Spyke

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Scientists successfully replicate historic nuclear fusion breakthrough three times

While this is amazing and all, it's always seemed to me that this approach of using hundreds of laser beams focused on a single point would never scale to be viable for power generation. Can any experts here confirm?

I've always assumed this approach was just useful as a research platform -- to learn things applicable to other approaches, such as tokamaks, or to weapons applications.

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'I can't drink the water' - life next to a US data centre

The article isn't clear about the mechanism by which the data center is supposedly affecting the woman's well. Is the data center using well water, depleting the supply of ground water in the area? Or is the claim that the construction disturbed the geology enough to cause problems with flow and sediment in a well 366 meters away? Does anyone know or have theories?

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Former GM Executive: BYD cars are good in terms of design, features, price, quality. If we let BYD into the U.S. market, it could end up destroying american manufacturers

I don't disagree with the criticisms of American cars -- overpriced, uninspired, unreliable, over-engineered, etc. -- but to everyone saying "we should just compete", do you realize the realities that Chinese workers experience? Have you heard of 996? It's shorthand for a common work schedule in China: 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Benefits that are common in the U.S., even in non-union shops, like retirement plans, PTO, worker's comp, and overtime pay are rare. So, yeah, things can be made much cheaper if you are willing to feed your workforce into the grinder.

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Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads

I feel like this is the ad-equivalent of the sub-prime mortgage situation, pre-crisis. With mortgages, you had loans that no individual bank or bank manager would want, and then you had an automated process that obfuscated the individual loan details and produced financial products that could be sold as high quality. In the ad world, it's the same thing. You have these websites that nobody would buy ads from, individually, but somehow, through an automatic process offered by Google and friends, the worthless product becomes valuable.

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Apple Weather's forecasts are so bad my meteorologist made a post about it

I've noticed the same thing. I was somewhat optimistic about Apple's purchase of DarkSky and planned integration of DarkSky technology into Apple Weather. I mean, DarkSky was awesome. Surely, DarkSky technology + Apple's resources would result in the ultimate weather app! Boy, was I wrong. Apple obviously took a wrong turn somewhere because the new and improved Apple Weather is anything but.