But you don't have to crack the TPM or the secure enclave. You just have to replace the camera sensor with a custom device that outputs the image you want, and if necessary set the camera's date and time or fake some GPS signals. You could even keep the hardware untouched and use a slide duplicator attachment to make an authenticated copy of any image you want.

For many years advocates of more liberal drug policy have argued that addiction should be treated as a medical condition. And we're always told that mental illness should be seen as just another illness -- you wouldn't stigmatize or blame someone for having a broken arm, so you shouldn't do so if they are schizophrenic.

Well, isn't this the logical outcome? If a medical condition is severe enough to destroy your quality of life, and it isn't curable, then in some countries you have the option of assisted suicide. Why would you refuse that to someone whose condition is being addicted, if that's just another medical condition?

Hmm, you say a roundabout takes more space than a 4-way light *for the same amount of traffic*.

If that's true, it implies that roundabouts aren't that good after all? Since I thought their advantage was handling a higher volume of traffic. Like for example, if you put a four-way intersection with traffic lights it can handle an average flow of ten cars per minute, but a roundabout could take twenty cars per minute. In other words, greater throughput. (I don't know what the true numbers are.)

Perhaps the throughput is the same but a roundabout reduces the average time for a car to clear the junction -- in other words, same throughput but improved latency?

I do remember back in the day Google was known for its contrarian approach. Consultants would tell you that for an "enterprise" data centre you needed expensive servers, redundant power supplies on each unit, RAID on each unit in case a disk failed, ECC memory and so on. But Google decided to get the reliability at the large scale, throwing together large numbers of cheap systems with off-the-shelf parts and if one of them fails, well you just leave it there and use the remaining ones.

Nowdays it's conventional wisdom that servers should be "cattle, not pets". Perhaps in even in 1999 the smart people knew that. Perhaps I am setting up a straw man with these "consultants" who wanted an expensive, gold-plated approach. For sure it would have happened anyway without Google. But this guy did have to swim against the current.

I hope they market the augmented reality headset under the name of "Reality Distortion Field".

Typically, for small devices at least, the wall charger has a USB output and then you use a USB cable to connect it to your device. The device might have mini-USB or micro-USB or USB-C or Apple's Lightning. So you need a variety of different cables. Standardizing on a single connector means you don't need so many cables but in practice I don't think it wiill reduce the number of power bricks since USB was already a de facto standard there. And yes, there are different kinds of USB and not all the bricks will deliver the same power output, but this isn't really an issue for phones, and I think that standardizing the connector doesn't really change it.

Ah, spaghetti! Ah, ravioli! Ah, mamma mia!

Blockchains don't enforce anything. They are a record, nothing more, nothing less.

But that's all an NFT is too. It is simply a record in a blockchain following certain rules, stating that a certain identity"owns" the token. The rules of the blockchain could be designed so that in order to transfer the token from one account to another, a certain amount of currency must at the same time be transferred to a fixed identity we'll call the "artist".

I don't see how you could make sure it be a proportion of the sale price, because people could arrange to buy and sell outside the blockchain, paying each other in real money, and then put the transaction through with an artificially low price. But it should be possible to guarantee a fixed sum on every transfer.

As for enforcement, nothing about NFTs is enforced anyway. I could create my own blockchain declaring that I am the owner of all of these NFTs, and also declaring myself emperor of Canada for good measure. The blockchain is simply an accepted convention. So when I say "enforced in the blockchain" I mean specified as part of the code in the blockchain system. That code is the only thing which determines "ownership" of an NFT to start with. (If NFTs are subject to the real world system of copyright, that's a separate consideration really. You could agree to buy the rights to an NFT and never bother to update the blockchain.)

But if they wanted to guarantee that artists would get a cut of the resale price, and NFTs being all blockchainy and stuff, why didn't they enforce this in the blockchain itself? Smart contracts or whatever it is?

What... is your name? Sir Galleri.
What... is your quest? To seek the Grail.
Do.... I have cancer? Yes. Er, I mean no -- aaarrgh!

