Definitely! I have an MX5 (miata), and the camaraderie between strangers is great. Majority of people will wave to each other as they drive past and I often get stopped for a chat in petrol stations etc. It’s one of the reasons I would really hate to get rid of the car because it’s just an extra dose of fun compared to everything else I have owned.

I suppose these things have to be opt-out because if they were opt-in then literally nobody would do it. Which is quite telling really isn’t it lol

Maybe? But to give an example of how I think it’s been pretty cool, is summarising my Dungeons & Dragons session notes, and being available to answer questions, or spin up ideas on the fly. I can take horrible and inconsistent notes with holes in them, but an LLM straightens them all out into any format I need. If I need a small piece of world building and ran out of time I can get it to spit a few ideas at me. Often generic ideas and tropes are actually what I am after. If I forgot something that happened 6 months ago I can just…ask it. It can pull up stuff I noted offhand and totally forgot about no problem. This sort of use where it’s like an admin assistant, and being inaccurate is totally unimportant, it’s a good tool.

Maybe that’s a really niche example but it’s one of the few cases where I can see long term use with zero downsides.

Ultimately it’s powerful at consolidating large volumes of information and allowing the user to probe at that information. As long as the use case can tolerate inaccuracies and hallucinations then it’s fine.

For sure, it’s amazing for some things. But it also appears to do more than you think it does until you become familiar with it. I think everyone new to using AI should quiz it on topics they are knowledgeable in, to realise how much shit it makes up.

Also yeah I’m specifically talking about LLMs because I think that’s 95%+ of AI usage right now in volume.

Once you use AI enough you start to peer behind the curtain and see how it’s all just a magic trick and not actually magic like it seems to begin with. So yeah I think its unsurprising people would come to this conclusion.

This part is interesting:

As solar becomes increasingly widespread and electricity prices plummet in the middle of the day when the sun is brightest, some see a risk that the incentive to deploy solar power also decreases, said Esparrago.

That makes grid improvements and the rapid rollout of storage technologies like batteries crucial, experts argue. But the EU is still lagging behind in that area.

I wonder however how far we are from that? There is probably a lot of incentivising that can be done to get people and industry to use this ‘surplus’ daytime energy up surely. Its weird because its usually the opposite with cheap night rates - I know many people who intentionally consume energy overnight instead of the day because its cheaper. Flip that on its head maybe that isn’t as pressing an issue?