Our internal training has shifted entirely to passphrases, to the point that we had to write our own internal training video because every training video we looked at talked about traditional ways of creating a complex password. We found that when people were encouraged to come up with a sentence, they usually came up with something in the range of 25-35 characters, well past the minimums.

It's not as if once he's done that, his media power is "spent" and can't be used any longer, all the physical assets are worthless etc.

Microsoft seems to be doing these kinds of migrations lately.

I think their old ways of poorly documenting things even internally came back to bite them. I've seen some things written by people who were at one time Microsoft devs working on Windows 7, 8, and 10, who said that a lot of removed functionality came because trying to figure out what the old code was supposed to be doing was nigh impossible, and figuring it out sometimes just didn't fit the schedules or budgets. If a feature didn't seem to be widely used as a percentage of the userbase, then it often got dropped.

Maybe some rewrites are being taken too far, but anyone who has dealt with code that goes back potentially more than 30 years is almost certainly going to find some really bad and/or confusing implementations.

NIST SP 800-63 has formalized this. Specifically, look up Section 3.1.1.2 in SP 800-63B-4, released just this year. Minimum length 15, max length at least 64, but no other requirements, including complexity or regular rotation. Unicode is supposed to be accepted, normalized against a standard process (that one I don't remember, but it's documented), with one code point counting as one character. Filtering for known bad passwords or patterns is strongly encouraged.

I pushed through an implementation at our company last year, explaining why, showing the NIST draft. A bunch of people protested because it was different, but the CIO told them to live with it because their entire argument was "but we've done it this way for 30 years!" Some critical vendors complained when we started pushing them to comply (or at least implement SAML), but we only have a couple of vendors not complying now, and they should be compliant soon. Users are largely happy with the change, and they complain a lot less when we see suspicious activity and force a rotation.

The Trump order applies ONLY to wind power. Oil platforms are not banned for any reason. If that seems illogical well... Trump.

If someone tells him Spotify is foreign, I'm sure he'll do it unless someone else talks to him first.

There's definitely a scam somewhere in the gift card's history; the guy writing about his situation is upset because Apple glassed his account over it, not over the gift card value. The process of not being credited for the gift card's code and then talking to the retailer to get one that hadn't been tampered with apparently went smoothly; but then the account and everything associated with it got terminated without comment or recourse.

Someone is presumably going to eat the value of the gift card, apparently the retailer either directly or through merchant fees and the payment card processor doing it; but the moral of the story is that you can, without recourse unless you are enough of a VIP to raise a fuss that reaches 'Apple Executive Relations', lose everything connected to your account if you inadvertently interact with a gift card that has been used for some sort of scam activity; even if you have proof that you purchased it from a normal retailer that sells gift cards; rather than some dodgy flea market arrangement that screams 'bagman'/'too good to be true'.

Aimed directly at the scammers? Probably not, unless the penalties for the scam are currently insufficient. Aimed at the ad networks who, currently, have zero to negative interest in ensuring that ad spend isn't overtly hostile before plunking it in front of you? Quite possibly more helpful.

I don't know if Google has been caught out as dramatically as ; but based on the sorts of ad impressions they deliver their standards are clearly pretty low or apathetically applied, and more or less the same perverse incentives exist.

Sounds like a program perfectly suited to kicking welfare in the direction of preferred corporate allies(both in terms of what tech gets adopted for federal use; and who gets to use the government payroll as an internship/evaluation program) and for ensuring that none of the departments with significant technical requirements who had their own internal expertise DOGEd to ribbons will get to regain it; instead periodically getting the Accenture Experience from a free-floating layer of loyalists who don't give a fuck because they'll be off to the private sector in 18 months anyway.

When that predictably turns out well; we can presumably grab some folksy Reagan line about how the government can't do anything right; and just directly farm out the contract to palantir or whoever.

If you think theater is a 'sacred space' perhaps you should get on theater management about that. Outside of some very atypical or heavily stage-managed cases the movie theatre experience is typically fucking dire. Paid admittance to a half hour of commercials; seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

It certainly remains very possible for a proper large scale theatre install to handily outgun anything you'd get at home, and definitely the 'whatever is cheap and 65in' best buy experience; but there doesn't appear to be much interest in making the overall experience a compelling sell.

If all you do is attend directorial release screenings with your colleagues I assume that isn't a you problem; but if you genuinely care about the viability, and survival, of the theater experience maybe you should care more; because it's not like people are staying away from theaters just because they are philistines who hate art and desire aggressively mediocre experiences; it's because the theater is an aggressively mediocre experience that squanders much of its remaining technical edge to apathy and cost cutting that can definitely make it more miserable than staying home; but will never make it a better value.

Yeah, one of the things I like about Claude (and Gemini 3 as opposed to 2.5) is that they really clamped down on the use of "Oh, now I've got it! This is absolutely the FINAL fix to the problem, we've totally solved it now! Here, let me write out FIX_FINAL_SOLVED.md" with some half-arse solution. And yep, the answer to going in circles is usually either "nuke the chat" or "switch models".

If they overpower the humanity trying to stop them from doing those things, yes.

So the new AI is going to be so 'opt-in' that it needs a killswitch you can use to get rid of it?

I realize that marketing and PR flacks are subhuman enemies of communication; but that's not even pretending to be what 'opt-in' means.

The characterization of "risk of artificial intelligence overpowering humanity" as the substance of an 'AI debate' seems itself like a strategy in trying to forestall it.

Sure, there's some fun sci-fi there; but most of what actual people are actually concerned about is what specific parts of humanity are using 'AI' to do, or justifying doing in the name of 'AI'; not fretting about how skynet might kill us all. And it's exceptionally handy to pretend that that is what people are fretting about; both because it's a distant and vague enough problem that you can justify punting most action without even lying; and because it's not even false that (perhaps outside of a handful who have outright cracked and started thinking about it in religious terms) even the most psychopathic techbros are also against skynet exterminating everyone; both because that would include them; and because Judgement Day would not be a good time for social media engagement metrics.

Yeah, when thinking of the typical air fryer market, think "working mom with kids who wants to serve something nicer than a microwave dinner, but doesn't have the time for much prep or waiting". You can get those mailard reactions that microwaving doesn't really get you, nice crisping and browning of the surface that you normally get from an oven, without having to wait for an oven to preheat. I don't think anyone disputes that an oven will do a better job, but the air fryer does a better job than a microwave, which is what it's really competing against. They're also marketed as easy-clean, which again is a nod to their target audience.