And how will you use a library computer?

There's a couple of ways that could go down.

One way is that you log in under a guest account and the guest account requires you to indicate your age. After your session is over, guest account logs out.

Another way is that the library has two sets of computers, ones set for adults, ones set for minors. You need access card to use computer and the librarian will give you the age-appropriate access card.

Another way is computers are set for restrictive (child) account by default. If you need adult access you have to ask librarian to unlock it.

It's been a while but as a 12 year old I completely broke the library system, installed cracked Starcraft, and refroze DeepFreeze afterwards.

Not to counteract your point, just as an anecdote I like remembering.

Trantor still managed to have imperial gardens though, so how bad could it really be? /s

Trantor was described as having, what, 40 billion people?

This would allow most of the planet to still be wild, if people lived at population densities of current cities.

Asimov was a city boy who famously didn't like to travel. He didn't have experience with how unoccupied most of the world is.

> low cost solar panels that families can buy at supermarkets and put on their balconies or outdoor space

Given the UK's typical solar exposure[0], and the quality of panels you can pickup at a supermarket, this has gotta be a net negative for a family right?

0: https://globalsolaratlas.info/map

The insolation requred to get decent return is often overstated on the internet - you generally see over 1000kwh for a 1kw system over a year, only dropping to ~900 in scotland. California only really gets 40-50% more useful energy out. Sure, it's less, but often close enough that it can still make sense - and more dependant on local energy and PV system costs than anything else.

The idea that you need constant, overhead, wall-to-wall sunshine isn't really true for current systems. In fact, somewhere nearer the equator the effeciency drops significantly for PV systems (even if the total power output increases slightly) as the "extra" light isn't really useful.

> 1000kwh for a 1kw system over a year

That will net you a whole $100 a year, probably less in most places

Selling back to the grid, maybe. But if displacing your own use, 10p/kwh is a pipe dream in the UK, more like 25p+.

And my point is more that in that example price/kwh, the "best" location only returns $150 or so for that same system.

Sure, worth keeping in mind for payback calculations, but not really a "category change" - power prices vary more than that proportion between the countries involved. And certainly not the whole multiples a pure insolation chart might imply.

The thing that people in the US forget about the UK (and indeed Europe in general) is that we're a lot further north than you think.

The UK's most southerly city, Truro, is still only at 50.26°N, but that's still further north than the border between the US and Canada.

I’m not entirely sure how your response maps to my comment, but indeed the airstream impacts on weather cause a much warmer climate in much of Europe compared to North America. This can confuse many folks when guessing the latitude of locations in each region. I remember how shocked I was when I was younger to learn Paris is nearly the same latitude as Vancouver, especially considering the climate difference.

It's more that there's comparatively little insolation here, unlike pretty much all of the US. If you go to one of the US cities that's incredibly far south like Seattle, you've got way more sunlight pretty much all year round.

Even down here at 57°N I'd need a solar farm the size of a football pitch to run a few lights in winter, and it would have to have the panels practically vertical because for the six hours or so the Sun is up the highest it ever gets is 9° above the horizon.

You're pretty okay for wind though, although if you're on the north-west coast it needs to be good for maybe 140-150mph sustained.

Your AI is acting up - Seattle is not incredibly far south, nor has abundant sunlight.. few minutes more than London, but if we're including cloud-vs-sunshine, less hours.

London would be "up" from Seattle (47.6->51.5) not "down here".

The 140mph sustained wind in Seattle is regularly featured in tourist guides, though. Fair play

Seattle is further south than most of the EU, and being down about the 45° point gets far more insolation than anywhere even five degrees north. It's just basic trig.

Consider that from where I'm sitting right now the border between Canada and Alaska is only like an hour's drive north for me, albeit 4500 miles west ;-)

I live in Canada (North of you) and get far more sunlight than you (~2350 hours/year vs London's 1640 or Edinburgh's 1430.. at 57.. are you just south of Inverness?)

Much further east these days but yeah, a bawhair south of Inverness.

It's still nearly a three hour drive though :-)

Used to live there-ish (Aberdeen).. it's beautiful countryside (but.. the fog)

> (but.. the fog)

Haar, it's called.

Cracking beaches all down that coast though especially a little south.

