The entitlement epidemic rages

I was recently at Stonehenge in the United Kingdom. Besides the historical significance, it is a huge tourist site. As you might expect, th...

I was recently at Stonehenge in the United Kingdom. Besides the historical significance, it is a huge tourist site. As you might expect, there are rules, ropes to indicate boundaries and a well-run system. Enter the influencer. She was the classic example, with friends, the attitude and the only one who crossed the ropes to get that special picture. The current set of typically self-declared influencers come with a sense of entitlement that is almost scary.

They rarely provide any concrete or useful advice but are somehow influencing the current generation of youth. They exist across a wide range of subjects from golf to beauty and in general have no training, experience or expertise in their chosen field, other than at a surface level.

- Based on reports, some companies are adopting a new strategy of deliberately keeping their customer service callers on hold for longer or even dropping the calls to avoid having to deal with a question or complaint. Annoying if true.

- I had to laugh at a quote a friend of mine sent me recently which read: "The biggest joke on mankind is that computers have begun asking humans to prove they are aren't robots." Every day a computer, not a person, is asking you to prove to the system that you are not some type of bot. Sometimes it seems they are messing with you when you get multiple Captchas in a row. I've had up to 10 before they accept that I'm not a robot of some kind. Also, while we're on the subject, if you have to select all squares with bicycles does that include the handlebars? My favourite is a picture of a snowscape and the ask was to highlight all images of a sniper.

- IBM is once again claiming that they will have a scalable quantum computer platform in the next few years. The Chinese are claiming they have a 1,000 qubit computer and others have made marketing announcements as well. To the best of my knowledge, no one has broken the workable 200 qubit barrier as yet and there are still a plethora of issues with scaling. This may be solved tomorrow, it could take another 10 years, or may not ever be possible. As of today, quantum computer claims are all marketing. Companies have put quite a lot of investment into this and to keep the stocks stable they must be positive about progress. It is the same story with artificial intelligence investment.

- According to a large language model query, one windfarm tower costs around US$2 million (64.8 million baht) per MW and a lot more for the offshore versions, not counting maintenance and some other costs. Each one takes up about 600m of space and the lifetime on average is estimated at 20 years. Idaho in the United States is currently testing eVinci reactors the size of a semi-truck that will output 5MW for a very long time. Even calculating a generous 30KWh per days for each home, that is close to 170 homes. The smaller Kaleidos units at 1.2MW can drive 40 homes. Put one or two of these near the average sub-station and you have 24/7, 365 power for generations. Refuelling is required every eight years or so and maintenance is minimal. Cost is hard to find but the initial investment for the front-end engineering and experiment design (FEEED) process was $3.9 million. These could be the future of stable, scalable, inexpensive energy.

- Why does any of this matter? Our technology and standard of living is related to inexpensive, reliable energy costs and supply. If the supply is nearby, this reduces transmission loss. If there is a grid of power provision this introduces robustness when other nodes can take up the slack if one fails or is down for maintenance. In some parts of Australia for example, there is a heavy reliance on interconnectors and if these fail the whole network can go down. I believe small modular nuclear-based products are the best approach for our energy future.

- With three months to go before the first end-of-life point for Windows 10, Windows 11 has finally taken over in market share. That still leaves around 46% of users on Windows 10 today. Many of those adopting Windows 11 will be organisations moving to the new OS and people buying new computers with it pre-installed. That means a huge number of home users and others still sitting on Windows 10. At the same time, so-called AI PCs have been selling in large numbers but without any "killer app" to justify these purchases. Kudos to the marketing of the term AI PC. Expect the announcement of Windows 12 in the near future.

- Turning it off and on still remains one of the best ways to clear a fault on your device. I've done this myself a few times in the past couple of months to solve issues on others' and my equipment. The IT Crowd got it right.

Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).