Do you have the time/resources to just go and get that college degree? Back around Y2K when I was still fairly new to corporate IT work the federal government of Canada decided everyone in the CS category needed a post-secondary degree. So the poor folks doing HTML and ColdFusion and whatever else for the past decade with no problem were told to work part-time and go to school part-time to get a degree. Some classes they breezed through, sure, but I did more than a year of private tutoring them for their other classes. They learned all sorts of things they didn't even know they didn't know.

So you'd either breeze through and get a degree you can use to get past the tier 1 HR screening, or you'd find out there's a lot more to learn than you knew about. Either way it sounds like a win to me?

Corridor Crew also redid that shot, using one of their own staff and replacing his face with a deepfaked young Mark Hamill. Their goal was to fix the lighting, make the face look less dead around the eyes, add back in the missing micromovements real people make, give him a bit of emotion, etc. Then they mapped that back into the original footage. While the staff member they had standing in for Luke did an OK but not stellar job with his acting, there are some other clear visual advantages to the changes they made. If a smaller shop like Corridor Crew can do that in a week, maybe LucasFilm should be collaborating with other visual effects shops instead of trying to do so much in-house.

To be honest, my initial concern is the quality of code the algorithm is going to suggest. Public github repos represent the full gamut, from the most elegant solutions created by the best teams to the most naive, cumbersome code created by students in their first coding class. Trained systems are only as good as the data they're trained on, and so far I haven't seen any documentation on how they selected the code to use for training. If they used everything at their disposal, you may get code that uses nested loops to locate a value in a hashmap because that's what a student pushed for their first assignment.

tldr; I have a Quest 1, Bait! is free but you pay to get the extra lakes (which I've done), I don't want ads added to content I've paid for. If ads will be in the games, that should only happen in "free" games or be made clear before purchase.

Background: We bought a Quest 1 1.5 years ago, and it's been great. No base stations means we can bring it anywhere (friend's house, office, gymnasium at the community centre), and combined with the price really lowered the bar to entry. A couple of my friends have Quest 1s, and a couple more now have Quest 2s. Online co-op works smoothly, and the new Quest 2 wireless streaming from a PC works even better than the workaround using Virtual Desktop, which gives you full use of your Rift and Steam VR library.

About the recent stuff: I have had a FB account since early days, right after they opened it to non-college accounts. I'd moved to New Zealand with my wife and it was the easiest way to keep in touch with my friends at that time (FB is really a broadcast model, whereas email and phone are used by most people as point-to-point.) I wasn't keen to be linked to my FB account, mostly because FB could cancel my account at any time and lock me out of a year's worth of game purchases. However from that perspective I'm not sure it's much different from Steam, Origin, Epic etc. I bought Star Wars Squadrons on a Steam sale and it required me to create an EA Origins account and have Origin installed to play it. If Steam or EA ban my account I lose access to all my purchases. To my mind this is the biggest downside to the current gatekeeper model (and the biggest reason I like GOG's DRM-free model that lets me download my games after purchase and install offline if I want.)

About the ads specifically: I own Bait!, it's free but only comes with one lake I think. Sort of like the old Shareware model where you get it free and pay to unlock the rest of the game. I've purchased the rest of the lakes, more than a year ago. If they had sold it as "buy the rest of the lakes, with ads" then I could make an informed purchase knowing what I'm getting. But adding ads after the fact is not only upsetting but also potentially illegal. Updates that degrade a product in some way aren't illegal on their own (it's a gray area depending on several factors), and contract law isn't my area, but with those caveats I'm pretty sure that a judge would agree that altering a product after purchase to generate additional revenue for the seller without the buyer's consent is not legal. Facebook's legal team should have instructed them to put the ads into a new game, either a free-to-play-with-ads type or a purchased one with a clear disclaimer that it includes ads and how they impact the gameplay. To be clear, I think there are a number of easy ways to include ads in games (movie product placement is usually seamless, games could have done this ages ago). But the way these bumble-f**ks have gone about it is guaranteed to generate both moral and legal pushback.

100% this. The app clearly just uses the QR code to keep track of where you've been. At worst you could feed it incorrect location data. At no point does the app people were using to scan the code send your personal data outbound to some site identified by the QR code!

That's only correct on paper. They registered a US company "Rocket Lab USA" to wholly own their actual NZ rocket business "Rocket Lab", which helps them get US investors and allows them to compete for (and win!) NASA contracts.

They built a launch complex in Mahia, NZ (first private launch facility with successful orbital launches) that they use for most launches (which makes the announcement that Neutron will launch out of Wallops in USA interesting) and their main manufacturing facility is in Auckland along with their R&D. Electron will likely continue to launch from NZ, on both pad 1A and the new pad 1B that they're now building. They have a license to launch every 72 hours from 1A, whereas from Wallops we expect they'll have to submit for approval of each launch. The wikipedia page looks like it's up to date and has good reference links if you'd like to read more.

The "a closer crop" link is broken in the summary. Just go to the full article, the closer crop image is just a bit down the page.

Be fair though, the monitoring they do with satellites, planes, boats, buoys, ground radar, etc... is super expensive. They may well be spending their entire budget on valid expenses and not be able to shake free $1.5M.

Not everyone's stuff migrated correctly. The forums are full of problem descriptions with hundreds or thousands of upvotes or "affects me too" comments. YouTube have been pushing fixes fairly regularly, but it's still not working smoothly for a lot of people. I haven't experienced the missing songs issue that an earlier post was describing, but I have personally faced the following:
1. the migration taking 3 weeks to bring across my 5GB of songs, instead of the 48 hours they said it would take;
2. playlists that didn't migrate with the songs (fix was released a few weeks ago for that);
3. playlists completely out of order, eg: playlist of all songs in Moana album named with a different name so my little kids can find it, migrated into order 1,6,7,4,9, etc, (fix released last week for that);
4. playlists that play fine from YouTube Music in a browser, but only play the first song when streamed from a Nest display (I haven't found an ETA on fix for that.)

So far YT Music is quantifiably an inferior product if you're trying to stream your own music instead of YT's music library. I'm hoping their product team takes a deep breath soon and focuses on getting the bugs out of the core functionality before they work on new features.

The Quest 2 is the newest VR headset from Occulus. Both the Quest 1 and Quest 2 are completely stand-alone and require no external equipment, so you can play them anywhere. No need for a gaming PC, no cables to plug in, and no external cameras to set up. That means you can bring it to a friend's house, or go downstairs with it after your kids go to bed, whatever works best at the time you want to play.

With the Quest 2 they've brought the price down to $299 USD, which means it's cheaper than buying a latest gen console. At work we figure this means it's targeting the casual gaming segment. It's also in continuous development, with the release of hand tracking this year (so no need to use controllers), Link (so you can play your PC VR games with a cable the same as other more expensive VR headsets), wireless streaming of games (not released yet, but supported by the official VR Desktop app), etc. With game prices averaging $5 - $20 USD, it's competitive with both PC and console game prices, and does offer experiences you can't get from those platforms alone.

Fixed that for you.

A fully-tethered and supported robot like this isn't much good for real world activities, but it'd be great for putting on shows at a theme park. Having a giant gundam kneel down and waive to a crowd of kids would be an awesome experience. Would like to see it sped up a bit, at regular speed it's still awfully slow right now (note that the linked videos are at 4x and 2x).

I wonder if the lower failure rate has to do with how well water blocks ionizing radiation? I couldn't find any numbers on how deep they sank it, but I think I was taught that a rough estimate is 10cm of water blocks half the ionizing radiation. So at just 1m deep only 1/1000 of the radiation would get through. If your drive errors are coming from cosmic rays or what-have-you, maybe an underwater data center is cheaper than the equivalent in lead shielding?