There are plenty of places that will take your exposed film, develop, and scan and/or print for you, by mail, or in-person, at least around here. If there's a Hunt's Photo near you, they do a great job.

If you only want digital photos printed, then there are many, many places that will print pro-grade photos for cheap, and the results will be a damn sight better than what you get at the local drug store.

I think the backdoor isn't Chinese in the sense of the government or the country, it's more of a vendor problem globally. Vendors do this to keep control of what they sell, to be able to force customers to buy support subscriptions on pain of having the product stop working if they don't. Vendors from countries other than China do this just as often. We should be worried about what all vendors do, not just Chinese vendors.

You're describing the consensus models, and they are better than any individual model, at least thus far.

Sad to say but these days that is a real possibility.

Why do we, a supposedly intelligent species, make war rather than cooperate ? If you think that I am naive - please explain.

I once had an interesting conversation with an Android OEM. I sat down with them to discuss what security issues they'd like to see the Android security team work on. They asked me "When are you going to fix the USB hole?". I didn't know what they meant and asked for clarification. They explained that in some parts of the world, notably India and China, there were "free" charging stations set up in bus stops, train stations and other public areas. These charging stations allow the public to charge their phones, for free! There's just one catch. On a sign above the charging station there's a set of instructions that tells users how to go about activating the charging. The sign tells them to go into the Settings app, then "About Phone", then scroll down to the build number, tap it seven times, then... it walks them through enabling ADB and accepting the key of the "charging station" computer, which would then proceed to install malware -- and to start charging.

Huge numbers of people used these charging stations every day, to the point that the biggest problem users had (besides the malware) was that they were always occupied. No one had a problem with "activating" charging for their device.

90% of people are capable of following a list of instructions. 100% of people are capable of either following a list of instructions or getting someone nearby to do it for them.

Anyway, this OEM wanted us to disable ADB entirely, or allow them to, because their users were doing it, getting loaded up with malware, and then blaming the OEM for making a crappy phone. I, of course, told them that we were not going to disable ADB and we were not going to remove the compliance requirement that forces them to support ADB.

Unfortunately, the current change still doesn't fix the "USB hole", but it does offer a way to rate-limit malware installation via downloadables.

Anyway, if you really think your users can't follow instructions, or can't get someone else to do it for them, you can always just register for a developer account. As long as you don't distribute malware, people will be able to sideload your APKs without using ADB. If the $25 is too much for you, maybe share the cost with some buddies, or get one of the limited accounts, though your APKs will only be installable on a small number of devices. Except, of course, by people who can follow instructions, or get someone else to.

Yep. It allows them to stop malware. How terrible!

How did you learn this?

and his push for coal quite so much if the pollution so caused would stay within the borders of the USA so that only Americans suffer climate and health problems caused by the orange idiot's stupidity. Unfortunately this is fantasy: we all share this planet and it's atmosphere so we all suffer pollution elsewhere.

We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

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I suspect you actually do derive a lot of utility from AWS and Azure, you just don't realize how many of the services you use every day are running on them.

Oh, actually, I missed the most obvious flaw in this argument: The verification doesn't give Google any significant control! It does give them the real-world identities of registered developers, yes, but then what? It doesn't do anything to require registered developer to use the Play store or comply with any Play policies other than one: Don't distribute malware.

The real purpose here is malware rate-limiting. Right now, malware authors can pump out huge numbers of apps with small variations to defeat identification. Google may identify one malicious app and warn all of the user that have it installed, but the malware author has thrown out a hundred variations of that app and Google only twigged to one. What ID verification does is require the developer to tie each app to a unique government-issued ID. In countries where you can't just go get a hundred government IDs, this means teams of malware authors can make approximately one malicious APK per team member. In countries where they can go get a hundred unique government IDs per person (because the government is actively cooperating or because they have a cousin in the ID office) it doesn't help so much, but Google can then start working with the governments to crack down.

I don't know if you noticed in the announcement, but this program is starting in a small number of countries, with the cooperation of and at the request of the governments who are trying to defend their populace against waves of malware. This isn't an accident.

Actually, though, your comment and my off-the-cuff response both miss the real difference which is why malware authors would choose to use F-Droid to distribute their apps. They'd have to publish source, which would be a disadvantage in the competitive world of malware authoring, and publishing source code would also make it easy for their malicious code to be identified. It makes a lot more sense for them to publish via downloadable sideloads or -- even better, if they can manage it -- in the Play store.

From a security perspective, it makes sense to treat F-Droid differently from random downloadable sideloads... but how is the Android OS supposed to tell the difference? The Android mechanism for establishing APK trust is signatures. So... F-Droid could arrange with Google to get the platform to trust APKs signed by F-Droid, which would make F-Droid work fine. And, actually, there's no need for Google to go through any complicated process to set that up: F-Droid can simply register as a developer and sign the APKs it distributes. Done. Of course, if F-Droid ever screws up and does distribute malware, it could result in all of their apps being evicted from Android device, but since F-Droid is a zero-malware platform, that's not a problem, right?

How many apps in F-Droid vs how many in the Play store?

I just got the v14 upgrade a few days ago, and it's a mixed bag. On the plus side, it now handles parking, as in I give it a destination, it drives me there, goes into the parking lot, picks out a spot and parks in it, all with zero human input or intervention. On the negative side, I think v14 needs a little more compute horsepower than my 2025 Model S has. I used to have a 2020, with previous-gen computer, and as FSD got more capable it actually degraded a bit, becoming indecisive and occasionally "stuttering". With the new car that went away entirely. I was very impressed. With v14, in the new car, it's began to get indecisive and stutter again. Not often, but it happens. I think this is a result of the model not being able to complete its processing quickly enough, because it doesn't have enough compute.

I'm hopeful that they can refine and optimize v14, though, to fix that problem. Other than that, and the fact that on the country roads where I live it always wants to drive too slow (the roads are small, but the speed limit is 45 and everyone drives 50-55, while the car is clearly not comfortable going over 35-40), it's extremely good.

Experience is just a feedback loop. Stuff happens externally, triggering computation and generation of explanations, then the events are stored in memory -- including the memory of the explanations. Then, later explanatory computation (reflection / introspection) uses those memories and creates additional memories. These layers of reflective/introspective computation constitute the experience of consciousness, but there's really nothing special about it. It's just cycles of self-referential computation.

I'm pretty confident that as our AI models begin to run more continuously as agents rather than episodically as task-focused systems, and as they gain better ability to reason about and generate explanations of their own previous "thoughts", they'll reach a point where we'll have to call them conscious or at least admit that we can't distinguish what they do from what we do.