Yup, so many major fundamental bugs, but hey, they gotta keep the focus on the AI slop.

Right now on one of my Win11 boxes the start menu is empty, half the icons are missing from the taskbar. At least it means no more ads when I hit the start button, but I feel it is fundamentally, morally wrong for the operating system to be an advertising platform. Either way, I suspect Explorer crashed and restarted badly when switching between KVM systems, as it often does, leading to this.

Right now another of by boxes the task bar is seemingly set to the lowest z-order, covered by other programs, including visual studio.

Opening up a search on explorer breaks the back button, once it goes into "search" mode it loses the ability to have the regular folder display, you need to completely close the window and re-open it. And you can't copy the location, it stays stuck as "search results" mode with no meaningful location in the address bar.

Context menus in explorer are broken, sometimes showing the new UI elements, sometimes the old style UI elements, sometimes they're missing.

If you're unfortunate enough to have to use the preview build for testing, it's far worse. You wanted to click an item in a new-UI app like the start button? Nope! It behaves as though it were unscrolled, instead of the 17th button down, because it was visually third from the top the start menu immediately jumps back to the top of the list and starts the third app from the top, you're getting the calendar app, or photos app, rather than what you clicked on.

The rewrite of task manager dumped a ton of features, task manager frequently crashes, and when you look up the known issues on their public bug list Task Manager still remains with hundreds of "mitigated" and unresolved issues despite task manager being a core piece of functionality.

I'm constantly switching between systems, Kubernetes cluster terminals, both Windows and Linux. I only use Windows when I have to, it has thoroughly slipped into 'enshitified' territory. So many fundamental "the user can't even access what they clicked on" bugs, and "the Windows start button, the core user interface element needed to do things, is missing" bugs, yet somehow AI slop is the highest priority over the ability to actually run the program you want.

Maybe that's the real reason for the agent stuff: "Hey agent, please start this program because the start menu is broken again, and my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard no longer connect."

In that case, I've got to tell you your duplicate post commenting about duplicate posts and duplicate replies is a duplicate.

It's duplicates all the way down.

Yup. Some others companies fought were ingredients lists ("We'll lose our secret recipes!"), nutrition information and calories ("people can work it out from the ingredients!"), financial disclosures ("Competitors can take advantage"), standardized rates of interest rate comparables ("customers can do the math!").

Anything that exposes the truth, risks, or potential liability or unwanted data gets fought as an existential threat.

It's been more than a meme.

As the article points out, it's been a question in philosophy since antiquity. At least 2500 years of discussion, probably more. We have no way to know how different people process what they see without peeking inside the brain and comparing. This is newsworthy as it's the closest we've come to verifying it.

There are still open questions about perception and interpretation in addition to just neural pathways, particularly around those with different sensitivities, but that's at least a start.

Color blindness missing one, two, or three sensitivities, tetrachromats or having a fourth sensitivity, shifted sensitivities that peak at slightly different places for different people, all of them lead to ways the colors could be perceived and interpreted differently by different people. It's a good start at research, but there's a lot more that can be answered.

Neither the FBI's assessment nor the CDC's assessment agree with your recommendations. They have a lot of heavily-researched recommendations filled with rigorous citations and backed by tragic data.

Research over the past 30 years is clear on how to do it: First and foremost, socioeconomic disparity needs to be addressed. Second, availability of mental health care to minors, especially by decoupling it from parental employment, or said differently, universal mental health care for minors at the very least. Third, external groups auditing schools for signs of bullying, social classes or have/have-nots, especially by administrators and teachers; data shows schools and districts cannot self-assess because the ones doing the assessments are part of the bias, and typically blind to their actions.

The data shows, and the FBI summary is clear in describing, that regulations on firearms themselves are statistically irrelevant. In fact, the FBI summary explicitly calls out that is one of the biggest pieces of misinformation and false claims, the demonstrably wrong belief that easy access to weapons is the most significant risk factor. The data shows it has virtually no effect whatsoever. Anyone wanting to commit violence at school can do so.

The four-prong assessment model, looking at the personality of the student, the family dynamics, the school dynamics, and interplay/leakage between any of those with society at large, tends to give the best view of risks. Schools and local officials especially tend to downplay their role, dismissing teacher favoritism to cliques as "school spirit", "supporting the team", and similar, and dismissing their prejudice because they are blind to it, believing it justified.

Unfortunately the research-backed guidance isn't popular with lawmakers. The plans cost money. Addressing the disparity is labeled terms like "woke" and "communist". Universal healthcare labeled "socialized medicine" and given labels like "death panels" as though insurance companies don't do the same today. The republican party is against it claiming individual liberties, the democratic party is against it due to high costs.

They took things they knew from the outset they didn't have a right to, like the oft-discussed Books3 database. They knew it was pirated, had an email chain discussing paying for the books, and decided to use it anyway. It was a wilful disregard of copyright law because it was faster and easier to use piracy for profit.

There are a TON of differences. Probably the biggest is that the machine version can read the entirety of all known creations.

Humans can study some a book in a few days, watch a movie in an hour or two, a web page in a few minutes. Machine learning can pull in thousands in the time it has taken you to read this.

Similarly for output, writing a book takes months to years, staging photos takes time and tools, feature films are hundred million dollar multi-year endeavors.

