It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?

If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when Steve Jobs went to bat against the trolls for h.264 decode; Apple should do it in his memory.

Separately, Google seriously needs to flex against patent trolls when required. Heck, Lou Rossman is more aggressive than Google on defending the community against patent trolls.

Speaking of which USPTO intends to stop challenges to patent trolls and maybe you, dear reader, should spend five minutes to fire off an email to help EFF try to head this one off at the pass.

I used to have many magazine subscriptions.

They would each mail me a reminder to renew my subscription.

If I sent them a check my subscription would continue. If I didn't send them a check my subscription would end.

I didn't have auto- anything. I didn't have to call to cancel.

The same went for when I was a paperboy. You pay for your week or you stop getting papers. When you remember to pay you start getting papers again.

I think this is how subscriptions have worked for hundreds of years, with auto-renew on a payment card developing in the past couple decades.

Without a contractual definition the corpus of caselaw would very likely date to throughout the history of the country.

LLMs are not good at self-management or judgement-call making. Allowing them to be "agents" and do things on your behalf is problematic because they can get things wrong and then make things worse when they try to fix it. They are much worse about this than human agents.

In my experience so far LLMs can generate code that "looks right", but doesn't necessarily work right. The more details there are in the requirements, the worse the LLM does. And in my experience implementing business workflow pipelines using LLMs, the LLMs are pretty good at interpreting plain English requests and translating them to something machine-parseable (like JSON or whatever), so you can then write your own code that reliably takes action, using the LLM just as a bridge between the two. But the more you ask the LLM to solve problems itself, make decisions itself, or take actions itself, the more it lets you down.

So, I think that AI just isn't ready for what Microsoft plans to use it for. And it seems like many others agree.

> quantum frequency converters, which compensate for residual frequency differences between the photons

Would it be too much to ask to call them Heisenberg Compensators? Please, it would be fun.

China's geology is really bad for petroleum production. A bad lot in the luck of the draw.

They are building a monster pipeline and rail system across Mongolia and Siberia to Russian reserves but it's a decadal project.

Electric transportation is a smart option for their situation. Their necessity has become their Mother of Invention and they are dominating the world in electric power systems innovation.

If we're graduating Seniors with Junior level math skills that's hardly "Can't do Math."

I suspect even that claim is wrong and we're also teaching the wrong math for an informed electorate. In undergrad we need people sharp in probability and statistics more than matrix algebra. So they can be numerate against politicians' bullshit. I guess we should ask politicians to work on that.

Some of us are neither Republicans nor Democrats but would support a strong 10th Amendment with strict observance of Article I limitations.

But nearly all the Democrats and Republicans want to selectively choose which parts of the Constitution to ignore. There is no will for Rule of Law.

The Congressmen get elected on the principle of stealing money from one person to give it to five. That's a guaranteed win in a Universal Suffrage system with no strong moral foundation.

The trick is they inflate the money supply to actually do it so everybody pays. The five "winners" suffer the most in real numbers.

I'd rather see a stable Constitutional order but it's fantasy to believe that's achievable. We'll see fiscal collapse, likely War and a Draft, and chaos instead. All because oligarchs and the poor want "free stuff". And it's hard to blame the poor when everything they want is unachievable for them because the markets are all rigged against them.

The Gini Coefficient is too damn high, so don't get between them and the guillotines.

Fortunately there is a formal system for youtube to indicate exactly how public/private something is. We need not speculate. 200 and 401 are as different as .. two different numbers.

This.

My take on vibe coding is simple: Don't.

At least not the way most people understand it. I'm totally ok with having an AI do the tedious work. But only do it on stuff you could do yourself (i.e. you're just saving time). Because otherwise, you'll never be able to maintain it.

This, in general, is the whole problem: The entire "vibe coding" movement only worries about CREATING code. But in the real world, maintaining, updating, refactoring, reviewing, testing, bugfixing, etc. etc. are typically more effort than writing it in the first place.

The BCG vaccine has also been found to be effective against bladder cancer. One of the two manufacturers bailed out of the market about a decade ago, limiting supply for both TB and bladder cancer.

They just opened a new manufacturing facility in Durham this past Spring to make much more. Not sure if it's producing yet, but it was a four-year build.

TB affects so few Americans that you can't even get BCG for TB prevention if you want it. Hopefully high-risk folks will be able to elect to get it soon.

> The software had a built-in limit of 200 bot detection features. The enlarged file contained more than 200 entries. The software crashed when it encountered the unexpected file size.

A built in limit is:

if ( rule_count > 200 )
    log_urgent('rule count exceeded')
    break
else
    rule_count++
    process_rule

This sounds like it did not have a built-in limit but rather walked off the end of an array or something when the count went over 200.

I heard earlier today that a court has determined that since governments are using all of this data, including license plates, that a FoIA request for all of the license plate data gathered from Flock in a city area for a range of dates was valid.

They want to have a power advantage over their serfs but turning their advantage into a burden changes that dynamic. Something to look into for those so inclined.

We seem to be well past the point of being able to expect them to follow the Law or "do the right thing".

> I see no reason why the government shouldn't be allowed to buy the same data that jim-bob the farmer can purchase.

Jim-bob is likely to face some serious problems if he smashes down your door and drags you away in a pre-dawn raid.

The IRS people get a promotion.

This is why the Constitution places strict limits on the actions of government agents.

(in its original interpretation)

Here I am about to think "damn, people losing their jobs to AI" and then I realize its the "pizza in 4-easy payments" people.

They should probably go all-in on AI as soon as possible. For their investors' sake.

OK, that was pretty funny. +1.