Regions with lots of sun necessitate lots of extra cooling, which somewhat negates the advantages of all that sun. And the tradeoff will only get worse as average temperatures continue to increase as a result of AGW.

We keep trying to eat our cake and have it too, when the real solution is to eat a lot less cake. But we won't do that, so we're fucked.

Then how about drama, or maybe even pathos? From the right perspective, AI is always popcorn-worthy! ;-)

Personally, if I was going all-in on AI I'd be looking for reassurances that it's not going to hallucinate, lie, or try to talk people into cheating on their spouses or committing suicide. Political bias wouldn't even be on my radar - and even if it was, it's kinda covered by the "do not lie" directive.

But hey - you do you America!

AI may have found its niche as entertainment in its own right. Let it hallucinate laughable or eerie takes on human-authored TV shows, movies, literature, etc. You'd never want to depend LLMs to be factual; but they seem to excel at makin' shit up, and some of the hallucinations seem quite amusing.

Of course higher utility rates, blackouts, toxic air, and accelerated climate change as a result of powering data centres constitute a hell of a price to pay for these amusements. It might be best to just call this whole AI thing off.

Fair point. I could have been clearer though. My biggest concern is EVs being disabled en masse as an act of war. If Chinese EVs reach even 10% of the cars on the road, suddenly disabling them all at once would lead to a lot of chaos. Add that to the other backdoors that the Chinese inevitably have in key tech products, and you have a pretty effective opening salvo in a war.

I'll bet Berliners who were alive when the Wall came down are very pissed off and/or scared about this. They remember what it was like to live in a surveillance state where every word and action was guarded, and I'm sure they see this as the return of that era or something very like it.

All over the world, oligarchs and would-be oligarchs are plotting and propagandizing in favour of an ersatz "liberty for safety" trade. Why in hell can't we have both? I have yet to be convinced that such measures make us materially safer.

Who benefits? First and foremost, the vendors of the tech and the consultants who implement it. Second, the police, whose budgets, powers, and staffing levels grow. Third? Probably nobody.

I have a hard time believing that average citizens will get much benefit at all from this. It's a net loss for them - loss of privacy, loss of freedom, and loss of money in the form of higher taxation. But hey - dictators gotta dictate. And the people pushing this seem to be either aspiring dictators, or dupes and stooges of same.

I'm truly not trolling when I say that I'd be very reluctant to buy such a car. I'm concerned about remotely activated kill switches in any modern car, but - perhaps irrationally - I'm MORE concerned about it in Chinese cars.

I've read great things about Chinese EVs, but I still can't bring myself to fully trust them. Then again, I also wouldn't ever consider buying a Tesla, so maybe I'm just overly cautious and/or cranky.

This news from WaPo comes on the heels of Pete Kegsbreath announcing widespread deployment of AI in the US military. It's very reassuring to know that the Department of War is adopting the most advanced and most reliable fiction generator available to the entire chain of command throughout the Services.

OTOH, the Department of War's shiny new AI says that the recent attacks on fishermen off the coast of Venezuela are https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...">"unambiguously illegal", so maybe there's something positive in this new-fangled AI after all!

I'm aware that Trump has just thrown back the cover from the rot that was always present and which started accelerating even faster after 9/11. But he is a new breed of president, and people like Thiel have more power and mind-share than they used to.

I think the Trump administration is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from any previous one, although to be sure it's a natural evolution of earlier presidencies.

If I was being charitable, I'd say that Orangey McOrangeface is simply unaware of how his policies have drastically reduced the number of tourists from other countries, and how badly the US tourism industry is suffering as a result.

But I'm disinclined to be charitable toward the clearly evil fucktard who lies only when his lips are moving. So I'll just say that Trump is entirely aware of the misery and damage that he's inflicting on his own citizens. I firmly believe that he relishes the misery he's causing, not just to the tourism sector, but to everyone below a certain income level. And that "certain income level" is getting higher every day...

My wife just made the interesting point that the current US administration is well on its way to ushering in a revival of British Victorian-era workhouses. I wish I could come up with a counter-argument; but I'm afraid that she's probably correct. Virtually every move that Trump has made can easily and logically be interpreted as part of a plan to effectively enslave the majority of the US population.

For example, the farming economy is being destroyed under Trump. When mega-corps take over farms, the farmers will either be wage slaves on what used to be their own land, or they'll be sleeping in boxes under bridges until the police take them to - that's right - the poor-house. Or the "poor-farm"...

Technocratic hegemony is on its way, and if we don't stop it soon things are going to get really ugly. And I fear that it might be contagious. It may get to the point where there's no safe country to move to - at least not one that hasn't closed its borders.

... I might pay for the feature that eliminates or hides all AI features, including on the websites I visit.

If I'm paying for a browser then it's going to be more customizable, and easier to customize, than Firefox. Charging for a locked-down browser that has AI - and therefore additional spying - baked in? No thanks!

These days, it seems that everybody and his dog is jumping on perpetual-revenue SaaS offerings. I consider those offerings to be burnt. This move by Opera is clearly just an 'excusortunity' to turn browsers into rentware. Fuck them.

I call it "Twit-X"; both as an homage to its old name, and in reference to the twit named Musk who gave it a new name while turning it into a steaming pile of dogshit.

I despise McDonald's, I despise advertisers, and I'm very wary and mistrustful of so-called AI. That said, when I watched the commercial I laughed. I thought there were some clever bits, and I'd watch it again.

I wonder if the negative response is akin to that of an otherwise-healthy immune system that has been faced with too many dire challenges in a short period of time and is over-reacting a bit. In this case that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

Because having all that day-to-day military data in the cloud, managed by a private-sector company whose primary business is data-rape, is a sterling choice for managing national security. Srsly, WTF?

What happens with people like me who only have Bluetooth, WiFi, and Data enabled when we're actively using them?

I suppose it's the same thing as with "loyalty" cards - privacy is screwed if you do use them, wallet gets screwed if you don't.