Given the amount of electricity training and running all these LLMs requires, they might, like cryptocurrency, become drivers of climate change as they cause polluting generators to be built or unmothballed.

Yet do they use ancient copies of the software that broadly still performs the tasks people need of them? No.

Yes, actually—I have a VM reserved mostly for 16-bit software.

Do they theme their system to look like the oh-so-superior Win98? No.

Yes, actually—the Windows machine I'm forced to use for work restores as much of that aesthetic as practical, sometimes with the help of third-party software. My main home machine features a Linux DE whose appearance is largely the same as it was circa 2005 and whose development team is dedicated to keeping that look and feel.

Some of us do put our money where our mouths are, although I admit that isn't universal.

It's true that some level of padding is necessary in a UI, but the amount present in contemporary design is way too large for a system using a traditional mouse or laptop touchpad, which are capable of small, precise movements. Touchscreen-friendly design is best saved for touchscreens, but people don't want to do the work involved to create multiple styles of UI for different hardware. I've never encountered anything touted as "one size fits all", whether it be a UI or a piece of clothing, that actually does fit everyone. At best, it's "one size fits most", and I'm usually outside the range of "most" the designers had in mind. At worst, it's "lowest common denominator", and that seems to be the best description for contemporary UI design.

Then it won't exactly be the first, "Teens are [doing thing]! It's horrible and we have to stop them!" overblown moral panic in the past century. (It'll suck for some teens who don't fit in with the people they're required to associate with in meatspace, but that's another thing that's always been true.)

Even if only 5% of cops are dicks, that's way too many for people in a position of power. Ask the two in your family what they did the last time they saw a fellow officer pulling some kind of icky crap (this, racism against someone Indigenous, whatever). Maybe they're genuinely good people and called their fellow cops out, I don't know. If not, I'm sorry to say that they're part of the problem.

People involved in law enforcement have a higher obligation than the average citizen to follow the rules, except where specific affordances are made for them so that they can do their jobs. This is not one of those places.

When was the last time a federal government managed to balance a budget? Trudeau-the-elder landed a smallish surplus once, back in the late 1970s, I think. I'm not aware of anyone having pulled it off since.

As with any devil's bargain, one must evaluate whether it's really worth it or not.

If all advertising on the Web disappeared tomorrow, would some valuable content be lost because the people putting it up are not willing to fund their site out of pocket? Certainly yes.

Would even more worthless garbage be lost? I think that's also a "yes".

I'm willing to accept a smaller Web with some losses in order to get rid of obnoxious advertising. So are many others. You appear to disagree, as is your right. In any case, it would take a major legislative movement and/or cultural change to cram the genie back into the bottle at this point, so the argument is most likely moot.

You may be able to prove that a photo with certain metadata was taken by a camera (my understanding is that that's the method), but you can't prove that a photo without it wasn't, because older cameras won't have the necessary support, and wiping metadata is trivial anyway. So is it better to have more false negatives than false positives? Maybe. My suspicion is that it won't make much difference to most people.

Ford's policies make it clear that he clings to the outmoded view that addiction is a moral failing and can be stopped by strength of will alone. He'd rather feel superior than save lives.

Thing is, most types of power generation have some kind of issue. Of the cleaner options, hydro, tidal, and geothermal can only be built in select places; solar panels create noxious waste at the point of manufacture; wind takes up space and interferes with some types of birds. Plus, wind and solar need on-grid storage (of which we still have little) to be able to handle what's known as baseline load, something that nuclear is good at.

Nuclear is better in terms of death rate than burning fossil fuels, which causes a whole slate of illnesses ranging from COPD to, yes, cancer. It's just that that's a chronic problem, whereas Chernobyl (that perfect storm of bad reactor design, testing in production, Soviet bureaucratic rigidity, and poor judgement in general) was acute. We're wired to ignore chronic problems.

In an ideal world, we would have built out enough hydro fifty years ago to cover the world's power needs, or enough on-grid storage more recently to handle the variability of solar and wind, but this isn't a perfect world, and we didn't. It isn't that nuclear is a good solution to the need for power—it's one of those things where all the solutions are bad in some way, and we need to build something.

It's been an issue in the Ukraine a couple of times already. So far, nothing has come of it.

Manufacturing of solar panels produces a different kind of contamination, though—it's just not located at the point of power generation. Wind is probably a bit better, with fewer exotic chemicals required, but "rooftop wind" isn't exactly a common catchphrase.

Would everyone who is surprised by this please raise your hand? . . . That's what I thought.