People need to stop bringing this up. Google, like every other publicly-traded corporation, almost certainly has to do evil, as evil is almost always necessary when the stated goal of your business is to maximize shareholder value at all costs. It was cute that they thought they could be above "doing bad things" in the early days, but once they had their IPO, any semblance of "ethics" was tossed right out. For large public corporations there is no "good and evil", there is only "punishable and evade-able".

Yup, functionally the same thing. They typically don't have prominent supports (or any at all, like the one I use), and are designed to be low-profile and easily put away. Just search for "walking pad" on Amazon (or just a search engine in general) and you'll see a huge array of examples. They are less reliable and more prone to breakage than traditional treadmills (which can cost thousands of dollars), but for $200 USD, I could realistically replace it annually if necessary.

Everytime I see the subject of standing desks brought up here (among other places), I see droves of commenters come out of the woodwork to announce that "standing is actually worse for you than sitting". Well, this is exactly why I bought a standing desk; not so that I can stand for 8 hours instead of sit, but so that I can switch between the two frequently. Add to that a cheap under-desk walking pad, and I can get a surprising amount of movement while hard at work.

That being said, I am still very lucky to work at home and take many small trips to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, to the garden to water plants, and more. Should I be forced back into an office (not unlikely), a standing desk would be the first thing I'd acquire.

I love this idea. It is a shame that the high-powered government and corporate entities with a vested interest in tracking our movements have an explicit requirement that we shouldn't know when they are doing it.

Unfortunately, centralizing access like this (at any level) gives effective carte blanche access to anyone with enough power or capital to demand it, regardless of how many "policy" checkpoints you put in the way.

I suppose that depends on how or where you store your passkeys. I use Bitwarden (technically Vaultwarden, but functionally the same for this purpose), and mine are stored as part of my Bitwarden data. That means I can use them in my desktop web browser, my phone, etc.

Your other points are definitely valid, but making the phone the "sole point of authentication" isn't an explicit weakness of Passkeys as a technology, only the terrible implementation by major tech providers (and lets be honest, device/vendor lock-in is certainly not an improbable explanation for this).

I agree, but I often wonder how many developers vastly overstate the complicated-ness of what they need to write.

My own experience with leveraging LLMs has been one of an efficiency boost. As I have around 15 years of software architecture and development experience, I have yet to come across an instance where an AI is used to do something I can't do, and instead is used to do something that I could have otherwise done myself, albeit much more slowly.

This has had a great effect on my workflow. I am still able to do high-level architectural planning, determine use-cases and usability parameters, etc. When I have those pieces figured out, I can use an LLM (in this instance Claude Sonnet or Opus 4.6) to do the actual generation of code, which I can then review and correct as I see fit. I have not (and will never) used an LLM as a replacement for my "higher brain functioning", but when it comes to the "code-monkey" aspects of my work, it does them far faster than I can (and typically with a healthy respect for naming conventions, code patterns, etc.). I still get to enjoy the fun critical-thinking-laden aspects of my job, but the simple "regurgitation of learned code words" is offloaded to an all-too-willing counterpart.

Yes, that's generally how scientific progress and discovery works. All of the things you mentioned were not well-understood in their time, thus the uses were flawed. I noticed that you didn't include things like MRIs, antibiotics, vaccines, or any other "poorly understood initially" type of technology that has had a resoundingly positive impact on human society. I understand caution, but from my reading (aka skimming) of TFA, it doesn't seem like this group of researchers is planning to rapidly monetize this discovery. Is it not enough that the discovery itself is fascinating? Who is to say that this research won't lead to medical therapies that help people REGAIN their sense of smell after it is lost by some other means?

Something tells me you didn't have the best relationship with said neighbor to begin with. No judgement towards you on my part, but it seems a bit extreme to suggest that 24/7 citizen-enabled corporate surveillance is a good thing because a dumb teenager did a dumb teenager thing and his parents didn't want to take responsibility towards a neighbor they probably didn't like in the first place.

If you really are interested in having surveillance around your house (which I completely understand), you could look into one of the many brands that doesn't rely exclusively on a cloud-based service (and also with a TOS that basically guarantees that your footage will be used for one of many potentially nefarious purposes).

Regardless, the trend is upward, and for good reason.

Make all of the snarky comments that you like, this is a frightening canary around the realities of de-generative AI and the new "economies" it is creating. I despise Big Tech as much as the next guy, but at least content creators and businesses saw SOME slice of the advertising-revenue pie. Now these troves of data are going to be used to train AI models and the downstream creators will never see a cent of return (and worse, their infrastructure will be hammered into oblivion by these ruthless crawlers).

The democratization of information is an incredibly valuable tool for a well-functioning society, but de-genAI is hardly that. It is a consolidation of information into a small cadre of for-profit (or soon to be for-profit) entities that will have a chilling effect on the ability of people to sustain themselves with bringing new or interesting ideas to the world.

It is easy to laugh at the downfall of the "Education Industry" and all of its shady financial motivations, but this is merely the first of many dominos to fall. How many are left before information on the web is either paywalled or accessed exclusively through an AI chatbot?

Nothing will eliminate that like the embrace of (de)generative AI!

Toothpaste I can understand, but lets hope our dependency on oil ends sooner than later. After all, we already know that oil itself is certainly not going to last forever.

One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

My favorite quote around the Doomsday Clock has always been from Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen: