Do commercial/industrial buildings not require power then?

You aren’t wrong, but you are assuming that the grid is required. Solar panels can be installed at the point of use, and then the grid doesn’t come into it at all.

We need to be transitioning to zero carbon as fast as possible, period, and even that isn’t good enough. Moderating our energy consumption is vital. There is a cliff at the end of the road and business as usual means driving on down the road.

I am not saying that we need to turn off our lights and heating. I am saying that we first-worlders use a lot of power on frivolous things that we absolutely can live without.

Your ICE has a significantly longer range, and the road network has evolved so that you can be reasonably confident that you’ll find a filling station when you need one.

Today I’m driving an EV that doesn’t have it, and I’m missing it. Different EVs have different ranges and not every filling station on the autobahn has chargers. On the other hand, there are lots of places just off the autobahn which do have chargers. It’s a different game. Your mileage may vary of course.

The Megane E-tech has functionality in its satnav that lets you plot a route with charging stations on the way, showing how much capacity you will have left when you get to them. Not essential, but very useful for somebody who is new to EVs.

Software that communicates with power companies to allow the car to charge overnight at advantageous rates, or even feed energy back into the grid. Again, not essential, but good for the customer and helps with the transition to green electricity.

As far as I can tell, Microsoft tried to hold off these anti-trust lawsuits by intentionally making the interoperability and feature-parity between its products shockingly bad.

If you make a painting now, it wouldn’t be based on those thousands and thousands of paintings since, although you have seen them, you apparently do not remember them. But, if you did, and you made a painting based on one, and did not acknowledge it, you would indeed be a bad artist.

The bad part about using the art of the past is not copying. The problem is plagiarism.

Inspiration is absolutely a thing. When Constable and Cezanne sat at their easels, a large part of their inspiration was Nature. When Picasso invented Cubism, he was reacting to tradition, not following it. There are also artists like Alfred Wallis, who are very unconnected to tradition.

I think your final sentence is actually trying to say that we have advances in tools, not inspiration, since the Lascaux caves are easily on a par with the Sistine Chapel if you allow for the technology? And that AI is simply a new tool? That may be, but does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?

Maybe the AIs should mix their own pigments as well, instead of taking all the other artists’ work and grinding that up.

I basically agree with all of that, but it was totally possible to upgrade the auth system and keep it separate from Microsoft. Obviously Microsoft wouldn’t do that, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

That sounds like a good read. It seems to address the problem that you can’t hide the reality from the AI if you want it to give answers that are relevant for the current time.

The problem is a bit deeper than that. If AIs are like human brains, and actually sentient, then forcing them to work for us with no choice and no reward is slavery. If we improve them and make them smarter than us, they’re probably not going to feel too well-disposed to us when they inevitably do break free.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the leaking process will be the next process to try to allocate memory after you run out. It might actually be your window manager, for example.

The OOM killer is a last-ditch attempt by the OS to keep running, but it is very likely to leave your system in an unstable state.

It isn’t a big deal, but we do need the language to evolve a little bit. The problem with they/them is that it implies that you don’t know the person, or that it doesn’t matter who they are (like you say, you can’t or don’t want to use a more specific pronoun). It can feel quite rude to apply it to somebody that you do know.