I remember this in an Australian PH ad from the 80s. An Italian pizzeria owner was lamenting that all his customers were going to PH, so one of his sons bought a PH pizza back to the shop to compare it. A son said "It has cheese on the top cheese on the bottom and more of what you like in between, hey Papa!" That is stuck in my head, along with the ingredients on a Big Mac.

Not a coder, but I have read a lot of undeclared AI-generated articles (masquerading as human-written blog posts) and they are garbage. At first I thought they were written by people with a NESB and poor English skills, but once chatGPT hit the mainstream, it all made sense: it didnâ(TM)t understand context or flow.

Ditto for AI-generated audio transcripts. You have to spend so much time with them, itâ(TM)s worth paying the real price to have a human do it.

Hereâ(TM)s his statement made to Arthur Bell:

I, I don't have a whole lot of time
Um, okay, I'm a former employee of Area 51
I, I was let go on a medical discharge about a week ago and, and
I've kind of been running across the country
Damn, I don't know where to start, they're
They're gonna, um, they'll triangulate on this position really really soon
Okay, um, um, okay
What we're thinking of as, as aliens
They're extradimensional beings
That, an earlier precursor of the, um, space program they made contact with
They are not what they claim to be
Uh, they've infiltrated a, a lot of aspects of, of, of the military establishment
Particularly the Area 51
The disasters that are coming, they, the military
I'm sorry, the government knows about them
And there's a lot of safe areas in this world that they could begin moving
The population to now, they are not
They want those major population centers wiped out so that the few
That are left will be more easily controllable

For gamers, there's a new Game Mode in macOS Sonoma that delivers an optimized gaming experience with smoother and more consistent frame rates. Mac users will now get the best experience running any of the three games available on the Macintosh.

But wait. There's one more thing.

Announcing today, there are two more games in development for the Macintosh, one of which may be ready by Christmas. 2024.

Eleven months later, the legitimate app was updated to add entirely new functionality. It included the ability to remotely turn on the device mic and record sound, connect to an attacker-controlled server, and upload the audio and other sensitive files that were stored on the device.

That update probably wasn't listed in the "What's New" section.

FTFA:
"Wang was able to flee the country even after law enforcement executed the search, despite promising that he wouldn’t.

Wang boarded a flight to Guangzhou, China, from San Francisco International Airport. In a press conference, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California Ismail Ramsey said Wang is in China and would face 10 years in prison for each count if extradited and convicted."

Onya, Chief Wiggum. Well done.

FTA: The media company was once valued at $5.7 billion back in 2017

From an interview published in 2018:

When I asked Dominique Delport, the chief revenue officer, whether the company was profitable, he declined to say and suggested that dollar figures were the wrong way to think about Vice.

That valuation seems optimistic.

1. "The Light Switch of Fate" made me snort-laugh.
2. When I first heard "Dial of Destiny", I thought of the movie "Pick of Destiny", a title chosen for its ridiculous sound.

At this point, the group of people responsible for making sequels to continue well-loved franchises would be indistinguishable from a group of people responsible for destroying them.

China and India are the two biggest rice producers. I'm not sure if their people, nor the people in the low-income countries buying from them, feel the same way about "empty carbs" as you do.

A story on Disney's operational decisions doesn't really count as "News for nerds". Barring company people, it probably doesn't even fit under "stuff that matters". It's either in the "all filler, no killer" category, or, given Disney's current political stoush, troll bait.

I retired a (work) mid-2013 27" iMac in January this year, so that's nearly 10 years.

It was on 9 hours a day, 5 days a week, 46 weeks a year. I used it for video editing mainly. In the end, the screen was still awesome, but the hard drive was grinding away. If there was money in the system for repairs, I would have had the HD replaced some years ago, but there wasn't so I didn't. I would have tried a fresh reinstall of the OS and restoration of files, but the time required + fear of the whole thing dying stopped me, so I soldiered on.

It's been replaced by a Mac Studio M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU and 16-core Neural Engine, 32GB unified memory, 4TB SSD and a Mac Studio Display and a 24TB Thunderbolt 3 Pegasus32 R6 RAID5. We happy? Oh yeah, we happy.

FWIW, now I'd really like to retire my (home) 2017 iMac for a new Mac Studio or Mac mini, too.

Neanderthals with SUVs.

Everything works as long as the music keeps playing. It's when the music stops and everyone tries to claim a seat that they realise there's not enough to go around.

Buffet specifically mentioned this "material weakness" in financial reporting in his annual letter to stockholders.

Finally, an important warning: Even the operating earnings figure that we favor can easily be manipulated by managers who wish to do so. Such tampering is often thought of as sophisticated by CEOs, directors and their advisors. Reporters and analysts embrace its existence as well.

Beating “expectations” is heralded as a managerial triumph. That activity is disgusting. It requires no talent to manipulate numbers: Only a deep desire to deceive is required. “Bold imaginative accounting,” as a CEO once described his deception to me, has become one of the shames of capitalism.

Or things that the bank counted on as assets were just puffs of smoke.