I go up to Aberdeen quite a bit, and as I'm coming over the brow of the hill on the AWPR as it passes Blackdog to the north and you get a view of the sea, I trip the dashcam to get a photo of my favourite wind turbines that really really really upset a certain elderly conservative guy.

30% less than Auckland, NZ. Not terrible, given how cheap and accessible balcony systems are.

The actual problem is how small such systems are. I can't imagine supplying more than 5-20% of your total use. Yes it's savings, but potential is far larger.

People's grandmothers know what AI is and many have used it, even outside the west.

Probably zero grandmothers outside the west, and very few grandmothers within the west, know what NFT even stands for.

But they do know what crypto is for and several of them would have lost money on it.

You’ve seen Schindler’s List, right?

This leads to paid certifications from limited experts leading to political payoffs controlling the certifiers

I was talking with someone solidly in Gen X that described their desire to write out longer form documents by hand on paper rather than typing them up. The process of typing helped them work through the content better than typing.

In an analogous way, I feel like I'm in that part of the millennial generation that is more comfortable doing things on a PC than on a phone. Sure I can informally browse airline tickets and cars on my phone, or upload some docs for my , but when things get serious, I'm switching to a PC to complete it.

There's something about doing things on a phone that just does not feel... robust? Maybe I am just too accustomed to the phone experience being minimal, or minimized in some way compared to the desktop experience.

I don't think it's generational at all, doing things on a phone is pretty objectively less comfortable.

It's generational in the sense that younger generations are far more accustomed to using phones than computers. They might not even be exposed to a computer until they need to use one for school. It's objectively less comfortable for them to use a computer when they never (or barely) used a mouse, physical keyboard, or any of that software before.

You can even see the same with games. All these kids growing up playing games on their iPads are really good at using those crappy touchscreen controls to play. Do you think they'd find using a physical controller comfortable? Maybe after a lot of practice, but why switch if you're already good at using the touch controls?

If true, then it's just unfamiliarity, not comfort. A bigger screen and bigger buttons are a pretty objective upgrade. "Why switch if you're already good at using touch controls" - because you assume it could be better? It not obstructing vision and being more precise is a good enough argument to try it out.

Although personally still not used to controllers. I mostly play FPS so that's only KB+M.

> It not obstructing vision and being more precise is a good enough argument to try it out.

An iPad has a big enough screen to not really obstruct anything important. It should be no less precise than a controller since it typically mimics the same joystick and buttons you'd have on a controller.

Having to carry a controller around is going to have a big impact on comfort.

First - why are you singling out Apple devices? Most kids who do have tablets are probably using something cheaper, it's not like a tween can be trusted with a device this expensive. And second - a lot more kids have phones than tablets, so the difference for a lot of people is still there.

My daughter didn't really grow up using a desktop computer, though she would see my wife and I do that often enough.

She prefers a phone, but has difficulty even doing most of the things you or I would want to accomplish. It is mysterious to her, because the phone makes it difficult and sometimes even nearly impossible, and so she acts like that is impossible. When the google screen only shows you two results, you give up if there's no clear answer in two results. When the phone screen shows 20 words on it, you think reading 1500 words is an ordeal. Cluttered pages not quite fixed with adblock can have the clutter ignored on a large monitor, but when there is no adblock and the screen is 3 inches wide, the clutter drowns out the signal completely.

Phones may be an entire computer, but they are a deliberately crippled computer that makes reading text input difficult, writing text input even more difficult, and makes thinking most difficult of all.

Phones are to computers what Twitter was to blogs.

My friend wrote her bachelor’s thesis on her iPhone. There’s an entire generation of ‘digital natives’ that are computer illiterate.

One would think that any nerds that knowledgeable could divide by 86400 to make the article more accessible for the rest of us though.

Oh that's a breaker box (or a box of wiring of some sort), not a mirror!

A mirror? I first saw it as a common (US-centric) exterior metal door, with a window -- and with a shelf blocking the opening.

The blur does interesting things.

yeah the shine in the top left of the rectangle was what led me to think it was a mirror, which from my experience would have been really strange for the types of nerds that would work in windowless rooms back in those days.

The black cable underneath looked like the shadow of an oval frame

Too bad there isn’t a complementary rule about not asking “is it just me or does this article read like AI slop?”

I’m so over these comments. Sure I can flag them but I feel like it deserves a special call out.