They can, and do do that, already.

Because your DNS failing over doesnt fail the lookups IN THE DNS over all your other services in another zone. You have to actually UPDATE THE DNS. Thats what this change does.

An LLM doesn't have a "system clock" any more than your brain does. Do you know anything at all about how LLMs work?

If an LLM made a decision to "check it's system clock" for the time, then it is no different than it calling out to a web service to do the same. It is a RAG-enabled external tool use. That is all it is.

I am saying that the question is irrelevant, just like a lot of pontificating about AGI is.

An LLM needing to use an external tool to check the time, is irrelevant as to how intelligent it is. Humans also need to use tools to check the time.

It's a stupid thing to even discuss.

The problem is that if you're running your primary DNS on Route53 in US-EAST and US-EAST goes down, you're currently fucked.

The real solution isn't this - it is decoupling DNS from AWS. You should not rely on your DNS and core infrastructure from the same vendor. Makes zero sense.

There is no reason your entire operation should be consolidated into one vendor's infrastructure in one region. It is just foolish to do this.

Use a different company like Cloudflare* for DNS. Use their native tooling to be able to automatically fail-over to another AWS region when your primary region dies.

Note that this requires cross-region replication to be set up, which is expensive so it only makes sense to do this when you are a mega enterprise.

* Yes I realize Cloudflare also went down recently. But the benefit of the DNS protocol is you can host it at multiple providers simultaneously. Nothing stops you from using Cloudflare *and* AWS both for DNS.

Humans are notoriously horrible at measuring the passage of time. Ever heard of the expression "a watched pot never boils" or "time flies when you're having fun"? Where do you think those expressions come from?

If I took away your watch/phone and all external tools and asked you to be able to tell me what time it was a few hours from now, do you think you would succeed within even a 30 minute margin of error?

The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

I continue to use burned DVDs for backing up the critical stuff. Not perfect, of course, but not electromechanically-failure prone like a hard disk drive, not "terms of service" failure prone like cloud storage, and not "the charge magically held in the gate leaked away" failure prone. I have optical discs over 25 years old which are still perfectly readable.

Why? SIMPLE. USA is SPREAD OUT! Japan is smaller than California in land area. That is just ONE state, not to mention the other 47 in the continental USA. You can travel from France to Germany by car in a day, but to travel from El Paso to Texarkana takes a couple days by car. Unless you develop "warp drive" for trains, it just won't work in the USA.

Microsoft hasn't been able to do proper security - or proper development for that matter - in half a century, and AI is notorious for pissing out poor quality code.

Glad I only use the git part of Github.

If only Microsoft saw some sense and quit pushing this disaster of a technology - or at least gave people the option to leave it out of their activities. Fuck this AI shit, seriously. It's getting really tiring now...

Two of my implants are passworded - the TOTP application in my Vivokey Apex and my Walletmor payment implant, which occasionally prompt payment terminals to ask my PIN - and guess what: I didn't forget them because they're kind of important. Duh...

If the hardware is still present, but is disabled, you're still carrying around the hardware. Most importantly, you're probably still powering its logic even if it's inaccessible to you.

BMW, like most German cars, is overcomplicated and overpriced garbage sold only to self-proclaimed car enthusiasts who wouldn't know how to change a tire let alone a timing chain. BMW got themselves into a bit of controversy by including heated seats which only functioned by subscription.

Now, say I had bought a BMW but didn't want the heated seats. I don't pay for the subscription. There's no additional cost to me, the purchaser of the car, because the profit from the people who do opt for the subscription are the ones paying the cost of the extra hardware in my car, correct?

Wrong. I am now carrying around an extra-beefy alternator to power the heated seats. I am now carrying around all the extra wiring to power the heated seats. All of this impacts my performance and my fuel efficiency. And all of this extra complexity adds a failure liability when something damages part of the heated seat hardware. All for a feature I specifically did not ask for by refusing the subscription.

With a disabled chunk of logic embedded in a processor, is it a negligible cost and a negligible risk? Maybe, but as the purchaser, it's crap that I didn't ask for, and you are imposing on me. If I have to carry it around and power it up, I expect to be able to use it.

If the manufacturer doesn't want to supply a feature then they should not supply the hardware. Leave the spots on the circuit board unpopulated. In the case of a chip, leave it off the die.

It will bankrupt you to have it prescribed though.

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.