Comment Jean-Louis Gassee? He's a legend! (Score 2) 39
Wow, I haven't seen that name for quite a while. I remember as a kid really rooting for BeOS and hoping they would challenge Windows. I'm still a bit nostalgic for those days!
Comment Stack Overflow owns the user data? (Score 4, Insightful) 31
That's incredibly hypocritical that this hosting site wants money for "their" when they never paid a cent for the data that helpful users posted there. If they're ready to take money for the data, they should pay money for the data.
Comment Re: Soap Opera Effect (Score 1) 121
It would be nice to be able to control the music track separately, too, for the small minority of us who don't like music.
Comment What if they were scientists and not painters? (Score 1) 52
I think it would be awesome if the scientists in this town would get together and talk, and then they make some CAD files and start building stuff. If you sped up the world at like 1000x speed, maybe they'd actually make something useful!
Comment Re:80% is pretty lousy (Score 2) 57
90% at five days out and 80% at seven days ( https://scijinks.gov/forecast-... ) is pretty good, I think. I doubt you are going to get that good by saying it'll be the same weather in a week as yesterday, except in places like the Sahara.
Submission + - Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.
Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.
Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.
Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees.
Tesla states in its online “Customer Privacy Notice” that its “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” But seven former employees told Reuters the computer program they used at work could show the location of recordings – which potentially could reveal where a Tesla owner lived.
One ex-employee also said that some recordings appeared to have been made when cars were parked and turned off. Several years ago, Tesla would receive video recordings from its vehicles even when they were off, if owners gave consent. It has since stopped doing so.
Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.
Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.
Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees.
Tesla states in its online “Customer Privacy Notice” that its “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” But seven former employees told Reuters the computer program they used at work could show the location of recordings – which potentially could reveal where a Tesla owner lived.
One ex-employee also said that some recordings appeared to have been made when cars were parked and turned off. Several years ago, Tesla would receive video recordings from its vehicles even when they were off, if owners gave consent. It has since stopped doing so.
Comment Re: Neither pretty nor right (Score 1) 124
At the relevant time, I was mainly doing stuff in C, either command line programs or embedded stuff. Windows GUI was really, really intimidating to program for, but Visual Basic was perfect for making a simple GUI wrapper around a command line utility and making the utility friendlier.
Comment Keep Kindles offline! (Score 4, Insightful) 244
In the family, we keep our e-ink Kindles offline, and install books only via USB (Amazon has made it a little more complicated to do that over time, but it can still be done). It's a bit less convenient, but it guarantees that nothing gets changed, and battery life is presumably even better.
I am not a lawyer, but I do wonder about the legality of changing files on someone else's device. I don't see anything in the Kindle Store Terms of Use ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/help... ) that one agrees to allow Amazon to change files stored on one's device. I expect somewhere there is some agreement to system updates, but this is not a system update.
Comment I also hate it when machines wash my clothes! (Score 1) 142
Dammit, I want underpaid serfs to do all my labor. I tell you, civilization started collapsing when technological contrivances started doing the jobs of the underclass. Can you believe that dishwashers are now appliances and not some repressed laborers? How am I supposed to feel posh when I'm not lording it over someone who's beneath me? This idea of machines animating the backgrounds of my anime is just another step down the slippery slope. That's a job for poor kids in an Asian sweatshop, not an usuffering AI! In the end, when commercial machines replace even my butler, driver and maids, being in the ruling class will come to mean nothing at all!
Comment Re:Basically have to test people over their papers (Score 1) 104
You've obviously never had to organise & administer (high-stakes) examination interviews. It'd be very expensive & time-consuming for already overstretched education institutions. It's just not feasible.
I have, without any teaching assistants, organized and administered high-stakes examination interviews. Each meeting used up about 30 minutes of my time in my office, which is not too different from how long it takes me to read and grade a written test or term paper. This was in a large-ish US university, where students get nervous about that sort of thing. I can confidently report that due to my careful use of follow-up questions, I can get a very clear sense of the depth of each student's knowledge.
