The one conclusion we can draw from this is the folks drawing conclusions are exposing nothing but their own beliefs.

All we know is the dog was unleashed and the Waymo hit it.

We don't know if the dog shot out from under a parked car, so it was literally impossible to avoid. Or if it was sitting in the middle of the road and the Waymo ran straight over it.

All the folks trying to assign blame one way or another are doing so completely prematurely.

First Street very likely doesn't have some magic model that can predict the future better than anyone else.

When you get a mortgage you have to pay for a flood survey. Even my house 700' above the village where the bank is.

Your flood risk is absolutely predicted by the flood history of your location. The bank writing the mortgage has the skin in the game which is why they make the buyer pay for the flood survey.

It sounds like First Street might be liable for damages based on pseudoscience if these Realtors bring a case. It would be interesting to see them present solid evidence that they prospectively beat the existing flood models and survive a cross-examination.

If they've published a peer-reviewed paper then I missed it.

Hostile design is often a sign of libido dominandi, not just laziness.

SmartTube has probably hundreds of settings you can tweak to improve usability and accessibility. The developer clearly has a user-first philosophy.

You have Revanced for Android but Apple doesn't allow such things.

It has some excellent accessibility improvements over stock.

Cheaper to just pay the bribes.

In America it's known as K-street. Or "donating" to an Inauguration Gala. Or hosting a high court judge in a European palace for a couple of weeks. Or giving decision makers absurd private sector salaries when they 'retire'. Or giving the Governor's wife a $200K no-show job. Pick your branch, there's a way.

In India the system is less formal.

The other launch site cannot reach the space station with either soyuz or progress.

There's a narrative on the right that fascism was a left wing form of government.,

But the reality is that both fascism and communism were extreme right wing forms of government.

Fascism openly so, but also communism. Remember what fascism actually cares about, maintaining order, obedience to authority, sacrificing for the glory of the state.

Communism was supposed to be about equality and the people controlling everything in a bottom up manner. But the moment you implement it on a national scale you end up with a small inner circle, and they either go fascist like the USSR, or a technocratic dictatorship like China.

There's a reason that when the USSR fell the one narrative you heard was about how much the government lied (because they were far right masquerading as far left). And there's a reason why it was so easy for Russia to go far right under Putin, because they were under far right rule in the USSR.

So yeah, demanding public ownership is pretty on brand for fascists.

Every week I read about yet another GOP-controlled state legislature redrawing the boundaries to eliminate districts that might vote for a party other than the GOP in time for the midterms. Indiana is the latest state to do this. I don't see AI overcoming this. It's truly interesting that this widespread, coordinated effort to eliminate democratic seats with a map is hardly a blip in the news media. They are talking about the dems taking back congressional power in the midterms but frankly it's not going to happen.

Several democrat states are responding in kind now, although in their cases they are moving forward with a veneer of legitimacy through referendums. The GOP states could certainly do this but for whatever reason they choose not to. Something about democracy doesn't sit well with them even when it favors them. Still with democrat states gerrymandering away a few GOP seats, it's not enough to counter what these other GOP states are doing in my opinion.

Sadly the cancer of gerrymandering is working its way north. It's already been done here in Alberta to try to weaken the power of the cities vs the conservative rural base.

There's a huge difference:

Our governments, at least in theory, are controlled by us, the people. Ok, the 1% who make the major campaign contributions. But that's still a lot of people.

The number of SpaceX or Amazon shareholders who have enough shares to have a say in these matters is single-digits. So power is concentrated in much fewer hands.

Given dynamic battlefield, I don't think that is as easily done as you think, and the moment SpaceX makes a mistake and knocks out a Ukrainian drone on a mission, they'll be guilty for everything. There's not really a winning position for them here.

Russia isn't hiding that it targets civilian infrastructure. They still wage war the way everyone did it in 1939-1945. US and UK bombers essentially just opened the doors above German cities and let the unguided bombs fall wherever. We're not doing that anymore because most of the world learned that despite all this, they didn't exactly surrender. So it's a huge waste of resources. Russia, on the other hand, still thinks that Ukrainians will agree to becoming Russians due to a few cold and dark winters.

Hiding money flow from public view. It is trivial to automatically trace all transfers on the blockchain. And the same way I don't post my banking history to the Internet, I have a reasonable need to not have all of my Bitcoin transactions fully transparent to everyone in the world.

So tl;dr: The legal use is: Protect my privacy.

That doesn't mean I am doing anything illegal. I might be doing something perfectly legal but socially controversial - maybe I make campaign contributions to the communist party, or consume an unhealthy amount of furry porn. It might also be legal but I have a need to hide my finances from someone specific - maybe an abusive spouse, maybe overly controlling parent, maybe a stalker.

For the moment, Bitcoin is still a bit of a niche thing, but the more it moves into mainstream, the more people will have the interest and the capabilities to use Bitcoin to breach people's privacy when they use Bitcoins to pay for something.

Proprietary service drops support for proprietary protocol..

The Animatrix was pretty solid for its intent as a series of vignettes telling stories of human civilization throughout multiple iterations of the Matrix. Most relevant is
"The Second Renaissance Parts I and II" (viewable on YouTube).

In that pair of vignettes, you follow humanity's introduction of *actual* AI, it's abuse of that sentience, its refusal to acknowledge independence, the resulting war, and the blotting out of the sun to starve the machines of their primary energy source. That, then, required the machines to seek out a perpetually renewable energy source which (the electrical impulses of human physiology).

Sci-Fi. It's a warning, not a guidebook.

It's been, what, a week, and they got 6000 jets through maintenance during a very busy holiday travel season?

That speaks to fantastic logistics. There are anonymous folks out there who did a great job and deserve a ridiculously generous Christmas Bonus. :gallant bow:

All of the headline changes go in during a two-week window at the start of the cycle, having been developed previously. Several people write articles during that window about what got merged, so the list is already known when the release actually comes out two months later. (That two-month period is used for testing in more unusual situations and checking for incompatibilities among the set of changes that got merged for the cycle.)

So this article is really reporting that two compact weeks of merge decisions in early October are now officially considered tested and ready, and they wrote the article and people checked it over a while ago now.

The part that's harder to track is ongoing development work, which happens continuously without a set schedule, but it happens in separate trees and only goes into the official tree when it's complete, has been reviewed, and has gone through various testing in systems managed by kernel developers. All of the work described here was done before 6.17 was released, and developed during several releases before that, but it didn't need to affect Linus's tree until he decided it would land in 6.18.