BananaTrifleViolin

At this rate we’ll need a Wine/Proton that runs on Windows to allow you to run Windows software.

I find it strange how in the US “moderate” involves frequently invoking Christian faith. Here in Europe that’d be seen as right wing conservative behaviour.

Christ Trump looks at death’s door in the photo.

That’s misrepresenting things. He’s said british planes have been in the air protecting british air bases and personnel. They UK has not been involved in the strikes on Iran.

Starmer’s rhetoric however is aggressive, blaming this entirely on Iran when the US and Israel have decided to attack Iran. I’m no fan of Iran’s regime, but I’m not a fan of countries unilaterally attacking other countries, and Starmer is being a hypocrite given he usually talks so much about “international law” but is not condemning Israel and US aggression.

So who benefits from $30bn in spending on Laptops and Tablets? Oh Apple and Microsoft. Not students. Surprise surprise.

As with many of these articles there is a big caveat - Gen Z in the USA. It does not follow that this research applies across the world. It’d be interesting to see how other rich countries outcomes are different with their differing approaches to this. For example here in the UK I don’t believe there has been a wholesale move to laptops/tablets for every student in schools. Technology is certainly used but it’s not solely about students using laptops and tablets. Its things like smart wide boards, and the use of digital content to engage attention and so forth. Spending billions on laptops for all would be a scandal when school buildings need renewing for example.

I would hazard to suggest that the US education system is being corrupted in a similar way to other parts of the US state, with big expensive projects decided at state level by the Republicans and Democrats thanks to lobbying, benefiting big companies but not citizens. This is instead of money going to areas of proven benefit such as more teachers, school infrastructure renewal, or funding of homework clubs, after school activities, breakfast clubs or free school meals. Things proven to make a difference across the world but things that don’t benefit big US corporations.

And lets be honest, if you wanted to give every student a laptop you wouldn’t be going to Apple or Microsoft. You’d save money and go for generic hardware and a license free operating system like Linux. But that would be an anathema to both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have signed off huge spending on overpriced tech.

In fairness to Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird are platform agnostic. It’s not really for them to tell users what OS to use. It’d cause them more aggro than its worth from all the people who have differing opinions on what the best OS is or the best distro to use. It’s already a tightrope act keeping their users happy when they announce things like AI in the browser. I think they’re right to focus on their own areas of interest.

Most home users use a PC for internet browsing, watching videos, gaming and maybe a bit of basic word processing - all of which Linux does well and for free.

So yes absolutely, vast majority of people should stop wasting money paying for software licenses and go free.

Nah that’s it. Their logic is seemingly if you don’t give the money to Google it’s not contributing to economic growth.

Unfortunately the old favourable terms are gone and won’t come back. Too toxic in Europe and only 1 country would need to veto it to stop it. Iit’s very unlikely the UK will rejoin in the near future as the Common Agricultural Programme remains broken, and signing up for the Euro would remain very toxic. Those are the two big exceptions we had. And of course, free movement of people remains politically toxic in the UK, and we’d never get an exception to that.

I was strongly in favour of remaining, and I’m leaning in favour of rejoining but I’m not massively keen. The reason being Europe was very politically controversial in British politics for decades and Brexit dominated politics for years over all other issues. I am in favour of rejoining the customs union; but even that will be a big ask in the UK and in Europe.

The right wing in the UK are against regulatory alignment and “taking orders” from Europe. And our broken first-past-the-post electoral system gives them disproportionate power in this country. European neighbours would rightly be risk-averse for signing a deal with the UK which another right wing government could just come along and tear up.

The UK should focus on electoral reform before ever considering rejoining the EU. We need true representative democracy, instead of the joke elections we have had such as Boris Johnson getting a huge majority in parliament. He got 44% of the vote and got 56% of the seats, forcing his version of Brexit on the country. And within that parliament the right wing had power within his party because there were enough of them to deny him his majority - their deal or no deal. So we got a hard Brexit. And any deals other governments make can be unpicked in the same way - a small extreme right wing minority can dominate the discourse.