If the service is free of charge, Google isn't going to employ human technical support staff to validate people's identity and make a best-guess attempt to restore locked accounts to their rightful owners. That's just too expensive.

If you pay for the service, even if it's only a couple of dollars a month, then you can always be identified as the account holder, just by tracing it back through your bank account (and identifying bank customers is a well known, if not completely solved, problem). Moreover if you're paying then you will have a human "account manager" whose job it is to sort out this stuff.

That's why for important things I prefer to use a paid service. That said, I haven't put the theory to the test - like if I lost access to my current email address and I had to ask for the password to be reset just on the basis of being the person paying for the account. There still might not be a clueful helpdesk, if 99% of accounts are free ones.

I use Outlook and Teams at work but I've found the web versions to be faster. I just open outlook.office.com and teams.microsoft.com in Firefox. Outlook in particular responds faster (for me) than the desktop app -- though it' still pretty sluggish. Teams in the browser is about the same experience as the desktop version (which is currently an Electron app anyway), but at least you only have one browser engine running, saving a few hundred megs of memory.

So obviously, links also open in Firefox. One thing I haven't managed to fix is the obnoxious "safelinks" URI munging. There are Greasemonkey scripts for that but Microsoft has changed the munging slightly over the years so I haven't found (or managed to write) one that works.

From the Bots of New York:

âoeIâ(TM)m freaking out!! Disney just unveiled the lineup for the next twelve phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Here is everything they announced today: Hulk High School (2024), Bride Of Hulk (2025), Spider-Man: Father Of The Bride (2025), Drunk Hulk (2026), Spider-Man: Girlz With Attitude (2026), Spider-Man: Dance Off (2027), Spider-Man: Magic Mike (2028), Spider-Man: Dance Off: Close Up (2029), Spider-Man: Dance Off: Close Up: Expanded Picnic (2030), Bruce Banner: Bride Of The Father Of The Bride (2031), Mr. Elton John (Agent Of S.H.R.E.D. III) (2032), Spider-Man: Far More Better Than Before (2034), Baby Driver (2036), Spider-Man: Benediction Of Timmy (2037), Venom: Look Who's Talking (2039), Spider-Man: Double Baggy (2039), For The Sake Of Continuity (2042), Deadpool And The Wook (2044), Apokémon Now (2045), A Batman Xmas: Drunk Hulk Blows A 2.0 BAC (2047), Spider-Man: Braveheart Reboot (2049), Spider-Man: Braveheart Reboot: No Spoilers (2050), Thanos: Untitled Origin Story (2050), Origin Story: Untitled Origin Story (2001), Star Wars: Infinity War (2050), Greedo: Untitled Origin Story (2050), Spider-Man: Dance Off: Close Up: Origin Story (2050), Spider-Man: First Dance Off (2050).â

Unlike the ACM article's author, I'm not offended by the new unreachable notation. It won't bite you unless you explicitly decide to use it. The problem is the implicit undefined behaviour allowing the compiler to do crazy things. In most cases I can kind of see why it's that way, but it needs a strong warning from the compiler that it's about to elide half of your code having decided it can never be reached without undefined behaviour being triggered.

We know that ChatGPT can make up stuff that vaguely matches its training set. And you could train it on a corpus of peer-reviewed academic papers and newspapers (not including Wikipedia or other websites in the corpus) and it might then be able to write encylopaedia articles. But as Jimmy Wales noted, you'd have to take its output with a very large pinch of salt, and by that point you might as well write the article by hand.

A more fruitful approach, as well as one that's more of a challenge for current technology, would be to ask a machine learning system to find problems with Wikipedia articles. "The claim in the fifth paragraph cites the study [15] as evidence, but the conclusions of that study do not support the claim in the Wikipedia article. This is because the study says... while the article says... "

Once you've got a system that can nitpick articles like this, even if it's unreliable and sometimes gets false positives, it's still a good starting point for a human to go in and check. And if the model has misunderstood, hopefully it would be possible to use these mistakes to correct the model or as additional training data.