It's also confusing because if you read the article (what? I know), it says Sony's down 5% over the year under a chart showing Sony starting at $17.01 a year ago and ending at $18.46. Huh?

But the overall point behind the article appears to be focusing on Sony's entertainment properties, and it's clear that Sony Pictures and Sony Interactive Entertainment are having major issues. Sony isn't just its entertainment divisions, and it's entirely that those other divisions are what's keeping the company afloat, even as entertainment drops.

All that being said, everything in the entertainment industry is encountering issues, for a couple of obvious reasons. The first is inflation: as prices rise, people drop luxuries, like going to the movies or game consoles, first. The second is the end of the pandemic: during the pandemic, entertainment sales spiked as people had nothing else to do. Now they do.

Which means that, even while Sony definitely had a bad year when it comes to entertainment releases, everyone else has had a bad year too. Microsoft is having issues with Xbox and Nintendo has pushed back the release of its new console. Quite a few game studios have folded entirely. It's not just a Sony issue.

No, it isn't. Don't lie.

You look it up by doing a REST request to plc.directory/[DID].

Which is a centralized service and the master repository for the DID, under the control of Bluesky.

And how exactly does your DID point to it, in a distributed way? How do you map a given DID back to the "personal data server?"

Because it's not distributed in the current implementation. In fact, pretty much every distributed thing is all "we'll figure this out later." Currently, the answer is your DID maps to a server that Bluesky itself runs, and only via this server can you look up the instance a user is on.

And, since the current DID implementation is essentially just a database key, there's no way to replace it with a "real" distributed implementation. It's irrevocably tied to that centralized service.

In the end, like so many "distributed" things, it's "distributed" right up until it isn't. Most of it is, in reality, centralized, and effectively under the control of a single, central company.

And notice that this was the ONLY demographic Democrats improved with. Every single other demographic, including women, they lost voters in. Gee, wonder why that might be. So many of us have never gotten a single helping hand from the Democrats because we can't win "identity bingo." And the Democrats handed out literally billions of dollars to buy votes. Don't think I'm ever voting for a Democrat ever again until ever cent is clawed back.

Democrats are a party that care more about dictating what pronouns you can use than improving the economy or helping businesses thrive. It's that simple.

The point in The Last Jedi that killed any ability for me to suspend disbelief was when they literally dropped bombs on a space ship.

I get that the combat in Star Wars is supposed to be based on World War II naval carrier combat. So that's why there are "bombers" that bomb the capital ships, why Luke was a fighter pilot, and why the ships have flak cannons instead of missiles.

But this went beyond that. Rather than having bombers be some sci-fi analog of bombers, which is how every other bit of Star Wars media handled things like "B-Wings", they literally - and I do mean literally - dropped bombs. From a bomb bay. In space.

And then the very next plot point has to do with details like the range of a turbolaser and shield strength and how fast the ships can accelerate and hyperspace tracking and they're going through all this technobabble after, again, literally dropping - keyword there is dropping - bombs from one space ship onto another.

All within the first 30 minutes or so of the movie. I stopped caring about pretty much anything at that point, because it was clear that there would be nothing coherent about the plot.

It's not that hard to understand. In an election that isn't particularly close, eventually the vote gap between first and second becomes insurmountable, even if every remaining vote is for the second place candidate. At that point, you can call it without counting the remaining votes.

Of course, there are points before that where in order for an election result to flip, the remaining votes would have to skew so far for the second place candidate to be outside the realm of statistical possibility. It's that point that news organizations use to call elections.

And they will be. It's just, it takes a lot longer for that entire process to complete than you'd expect, and the outcome of the election is a foregone conclusion well before the final count. The final vote count can take until the end of November. Do you really want to wait four weeks to announce a winner, when there's already enough data to guarantee who won?

So I take it that's a no, you don't want to face reality and admit that, in fact, Trump has made great inroads with just about every demographic? That the youth vote isn't going to break towards Harris in record numbers?

