Mmmhmm. A misspelled word is at least not the real word. But I would say that they cannot enforce IP for the real word homonym/homophone when it's used.

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

I'd be much more concerned that if the buses are also tunneling back to the polity's network that there's now a vulnerable IoT device that allows using the method to do maintenance to then hop into another network.

This seems like something that doesn't need to be in a vendor cloud.

There was an Outer Limits episode where Michael Dorn played an astronaut who was taken-over by such an alien and the other astronaut had to make the decision to suicide himself or to live and let the the alien reach Earth.

Having a whole lot of free time and very likely having reduced mobility to actually get out of the house could also be major contributors.

Be careful of the tax-incentives offered to big business to set up shop cheaply in small towns. If from a bottom-line perspective they have little invested, then they have little reason to abandon those investments, leading to a boom/bust cycle for the town next time the big tech vendors concoct some new 'best practices' scheme to try to cause the businesses dependent on them to buy more crap.

If the business has spent a lot of money out of their own coffers to build, they're more likely to treat that buildout so dismissively.

That's amazing, frankly.

I wrote a simple bash script the other day to handle a video encoding queue, with this line:

if [[ $(date +%s -r "$file") -lt $(date +%s --date="1 min ago") ]]

It's running on Debian 12 but to imagine that if it were running on Ubuntu it would have failed?

Wild that this wasn't caught as soon as the dud utility shipped in a distro. I would have expected somebody's scripts to have failed, they ran it under bash -x and thought, "Oh, boy," then off to file a bug.

I like the idea of using Rust and the idea of Software Engineering. But together.

We heard a while back about Google making a nondestructive book scanner that used puffs of air to turn pages and multiple cameras with stitching algorithms.

Is there a home version that people can recommend, product or build plans?

I have at least a hundred out-of-print books, some on taboo subjects, that I'd love to be able to scan and lend out privately.

Frankly this would be a good item to lend around; I'd only need one for a few days a year.

The day will come that an AI will learn something that we did not deliberately teach it. When an AI is able to improve its own code, it won't be bound by the limitations of its human creator. It's only a question of when.

LK

Nice.

It's actually pretty funny, you mention WiFi only for the cameras, but I would love to have a good wifi-capable commercial-grade outdoor all-weather security camera that didn't basically rely on some other entity's wifi adapter, particularly if it could run off of power as varied as 120V to 277V.

And that is a fundamental problem.

Even in a professional setting, it takes real time and effort to devise IoT policy that actually works. Some IoT only works with like-appliances from the same manufacturer. Some IoT has to work with like-appliances, and has to work with general purpose PCs or phones or tablets. Some IoT works with industry-standard protocols and has interoperability with devices from other manufacturers. Some IoT is cloud-only. Some is local-to-other-devices and cloud. some is local, local to general purpose devices, and cloud.

And that's just reachability rules. That's not including things like security vulnerabilities due to the device manufacturer having ceased software support for hardware rev 1.5 six months after hardware rev 2.0 debuted but the durable goods that the controllers are embedded into have another decade of expected service life.

For the average person who isn't an IT engineer or hobbyist, they're going to basically have to subscribe to yet another service in the form of a cloud-managed firewall that the manufacturer supports for whatever amount of time the hardware is considered good for. That's going to be expensive as hell.

I guess it's difficult to be particularly sympathetic when a publication or service that is rather important-to and dependent-upon the research that has brought us what they're currently calling AI is swamped with low-quality, low-effort garbage generated by the same sorts of systems that their service has enabled.

I'm still wondering how/why this happens if one presumes that the names of researchers are associated with any academic papers. It seems like the reputational harm that should be done to someone publishing hot garbage would be enough to get them blacklisted from publishing altogether if their abuses were too frequent.

Given the sheer number of people that will make choices or take actions that are clearly and obviously against their interests, I simply must disagree.

Unless my original comment that started this particular thread stands.

Experiments can be crafted in such a way as to exclude certain human beings from consciousness.

One day, it's extremely likely that a machine will say to us "I am alive. I am awake. I want..." and whether or not it's true is going to be increasingly hard to determine.

LK