In addition to cost (as everyone else said), work and worker qualifications. Working on underground lines requires special confined spaces training and certification, because it is more dangerous, could deal with not just electricity, but potentially hight temperatures, water, sewage, toxic gas, lack of oxygen, etc. There are even fewer people willing to do that compared to riding a bucket to the overhead lines.
Source: Worked for electrical utility
It’s unclear what would be accomplished by banning AI for a tiny portion of the code while continuing to use Linux, AOSP, Chromium and hundreds of other projects heavily using it.
AI or not, this is such shit attitude. Call it peer pressure, or appeal to authority, or whatever, but think for yourself. Especially for a project like GrapheneOS.
If you are a (younger?) immigrant in the US, you will be asked by a curious American:
The second thing you want to know about my language is how to insult someone? Baffling, but happened more than once.
You gotta be really careful with this type of stuff.
Ohio passed a law that allows its current government to “clarify” the way issues are written on the ballot. Conveniently, it was done right before the vote on anti-gerrymandering. This anti-gerrymandering issue intended to select a fair cross-party committee for redrawing districts, but was re-phrased as a wordy and confusing blurb mentioning “unelected individuals” and “without accountability”. The issue did not pass. Which was the goal.
The parsed and properly displayed reactions are a QUIK feature, but it does not mean RCS is being used. You can try to install e.g. Fossify Messages and you will see the “A reacted to B” messages again.
Also, this reaction parsing does not work for all languages.
On iOS a few years ago, I prefered it to FF or Safari.
However, its “tracker protection” is questionable sometimes. They will list Google or Meta as enabled on site “to prevent breakage”, but do not give user an option to still disable it.
The unease of being watched while doing something (whether a job, a hobby, or a chore).
unlock your doors remotely, or precool/heat the cabin without this connection.
The fact that these require an internet connection instead of a radio transmitter in a keyfob is crazy to me.
Also it doesn’t help that, for example, at U-Haul, employees just use their personal phone to scan a QR code and take pictures of your ID.
I expected the bottom to say something like “instead of cloud-native scalable microservices using AI models that cost an average US household salary per day to run”, but maybe I’ve been in corporate for too long.
Sometimes manufacturers “do their own thing”. Nintendo USB-C power supply can somehow power my soldering iron at 20V, but cannot charge a laptop.
Ran into the complement/opposite of this with a cheap handheld. It cannot be charged with a USB-C PD charger, but can be charged with a “dumb” USB-A to USB-C cord, all because the manufacturer cheaped out on 2 resistors.
In early 2010s, I worked in a city that was planning to remove a huge useless highway section. When I moved away from that city in 2025, they were still having hearings about plans to potentially start thinking about removing that highway.
“AI” is a pretty bad blanket term. BirdNet / Merlin is a model trained specifically on bird calls (and some noises) built to recognize bird calls. App and logo use huge general-purpose models to create content of questionable quality.
And yes, a decent birder should never trust just Merlin ID.
Several states have Working Families Party. IMO a better name, no mention of socialism (even though they usually endorse progressive or socialist candidates) and in some states (e.g. New York) they are legally a party, so they get their own column in the ballot on state and local level (alongside Democratic and Republican parties). DSA is not legally a party afaik.
I had the same thought reading Dream Hotel. Technically it is sci-fi, but the only sci-fi thing is the implant, the rest is reality turned up to 11 (discrimination, prison labor, black box AI tech, privacy abuse)
The modern take on “automation that survived the apocalypse” is Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s an entire novel, more humorous, but still very dark.
Someone I know got screwed over when 3G shut down. Their business used an alarm system with a 3G modem (using a cheap data-only SIM card).
The “updated” version requires subscriptions, an app, and goes through manufacturer’s servers, so more expensive, and several more points of failure.
a hardware feature that uses “subtle light and color on the back of your device to inform you of important activity when it’s face down.”
Notification light is back! Now with a dumb ass name, and probably restricted/incompatible API!
Ironically the free-but-with-ads Tubi is the least bad when it comes to UI. They have categories with exhaustive lists, and even labels for movies highly rated on RottenTomatoes.
Netflix sucked for a while (don’t have it anymore). Apple TV is absolute shit now (subbed for a month to watch a few shows)
IMO those paths diverged in web development somewhere around 10 years ago. While you could write efficient websites using standard HTML features and minimum of JavaScript (the good-efficient path), companies and developers started going towards various frameworks, which were “faster” for developers to use, but usually at expense of performance on users’ side, numerous dependencies, and security. Each framework trying to do its own thing, and some are conceptually entirely different from bare HTML+JS.