Comment Re:UNIX-style passwords (Score 5, Interesting) 72
On Hacker News the headline for a similar article was "AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt".
I think that sums it up well. Like you said, it's been known for 20 years
Comment Re:Its Going to Suck (Score 1) 48
Ah, I didn't realize that; it's a very wise decision.
Again, I want to ditch Google as much as anyone, but it has to be the consumer walking away from each app as a better (and more private) app takes its place. This approach seems to allow for exactly that!
Comment Its Going to Suck (Score 2, Interesting) 48
Look, I want to escape the clutches of Google as much as anyone
> completely strips out native Google services and telemetry at the OS level.
Google has spent literal decades working on some of those apps. They are polished, work well, and everyone takes them for granted.
My last phone was a Samsung that tried to replace those apps (while still leaving them on the phone, since it wasn't GrapheneOS). It was probably on v3 or v4 of those apps by the time I bought my phone
Maybe, in 5-10 generations, this phone won't suck! But to think they can just replace decades of Google development overnight is nuts.
Comment Re:So, wouldn't fake accounts... (Score 1) 93
P.S. Now of course the AI companies want to scrape on a completely different scale
Good luck to Reddit in trying to win a "CAPTCHA" battle between their engineer's ability to separate humans from bots
Comment Re:So, wouldn't fake accounts... (Score 2) 93
I mean, kind of. Its like saying postal spam costs more than email spam
Similarly, as a scraper I just need to get enough valid accounts to scrape what I want. All Reddit can do is try and raise the cost of me doing that, but for any reasonable amount of scraped data that cost simply isn't going to be prohibitive.
In other words, Reddit might drive the cost of scraping up from two cents to four with this change
Comment Re:Industrial applications only please (Score 2) 21
Apples (pun intended) and oranges: Apple's Vision Pro was a massive, heavy, full head headset
Submission + - Wolves Descend on Finnish Villages After Google Hacked Down 1,300 Acres of trees (futurism.com)
fjo3 writes: Earlier in October, Finnish authorities ordered Google’s affiliate data center developer Tuike Finland Oy to immediately suspend the illegal cutting of some 1,300 acres of forest. The tech giant was given a week to draft a report explaining its actions, which soon became a flashpoint for Europe’s growing outrage over the data center boom.
As the anger grew, reporters descended on the scene — and what they found is a clear-cut example of the AI revolution’s impact on the environment.
New reporting by the Guardian shed fresh light on the impacts of Google’s deforestation. After the 1,300 acres of pristine boreal forests were reduced to tracts of mud and stumps, fauna which once called the woods home has been forced to vacate.
As the anger grew, reporters descended on the scene — and what they found is a clear-cut example of the AI revolution’s impact on the environment.
New reporting by the Guardian shed fresh light on the impacts of Google’s deforestation. After the 1,300 acres of pristine boreal forests were reduced to tracts of mud and stumps, fauna which once called the woods home has been forced to vacate.
Comment Re:uh no (Score 1) 173
They have? I thought they conquered parts of Ukraine years ago, and the occupants (especially the ones closest to Russian border and away from the fighting) are doing just "fine" (for whatever definition of that word describes living under military occupation).
I'm no fan of Russia or anything they are doing but *genocide* seems inaccuate.
Comment Re:Projection (Score 1) 340
Don't we have laws protecting sexual abuse victims and their case details? Even a hundred Democratic congresspeople can't just magically override the law like that.
Submission + - Trump DHS asked CISA to Secretly Aquire and Hack a Voting Machine (propublica.org)
fahrbot-bot writes: ProPublica (and others) is reporting that a few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wanted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.
In addition, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.
“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.” [Or, perhaps do something worse?]
The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.
In addition, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.
“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.” [Or, perhaps do something worse?]
The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.
Comment Re:Achievements (Score 1) 35
It depends on the game/player. Some people are completionists who want to experience the entire game, and achievements help them do that.
Some people don't give a crap about achievements
But really instead of asking "do lots of gamers want achievements"
Comment Re:Durable goods from commodity companies (Score 1) 57
Why was this downvoted?
I mean that as a legit question: I thought the coward accurately described Tesla's self-driving promise
Comment It's not crazy ... (Score 1) 81
That valuation is not at all a crazy if you think Anthropic has a key new technology, that will be wildly in demand in the future, with a business "moat" to help protect it (eg. a huge % of market share from being the first mover, or a set of government regulations that only it and maybe 1-2 companies can navigate)
Good luck to Anthropic's IPO investors
Comment Re: This Was Broadcom's Entire Plan (Score 2) 90
You are correct, but they are following a model pioneered by private equity firms. From Gemini:
Broadcom operates a public business model heavily inspired by private equity strategies
Comment This Was Broadcom's Entire Plan (Score 5, Insightful) 90
Let me be clear: Broadcom did not buy VMWare to go into the virtualization business!
They bought them with the following plan:
1. Jack up the prices (by an insane amount) while reducing costs in extreme ways
2. Most customers are large enterprise users: they will change eventually
3. Eventually everyone leaves VMWare
4. VMWare, even with few/no customers, still has tons of assets like real estate: you liquidate all that and now you've made a massive profit over what it cost to buy VMWare
This was not some secret: it's a playbook Broadcom has used on acquisitions before. Maintaining a virtualization company was never their goal: it was to make money fleecing the company's corpse.
