of transforming into a block chain or AI company.

Back in the early 2000s, when Amazon first transitioned from being a book store to an everything store, and they just introduced Prime membership, you used the site and thought "this thing is great." Nobody thinks that anymore; it's slower, more opaque and less reliable, cluttered with knockoffs, sponsored results, and astroturf reviews. Fake sales events with phony markdowns? Who is surprised?

They have the tech - they have demonstrated it, I actually got to see one. Problem is "low temperature" is relative. In their case, the melting point of their salts were 61C and the operating temperature is 90C. For molten salt, that's great, but for operating a car, it's not practical to have to heat and keep your batteries at 90C. What you save in energy density you lose in heating and what you save in space you lose in insulation.

They did what they said. There just isn't a good use case for it - it's interesting, but not as useful as you might think.

There's no doubt that AI is developing into a useful tool -- for people who understand its limitations and how long it is going to take to work the bugs out. But people have a long track record of getting burned by not understanding the gap between promise and delivery and, in retrospect, missing the point.

I think we should take a lesson from the history of the dot com boom and following bust. A lot of people got burned by their foolish enthusiasm, but in the end the promise was delivered, and then some. People just got the timescale for delivering profits wrong, and in any case their plans for getting there were remarkably unimaginative, e.g., take a bricks and mortar business like pet supplies and do exactly that on the Internet. They by in large completely missed all the *new* ways of making money ubiquitous global network access created.

I think in the case of AI, everybody knows a crash is coming. In fact they're planning on it. Nobody expects there to be hundreds or even dozens of major competitors in twenty years. They expect there to be one winner, an Amazon-level giant, with maybe a handful of also-rans subsisting off the big winner's scraps; tolerated because they at least in theory provide a legal shield to anti-trust actions.

And in this winner-take-all scenario, they're hoping to be Jeff Bezos -- only far, far more so. Bezos owns about 40% of online retail transactions. If AI delivers on its commercial promise, being the Jeff Bezos of *that* will be like owning 40% of the labor market. Assuming, as seems likely, that the winning enterprise is largely unencumbered by regulation and anti-trust restrictions, the person behind it will become the richest, and therefore the most powerful person in history. That's what these tech bros are playing for -- the rest of us are just along for the ride.

But you are leaving out the difference in fertility. The fertility rate of the UK, which as you noted is a population dominated by native britons who trace their ancestry on the island back a millennium or more, is 1.4 live births per woman. The replacement rate is 2.1. In a hundred years the UK will have a smaller population than Haiti.

Because under a true system of sovereignty, people wouldn't be allowed to vote for a Muslim mayor.

I have long-since switch to magnetic quick-connect cables and a little magnetic dongle on each device. This way regardless of the type of end my device needs (there are still a surprising number of micro and mini USB devices around) they all take the same cable. I haven't used a "provided" cable in years.

What "savings"? Despite the $20 you get charged for a USB cable retail, you have to know they cost literally 20 to make.

Is if they confirmed your age by a behavioral maturity test. AI could monitor posts, and if it figures out that someone with an emotional age of 15 or older wouldn't have posted such a thing, you're cut off.

Art and cultural activity is a major sector of the US economy. It adds a staggering 1.17 *trillion* dollars to the US GDP. However that's hard to see because for the most part it's not artists who receive this money.

The actual creative talent this massive edifice is built upon earns about 1.4% of the revenue generated. The rest goes to companies whose role in the system is managing capital and distributing. Of that 1.4% that goes to actual creators, the lion's share goes to a handful of superstars -- movie stars and music stars and the like. This is not as unfair as it sounds, as it reflects the superstar's ability to earn money for the companies they distribute through, but the long tail of struggling individual artists play a crucial role in artistic innovation and creativity. Behind every Elvis there's a Big Mama Thornton, and armies of gospel singers who may have made a record or two but never made a living.

We can't run this giant economic juggernaut off a handful of superstars with AI slop filling in the gaps in demand. But maybe we'll give that a try.

It's actually a detriment in that it can be difficult to figure out what version you actually have. It's been an annoyance since I started running Mint, which is Ubuntu-based. Mint has to have their own name, based on another name for Ubuntu, based loosely on yet another name for Debian version closest to the rolling release they froze Ubuntu at. So then you go to find a package for your system, and the package developers all (sensibly) list the specific version number their packages are built for. Which starts me unrolling the dumb loop on what actual version number my system is actually based on.

The dumb names were cute exactly once. Get over it and just roll with the numbers, which (being based on year of issue) are actually meaningful and useful.

At first my reaction was, like many, "who uses pop anyway", good riddance. Then I realized this was for getting mail IN to Google, and then I thought, well who would have another account OFF Google and then want get their mail back ON anyway? That's like escaping from your kidnapper, going to the grocery store to get food, then taking yourself and your groceries BACK to the kidnapper's house.

Email going to an account Google doesn't control, and people actually give it to Google to read, record, process, and store? Jesus.

Hopefully all those users who are using gmailify to grab email from other accounts will now just switch to using those other accounts directly.

Fuck off you illiterate moron

Actually in China significantly more students choose to pursue degrees in technology, engineering,or business than in the US â" degrees which qualify them for specific jobs after graduation. So the process of college education becoming more vocationally oriented and less about training intellectual skills has advanced even more advanced in China than it is here.

China grants very few liberal arts degrees and its vocational degree programs have minimal or no liberal arts content. In the US an engineering or business degree program requires substantial liberal arts content to be degree accredited. So an engineering student graduating from a US program has had many semesters of training in critical reading and thinking, challenging claims with original sources, and crafting persuasive arguments in areas where opinions differ.

These are skills the Chinese government is not eager to put in the hands of its citizens, so we really ought to question just how âoeuselessâ those non-vocational intellectual skills really are. There are clearly people here whose priorities for education are more aligned with Chinaâ(TM)s â" inculcating respect for authority, obedience to tradition as described by authority, and job skills useful to authorities. In other words for them education isnâ(TM)t about empowering the students, itâ(TM)s about forming a class of compliant worker bees.

I have a plain Debian image I can pop in about 90% of the machines we're removing Win10 from without any hassle. When the hell is the last time you installed Linux?

It's Powershell, it probably takes up 2gb in libraries.