But 20 million cells? That seems ridiculous. Why aren't they using a database for something that huge?

Because I can bet it started out as a way for an engineer to track say, the parts of their little piece of the plane. Maybe it was just all the mechanical bits associated with the inner flap on the right wing. It started as a manual tracking system on pieces of paper and post-it notes.

Then the guy gets handed a spreadsheet, realizes all those little pieces of paper can be consolidated in a nice table that fits in a nice small file. The guy starts using features like colors and such to make tracking easier and boom, he's gone from needing dozens of pieces of paper, risking their loss, to a spreadsheet table that holds all the same data

Slowly it accumulates features and other engineers on other parts of the plane start asking him for a copy of the spreadsheet to simplify their operations. At the same time, people start realizing they could get a better overview if they put all their information into one document instead of it being spread out across dozens of spreadsheets.

And now you have a spreadsheet with 20 million rows which provides remarkable insight into all the parts going into a plane.

Could a database do it better? Of course it can. But it likely wouldn't have happened - it just started as one engineer's way of keeping track of parts, that then grew organically until it became the behemoth it is. I'm sure when it started they decided it was 100 odd parts, the effort to use a database wouldn't be justified, if they learned how to use a database.

But now, it's difficult because now you need to create a database and program it to how the spreadsheet works now, then import all the information over. It's likely something that's going to take some time for a developer to properly develop and deploy it and make it work the way the people using the spreadsheet used it. And then deploy it so it works with dozens or hundreds of users.

And it all took place over 20+ years so it's likely for many users it was always how it worked when they started.

As usual, reality is less glamorous. Social Media company will only be liable "if itâ(TM)s clear that they failed to remove an online scam that had been reported". (source: TFA) Which just means it's another obligation of removing contents, which they already have to remove in short order sorts of violent, obscene, or otherwise illegal contents. Meta will add "financial scams" to the list, hire a few more third-worlders in their WFH moderation team, and continue their day of obscene profits.

Except it was shown that Meta profits heavily from the scammers buying up ads. If it means they have to take down scams a few minutes after posting, this is a plus as it greatly narrows down the window of victims that can be exploited. This can also make Meta not worth scammers time and money reducing their profits.

It just means Meta will have an incentive to quickly bring down scams than to slow-walk them down because they make big money off scams.

Traffic within a region is not free in AWS :) You're thinking about traffic within a single AZ.

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

Except for us-east-2. Traffic between us-east-1 and us-east-2 costs the same as traffic within us-east-1.

(Score:X, Troll)

And yet, your imaginary friend still isn't real. ;)

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

And clearly God (who as we know, is a scalar field) is an AI. That's why there's so much "slop" in the Bible - factual errors, contradictions, different versions of the same text that heavily contradict each other, etc etc. It all makes so much more sense now!

At one point last week I pasted the first ~300 words or so of the King James Bible into an AI detector. It told me that over half of it was AI generated.

And seriously, considering some of the god-awful stuff passing peer review in "respectable" journals these days, like a paper in AIP Advances that claims God is a scalar field becoming a featured article, or a paper in Nature whose Figure 1 is an unusually-crappy AI image talking about "Runctitiononal Features", "Medical Fymblal", "1 Tol Line storee", etc... at the very least, getting a second opinion from an AI before approving a paper would be wise.

Are you saying you didn't see this coming? It is a democratic system, ain't it? So this means politicians just do what is expedient, that's why they are elected. Leaders have stopped being elected long long time ago. Not that I am for any government intervention into any of this at all, I am against it. I believe we must do what we do as a species without any collective action enforced by government, I am against all government intervention. I am totally against anyone trying to architect our survival as a species, I am all for real natural selection.

Asked the thing to tell me:

is this it?

I don't know how some people get these types of weird answers, I cannot get the damn thing to tell me the wrong time. The only really weird thing is that it is 'searching the web' while 'thinking'.

Shirley the thoroughness of the investigation is inversely proportional to the amount Amazon "invests" in Trumps latest scam.