Indeed. And let’s not forget that these budgets are all effectively handouts to the car industry (which created all the problems in the first place)

I’m a huge Bluesky user and I don’t understand this post at all. Bluesky has a strong Block feature, which I use liberally to avoid trolls and people I don’t want to engage with, but I don’t know what’s being referenced here

At every given moment you’re carrying around a very heavy extra motor and a very heavy extra fuel supply. Hybrids aren’t the answer, unless the question is “How can we carry on selling more cars without really changing anything?”

Current US government is apparently there to sell fossil fuels and enforce car dependency. As such, making it difficult to offer alternatives seems like a logical step

Back in the Cold War somebody commented how apt it was that if you wanted to call Russia from the UK you have to dial 007

You’re right. I could believe these data might be explained by a lot of businesses being in a “wait and see” phase, hiring conservatively while they see how the AI thing shakes out

This is a good point, but the issue is that vendors have abused this need by not just pushing security updates, but also regular rewrites that make the products more invasive/full of language model shit - Exhibit A being anything at all from Microsoft

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For context, UK domestic energy suppliers don’t actually do any generation or distribution - they just retail electricity produced and distributed by others. So they can buy wholesale energy and attempt to compete on price, customer service, or other innovative products (eg Octopus’s dynamic pricing).

Normally I’d expect Tesla to do an Uber-style approach of subsiding the prices for the first couple of years to try to capture market share, as well as the more obvious vertical integration with their cars. But in this market, switching suppliers is too easy to make that worthwhile

Solar and AC is a great combo. Almost by definition, when you need AC you know the sun is shining and so the energy to run the AC is therefore free

I was questioning the use of the word “prolly”

“Prolly”

That looks like it would just about hold an old-school Palm Pilot or Psion - I can’t see it holding even a small MacBook in that space

Totally unrelated though, and just a coincidence. The word meme in the way we use it today was coined by Richard Dawkins in (IIRC) The Extended Phenotype. I presume it’s an abbreviation of Mental Gene, or something like that. The idea was that a meme is an idea or concept that can fight for survival amongst other ideas, just as a gene tries to survive being being a good fit to its environment

The idea of general intelligence (g) is that you’ve got some overall capacity that can be turned to any task. Human intelligence is probably much more like a big toolbox of skills, though, and I can’t see a version of computer “intelligence” that’s any different to that. I worry that people who get excited about AI are kidding themselves a bit as it isn’t going to be general - it’s going to be a toolbox at best: an LLM for writing, a totally different system for drawing, another for identifying birdsong, and and yet another for maths… And at that point you’ve not got some special interesting AGI - you’ve just reinvented the idea of apps

If AGI is made of components, you could argue that it isn’t “general”. Which would be fine, as most psychologists would say the same about human intelligence

If people are cycling on a road, the cyclepath must be strongly perceived as lower quality. Perhaps we need to focus on why so many people who cycle a lot feel the facilities created for motorists are far better than the ones created for cyclists

Anyone in Europe looking for an alternative might want to check out Tado

These language models don’t get the meaning of anything. They predict the next cluster of letters based on the clusters of letters that have come before. Sorry, but if it feels to you like they’re captured the meaning of something, you’re being bamboozled

There’s at least two steps before those three:

-1. Society has been built around the needs of the auto industry, locking people into car dependency

0. A legal system exists in which the people who build, sell and drive cars are not meaningfully liable when the car hurts somebody