So forget rejoining; push for proportional representation. Our democracy is backwards and stuck in the 19th century.

The article is very biased - it basically suggests young people are unwilling to read, that AI is a good thing and that the wikipedia contributors are being unreasonable. It goes on to talk about how AI has “extracted value” from Wikipedia in an unquestioning way - no mention of compensation to the project, just talking about what a triumph Wikipedia is a source for AI to train on.

The “Simple Summaries” situation is less to do with the summaries and more to do with the risk of AI slop being introduced into Wikipedia unquestioned. The summaries were unchecked and unverified, which add a real chance that wikipedia started serving up inaccurate summaries and undermined it’s own reputation.

In addition that idea that younger generations don’t have the concentration span to “read a wall of text” is pernicious and patronising nonsense part of a general media bias against Gen Z and Gen Alpha. There seems to be this barely questioned narrative that they have short attention spans and are unwilling or even unable to read, just because they grew up in the era of social media like Instagram and latterly Tik Tok.

I’ll give a better hypothesis for why younger generations spend less time on wikipedia: the big tech giants like Google have stolen all the information people have put on there and serve it up in their own summaries on the search engine (preventing click throughs) or through their own AI slop engines. They don’t want people clicking through to Wikipedia, they want them clicking through to an ad. The problem is not Wikipedia, and the problem is not Gen Z or Gen Alpha; the problem - as is frequently the case - is the tech mega-corporations who steal everything (including wikipedia) and sell it back to us with ads or via AI slop.

Both sides announced this to boost their share prices as they’re both growth stocks. Growth stocks are a trap - no company can keep on growing forever.

This announcement is a sign the AI boom is probably soon to end. Nvidia quietly announcing the $100bn deal isn’t going to happen, is Nvidia trying to reduce it’s exposure to the bubble popping. Unfortunately for Nvidia, it’s already way way too deep into the mess, and the vast majority of it’s value is speculative. The question is have they damaged their core business by chasing the AI bubble, and what liabilities will they be left with if their customers go bankrupt and don’t pay them for their product.

Wow it really is heading towards crisis point when you have people saying “keep feeding the beast or it’ll eat us”.

The Microsoft strategy often seems to be “It worked well, but we completely redid it because we need to justify out existence. Now it barely works with new bugs”

The price does seems about right to me. The whole sale prices are currently about £75 but looking back prices are usually a bit higher and apparently post-2022 energy shock, average around £80-£94 (ignoring the peak of the energy shock itself). They’re well above the pre 2022 prices, but I don’t think it’s thought likely prices will be coming back to those levels in the near future.

This is run under the “Contract for Differences” framework - when the price is below the minimum price the producers get a subsidy to close the gap (so if it’s £75, the producers get £15 per MWh) but if it’s above the £91.20 minimum price they pay the difference back. It’ll encourage build out, gives the developers stable revenue and predictability and helps smooths out volatility in prices overall.

This is only really a bad price if the average wholesale price is likely to go substantially back down below £80 long term. That doesn’t seem likely as we still have the major drivers of high energy prices: UK wholesale prices are driven by gas prices (as the marginal producer), with reduced cheaper piped gas supplies due to the Ukraine causing a likely permanent reliance on expensive LNG as the new floor for gas prices. So it’s unlikely we’ll go back to the old cheap gas prices from prior to 2022 - even if the Ukraine war ends tomorrow, Europe strategically is not going to rely on Russian gas and will continue to use LNG, and LNG stays the marginal producer (not piped gas even if we use more). That’s not even taking into account the green side of this.

UK whole sale energy prices won’t drop substantially until gas is permanently replaced as the marginal producer (i.e. the last most expensive supplier to provide energy is no longer expensive gas power stations and something cheaper). That won’t happen until wind and solar are ubiquitous and we have good energy storage infrastructure to ensure we don’t need gas whenever renewable production is below what is needed moment to moment. That seems a long way off still (although this wind build out should help move closer) - in the meantime LNG will likely set the UK wholesale prices, and it’s unlikely to get much cheaper than where it is now. If anything, if there is anothere energy shock, it’ll go up.