You mean Biden? Because the irony is that one demographic has been shifting away from Republicans: people aged 65+. But that shift has been more than made up by every other demographic shifting in favor of Republicans.

Oh, that's easy: they don't. But it doesn't matter, because his opponent effectively insisted that the issues didn't exist at all.

When you have to choose between someone who acknowledges your problems and promises to fix them, and someone who tells you that your problems aren't real: who exactly are you going to pick?

You're not going to like the answer, but I'll give it to you anyway: It does and did.

Because all things being equal, voters voted for change. The fact that it was as close as it was is proof of that.

Trump didn't get a free pass. A lot of the people voting for him don't like him. They just think he'll be a better leader of the country than the Democrats. It's that simple.

If Harris had positioned herself as a candidate for change, who knows what may have happened. She didn't. She ran her campaign as Biden 2.0: Younger and More Female. Voters don't like Biden. They don't like Trump. But they especially don't like the status quo. So they voted for change, and this election, that meant voting for President Trump.

Now that the election has been called for President Trump, will you consider maybe looking at the facts? There was every reason to believe the pollsters were still missing Trump voters and no reason to believe that they were missing Harris voters. Likewise, pretty much every demographic saw a shift towards Trump - including younger voters.

Biden was an amazingly unpopular president, the economy is in the toilet and speeding towards disaster, inflation may have slowed but people still can't afford groceries, and Harris promised to continue all that. It should be no surprise she lost.

You do realize that the youth vote has been trending towards Trump, right? The main theory is that young voters are either newly entered into the work force or are looking at their future prospects, and see an entirely ruined economy, and are hoping President Trump can turn things around.

Another headwind against Harris is that a lot of the youth vote see her as complicit in Gaza, and while these voters aren't likely to be voting for Trump in protest, they may end up voting third party instead.

Or, to put it bluntly: don't count on the youth vote to save Harris's failing campaign.

Which is what makes the polls this year so suspicious. Nate Silver called it "herding" - all the polls are showing a race tied within the margin of error. Almost every poll reports a confidence interval of 95%, so that means you'd expect 5% of polls - if they were truly random samples - to be outside that range.

But they aren't. Because every pollster is absolutely terrified that they'll be declared "wrong" if the election doesn't go the way they polled. And a pollster who is "wrong" won't get paid to run polls in future elections. So they all do some "modelling" to "correct" whatever raw data they got. (It's also to deal with the fact that getting a random sample is, literally, impossible. There are just too many people who simply won't answer a poll, which makes any sample that doesn't include non-responders non-random, so pollsters do a whole bunch of things to try and deal account for that. If they did include non-responses you'd get polls that show something like 5% for each candidate and 90% "didn't answer.")

You can't be accused of being wrong if everyone else in the herd was too.

The article answers this:

So: yes, or at least they did. As of now, Google has no presence in Russia, and this fine seems more likely to guarantee Google stays out of Russia than Google unblocks Russian content.

Not to mention that unless it's a native app coded specifically using the tools that Apple or Google provide for making a native app, I can almost guarantee that it's secretly just a web app. Pretty much every "mobile app" framework that targets multiple platforms is really just an embedded browser. Except for apps written by the platform owners, almost no "app" is really a native app, they're almost all web apps that you run in an app shell to give the appearance of a native app.

Given the mix of iOS and Material UI icons in their screenshots, I think it's a fair guess that the "app" is, secretly, a web app hitting a web backend.

You can't even turn it on, since it's currently "waitlisted" and you have to be "invited" to enable it, and it's limited to the United States. (Which is odd, because I thought it was supposed to all run on-device.) Plus it only works on the latest iPhones: Apple is using it to try and sell phones.

None of which answers your question. Presumably you won't be able to turn it off after some random update in the future. When Apple says "it just works" they really mean "we don't give you any choice."

But right now, you can just not enable it at all, or stick with a phone too old to run it. At least until Apple stops updating the phones that don't run it. Who knows when that will be.