Entergy is lying through their teeth about the whole ordeal. Claiming the data center would not impact rates while fighting like hell to suppress the details of their deal with Google.

At the same time, they are currently pitching a full rate restructuring to the Arkansas Public Service Commission which will absolutely increase rates. Especially for small businesses.

Sarah Sanders administration also bears some responsibility for this bullshit. After Ted Thomas resigned as PSC chairman in 2022, the governors office began working hard to make the PSC much more friendly to utilities and much less friendly to rate payers.

In some ways, this is Arkansas voters having the day they voted for. Ya’ll wanted a governor who was “pro business” (aka pro corruption) and now you’ve got a PSC – which is supposed to advocate for ratepayers – that just rubber stamps rate increase requests.

Yes.The ability to do speech-to-text and text to-speech with a relatively high level of speed and accuracy is impressive. And it has at least a few potentially positive real world applications.

Similar tools have existed for years but the quality and user friendliness of those has generally been pretty lacking.

IKR? For what it costs and for how hard Microsoft has worked to shoehorn it into everything, it offers very little in terms of increased productivity. I would go so far as to call it an epic failure. Especially considering they spent vast sums of money on it and all they managed to produce was something that is at best marginally good at drafting emails.

As far as a coding assistant, Copilot is pathetic and produces code that is utter trash much of the time.

We have copilot at work and we are expected to use it. They recently updated the Copilot desktop app to include live voice chat, where you can have actual “conversations” with it. To be honest, that actually is kind of impressive. Unfortunately, that’s also about where the impressiveness stops. I burned up all of my daily voice chat limits, and I don’t even know how many tokens trying to get that stupid thing to walk me through making a relatively minor configuration change in Azure. It could not do it. It was consistently wrong about so many things.

You would think Microsoft would be embarrassed about selling a chatbot that can’t even tell you how to make basic configuration changes to their own products. Personally, I’m not strongly opposed to LLMs. But the value proposition that all these tech firms are currently selling is laughable at best.

That paint should be white and it should be on everything. Walls, trim, light switches & outlet covers. To hell with painters tape.

I had an old colleague who was an engineer for Emerson Electric for most of his career. Emerson started as an electric motor manufacturer and eventually got into making just about EVERYTHING. I have a house from the 70’s that originally had fans, garbage disposals, heaters, light switches etc. All made by Emerson. Even different branded appliances using Emerson components.

One time I asked my former colleague what Emerson still makes. He just smirked and said, “Money.” I knew what he meant. I work in manufacturing and as far as I can see, innovation is dead. Because the goal is no longer to design a solution to a problem and (hopefully) profit from it. The goal is to profit. Period. As quickly and cheaply as possible.

So now, all the old people who knew how to design things are gone. And young people are not going into electronics or mechanical engineering because no one is hiring. And who really wants to spend their whole career having to answer to people who don’t care about building cool shit.

Tech has a similar problem.