Comment Re:that business. (Score 1) 254
All sounds right, except that lunch need not be any more expensive for in-person work if you just pack a sandwich.
Comment Re: Already a solved problem? (Score 1) 35
Isn't the difference that this coating doesn't need electricity, but heats up via IR? Glasses with batteries would be bulky.
Comment Procedurally generated video games (Score 2) 26
This was another missing piece in procedurally generated video games. I suspect that pretty soon somebody is going to stitch together a tool like this, some diffusion-based visuals generator, and chatGPT for dialogue, and we'll have an awesome open-world game with infinite replayability. All the pieces are falling into place!
Submission + - Left-Wing Voices Are Silenced on Twitter as Far-Right Trolls Advise Elon Musk (theintercept.com)
AmiMoJo writes: Elon Musk claims to be “fighting for free speech in America” but the social network’s new owner appears to be overseeing a purge of left-wing activists from the platform. Several prominent antifascist organizers and journalists have had their accounts suspended in the past week, after right-wing operatives appealed directly to Musk to ban them and far-right internet trolls flooded Twitter’s complaints system with false reports about terms of service violations. As the Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin noted on Twitter, the suspended users include Chad Loder, an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers. The account of video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh, who reports on far-right protests in Southern California, has also been suspended.
Among the other prominent accounts suspended were the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in North Texas, and CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that has published and distributed anarchist and anti-authoritarian zines, books, posters, and podcasts since the mid-1990s.
All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.” In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him.
Among the other prominent accounts suspended were the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in North Texas, and CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that has published and distributed anarchist and anti-authoritarian zines, books, posters, and podcasts since the mid-1990s.
All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.” In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him.
Submission + - Musk suggests bankruptcy for Twitter is a possibility (nytimes.com) 3
quonset writes: As Elon Musk attempts to impose his will on Twitter, the problems keep piling up. First he fired a ton of staff, then asked many to come back. Next, he announced that all workers must work from the office at least 40 hours per week. As a result, several senior members of Twitter's privacy and security teams left the company while offering ominous warnings of the trouble Musk is getting the company into. Now comes word Musk has said Twitter might have to declare bankruptcy as more and more advertisers stop buying ad space because of the hate-filled screeds Musk has allowed to permeate Twitter. From the story:
At the meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk warned employees that Twitter did not have the necessary cash to survive, said seven people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The social media company was running a negative cash flow of several billion dollars, Mr. Musk added, without specifying if that was an annual figure. He mentioned bankruptcy.
Mr. Musk added that he had recently sold Tesla stock to “save” Twitter. He has sold nearly $4 billion in Tesla shares recently, according to regulatory filings this week.
Even so, Mr. Musk said Twitter remained over-staffed after mass layoffs of half of the company’s 7,500 employees last week. Remaining workers needed to be more “hard core,” Mr. Musk said.
His statements echoed messages he shared in two emails sent to workers late on Wednesday. In those notes, Mr. Musk said “the economic picture ahead is dire.” He added that he planned to end Twitter’s remote work policy and wanted employees to renew their focus on generating revenue and fighting spam.
At the meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk warned employees that Twitter did not have the necessary cash to survive, said seven people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The social media company was running a negative cash flow of several billion dollars, Mr. Musk added, without specifying if that was an annual figure. He mentioned bankruptcy.
Mr. Musk added that he had recently sold Tesla stock to “save” Twitter. He has sold nearly $4 billion in Tesla shares recently, according to regulatory filings this week.
Even so, Mr. Musk said Twitter remained over-staffed after mass layoffs of half of the company’s 7,500 employees last week. Remaining workers needed to be more “hard core,” Mr. Musk said.
His statements echoed messages he shared in two emails sent to workers late on Wednesday. In those notes, Mr. Musk said “the economic picture ahead is dire.” He added that he planned to end Twitter’s remote work policy and wanted employees to renew their focus on generating revenue and fighting spam.
