Yeah, sure...

Is anybody surprised by this?

I know Yen retracted his statement, but that's not good enough. I don't trust him like I wouldn't trust Elon Musk if he apologized for the Nazi salutes, because doing it once kills your credibility forever - or at least makes it exceedingly hard to prove you're not that person later on.

Proton should have thrown Yen out immediately after that incident if they had wanted to preserve their reputation and they didn't. So I don't trust Proton.

Next up: the measles epidemic might be linked to the anti-vax HHS.

There's a reason TIFF stands for Thousands of Incompatible File Formats. It's probably time to take TIFF behind the barn.

Vapes with replaceable 18650 tend to be higher quality and use safer IMR batteries (which also have lower internal resistance for a higher performance vape). Vape pens tend to be lower quality disposables powered by whatever was cheap when battery stocks got low at the factory. In part, that's because few will see the sealed in no-name battery.

Note that the popular 18650 is a little longer and thinner than a C battery and won't even fit in a vape pen. They're not absolutely impossible to short with keys but it's a bit of a challenge. The terminals are on opposite ends of a 65mm cylinder, not a quarter inch apart. They make silicone rubber socks that fit over the ends of spare 18650 batteries.

Many camera batteries are crazy over-priced and proprietary. To be fair, others are much more reasonable but still tend towards proprietary.

So yes, let's keep the red tape brigade on a leash for now. Let it get involved with SPECIFIC demonstrated problematic products.

We already have safer formulations. They fit the broad term Lithium Ion, but they don't tend to catch fire (or "vent with flame" as the industry prefers) even though some of them can actually provide more current to a dead short than regular Li-Ion can.

That depends on the formulation of the battery. There are several.

The problems tend to happen with the batteries that maximize capacity over safety crammed into a too-small space with cheap or absent protection circuitry.

Let's not roll out the red tape brigade prematurely here, it harms innovation and makes everything more expensive. For example, you can greatly reduce costs and regulatory friction with little effect on safety by exempting removable batteries (for example, camera batteries, flashlights with 18650 batteries). Those tend to be better quality and be better protected from damage. They're also avoided by the manufacturers that want to pinch every penny even at the cost of safety and reliability.

Meanwhile, 50 incidents only seems like a lot until you consider how many million person-flights there have been this year. That's not a call to do nothing, but most of this can be handled by air liners having a small metal box and an oven mitt on board. Also a place for the box next to an air outlet.

And hilariously, someone mad a mod for GTA (IIRC) to replace the grenades with Galaxy Notes.

Elon's MechaHitler doesn't quality for the AI Darwin Awards because it's still very much alive and spreading its poison.

Winning a Darwin Award implies that the recipient removed him- or herself from the gene pool through stupidity. In the case of AI, I would assume the most important criterion is that the egregious AI has been pulled our. MechaHitler hasn't.

Most deployments of AI are either very shit or done for nefarious purposes. More often than not, both, because I consider replacing capable humans with mediocre machines to save money a nefarious use of the machines.

The alternative is working through Teams. And if anybody knows how effective that is, it's the very company that inflicts Teams for remote working to the rest of us...

Nova let me turn off animations and effects I didn't care to see and because it allowed me to back up and restore my home screen layout, it made the process of switching to a new device completely painless, even across different Android versions and OEMs. My Android experience has been identical for the last dozen years even as I used LG, Pixel and Samsung phones and a half-dozen different tablets from cheapies to premium models.

Microsoft Launcher probably isn't going anywhere, but I'm still pissed at Microsoft for killing Swype + Dragon, the best keyboard experience Android had. Gboard is barely acceptable, but since it requires me to manually import a user dictionary I have to maintain as a plaintext file, it's never going to live up to just signing in and getting all the acronyms, jargon and proper nouns I use daily back. Lawnchair might be functionally fine for me as well and probably isn't actively fucking me with datamining, but I don't think it fully replicates all the things Microsoft's does.

All in all, this whole deal just sucks.

Heil Trump!

Well, let's see. Developers made a non-MS choice, so MS bought it and shoved itself into the relationship. Shades of "NO means no".

not so good when asked to produce exact information.

That's why it's great to make deepfakes of Natalie Portman covered in hot grits, but not so great at coming up with real, existing law cases or math proofs.

I only use GitHub as a dumb git repo for my open-source projects. That way, I never really have to interact with the website itself, my stuff isn't stuck there, and Microsoft doesn't get to invade my privacy and monetize my data.

In other words, I waste Microsoft's resources and they get nothing in return. That's why, despite by burning hatred of Microsoft, I host my stuff there. And I abuse the hell out of the storage capabilities too.

And therefore I never see any AI garbage from GitHub.