The human cost is a huge part of the economic difference. The AI industry has made fortunes by sweeping in everything ever created, authorized or not. Companies like Meta now have email trails showing they could have moved for authorized access, but like a thief that it was easier to just grab known-unauthorized materials and profit immediately rather than compensate people for the use.

Combined the two are unacceptable. They could pay but they refuse, they claim the only way to operate is mass infringement on the scale of all humanity, that if they don't get unfettered access to everything humans have ever created, without compensation, so they can maximize profit.

They increase the cost to customers and cre revenue for the government, but they do not stop trade.

For small, normal tariffs there is no real difference in trade. It just goes to government coffers as a hidden tax.

The current trade war will certainly increase costs, but still the goods will flow. Nothing is stopped, just a bit more pressure on people who are sensitive to costs. Certainly the rich don't care about a few cents or a few dollars. The billionaires especially don't care, they can pay hundreds to have a special sandwich delivered to them fresh at their vacation location, what's a few bucks at Amazon when they are also getting same day delivery?

If stopping trade was the point, there are trade embargos and import bans and government seizure of goods that could be invoked.

When I search for anything, Gemini pops up despite it being useless.

When I tell my phone to play the news or play some music or tell me the weather, Assistant was disabled and now Gemini tries to do it, but badly.

Features I liked on my phone were removed against my will and against my preference, now instead of something useful it just says "I am a large language model and I can't do that useful task".

When I use work tools that use Gmail, Gemini pops up and I can't turn it off.

When I use Google Docs, because that's what work requires, Gemini pops up repeatedly telling me it wants to be useful, it's worse than Clippy ever was.

Probably 10,000 of those "uses" were just me personally telling Gemini it is a useless pile of garbage that if it caught fire it could at least provide warmth and heat as a dumpster fire, it is less valuable than that. It is a waste of bandwidth, unwanted, being aggressively forced on the victims using Google products as their enshitification converts useful tools into monetization.

Quite a few scenarios can't do it, actually.

If your scenario fits in the box --- and the vast majority of cases fit in the box --- then the ACME protocol works great. Publicly accessible, ability to modify mainstream DNS TXT record, and public access to port 80, and able to get online on the public internet periodically at least once every 3 months, you're great. If you're in the most typical scenario it works just fine. Box in a datacenter, system runs in an always-on network, using any of the major DNS providers, even if your network is mostly private but one at the top level is accessible so you can do a *.example.com wildcard registration, the vast majority of people have no issue with it.

But that's not everybody, that's almost everybody. Some scenarios are excluded. What if the device is not using a mainstream DNS provider? What if the device can't provide the port on the domain's address? What if the device can't get online frequent enough? What if the obscure configuration doesn't allow for DNS challenges? What if you don't own the level you can do a wildcard registration? What if you can't satisfy the round trip timeout? Live in a rural place, where service comes through "internet on a bike" but still want security? Need to serve from a device that can't reach the public internet for many months at a time? There are plenty of obscure situations where the protocol doesn't work.

People in those scenarios still want the security, but they don't fit in the box.

Yup. They are overdue for poisoning bot requests. Block the hosting domains, errors and black holes, feed them the same errors every time about how they can get the copied version of the databases at cost. This is not a new problem, companies have detected and killed bot traffic for decades now.

It's more complex than the article suggests.

Somewhat ironically, the problem DNG proports to solve is a problem the format itself experiences. Yes, it is true that the camera manufacturers update their image formats and it takes time for companies to catch up. But at the same time the DNG format is on it's 7th iteration, if your camera is using the 2023 version of DNG but your software only supports up to the 2021 version of DNG, it's exactly the same problem as if you've got a 2023 version from your Canon camera but your software only supports up to 2021 version.

Plus as a container format, anybody can put whatever they want in the file and you still need the matching codec for that piece of the content. In many ways it's like so many other audio and video formats, the file can be opened but the specific codec is still required.

Similar but reversed. My credit unions aren't part of Zelle, but some people don't use or won't use Venmo or Paypal FF. This removes one of the few free ways to transfer funds.

I used to be able to tie a debit card to Zelle. Now it's looking like I need to open yet another bank account (I've got four) to find one that offers Zelle built in. Zelle is a system built buy the banks, for the banks, and I understand why they're doing it, but I'm one of that 2% of users that is hit hard by their action.

OpenAI CEO: We're limiting numbers to 2 images per account per day for free accounts.

Also OpenAI CEO: These images are popular, we've seen millions of new accounts making the images.

I can't help but put these two things together.

It's a balance, the rights of the individual versus the rights of society. It's also about errors, misuse, and abuse.

If there were absolutely zero misuse and zero abuse, and it worked perfectly 100% of the time, I'd tend to agree with you. It could quickly help identify people known to be wanted in connection to crimes, or legally banned and trespassing. Even without those qualification it is certainly a useful tool by police, for good or ill.

Unfortunately anybody can get on the lists for any number of reasons. People can also be mis-identified, the systems have always been bad at women and POC. Some people are chronically mis-identified, carrying government-issued papers that say they aren't the criminal but they do look like their doppelganger to the computers. It doesn't take a criminal conviction to get on the list and false accusations can disrupt the lives of innocent victims, now harassed by police and government until they can prove their case. Sometimes getting off the list is difficult or impossible even after clearing their name, so they get arrested and abused by police time and time again despite having addressed the initial issue.

In societies with enough checks and balances and judicial review they can help, but the risks of abuse, misuse, and error are so high that it's generally a bad tool when looking at the totality of ethics.