Indeed. The Germans started strategic bombing of civilian areas about 88 years ago, and in fact, the German president was just in Guernica paying his respects to the victims of that attack: https://www.theguardian.com/wo....

We haven't stopped strategic bombing of civilian areas just because they don't work, it's also because it amounts to war crimes. Britain bombed Germany like that as a response to Germany doing it to Britain and that being the only response Britain could muster at the time, but RAF Bomber Command has always been down played because of the perception that it was wrong; they didn't even get a memorial until 2012.

Russia is behaving like it's still the 1940s. 27 Russian soldiers dead for every square kilometre of Ukraine they've taken. They don't value their own lives, and so they certainly don't value those from other countries.

How long have Airbus known about it? When were the airlines notified versus this report in the media?

Right, and it can improve foreign investment, although exchange rates also tend to reflect the health of the economy and not always about the government actively trying to achieve this. Undervaluation can lead to some problems though, such as loss of productivity due to weaker competition or higher inflation.

Google docs that changes the language of the user interface when you go to another country. WTF?

You left during a recent high point in the currency. I remember well it unexpectedly climbing from 62c to to the USD in 2003 to parity by 2008 because I was living in Ontario and working 1099MISC since 1999 for a Californian company and watched my USD pay diminishing in value. Letâ(TM)s be honest, the exchange rate is back where the historical trend was taking it.

Yes, along with copy and paste and other Continuity features.

Kyiv, not Kiev.

"If I go find an actor/actress that I like the sound of their voice of, and want to create a weird golem of a voice, what I'd do is get several 48khz 16-bit recordings from audio books of that actor, run it through the training (because I have their voice and the book they are reading) and then find a performance style of that actor/actress I want (from maybe a movie or or television show) and thus "skin" that voice to sound like that performance. That will give me a 95% reasonable sounding voice for all the words from the books they read, and a 10% accuracy on words that they never ever said before.

And of course you would contact the appropriate copyright clearinghouse or actors' association and pay the associated fees for using those voices, which the massive IP theft organizations known as "AI" do not.

That's what the big bosses tell us anyway. In a somewhat obscure corner of the human experience where I sometimes hang out there are ~5 web sites of varying ages that write and publish original and meaningful things. But if you search for that obscurity on Google you will now be directed to 847 "sites", "magazine articles", "experts", etc of which 842 are thinly disguised machine-rewritten versions of the 5 real sites - the kind of rewriting I would have instantly flagged as plagiarism back in my TA days - wrapped up in phony autogenerated web sites, documents, articles, etc.

Most people aren't authors or painters who earn a direct living from their creative work (of which there are very few), but most people put some amount of creative effort into their jobs and livelihoods. Whether it is a financial analyst in a cubicle who develops independent analyses of the prospects of an investment target, a graphic artist who creates flyers and web sites for small businesses, or an electrician who figures out a better way to route cabling through a standard spec house during construction they can all recognize that the self-styled "AI" vendors are just stealing their creative labor with zero compensation and feeding it into a spicy chatbot labeled "AI" which is going to be used by their bosses to put them out of work.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or another one of the big software development companies could easily fork ffmpeg itself, fix the open CVEs, provide their own (likely incompatible) features, and become the new standard - leaving the original developers out in the cold. Google did this with Blink (forked from WebKit, which itself was forked from KHTML). They took a fork of a KDE backed project, put it into what is now the #1 browser in the world, allowed Microsoft, Opera, and others to then use it in their own browsers — and now Google owns the entire narrative and development direction for the engine (in parallel to, and controlled to a lesser extent by Apple which maintains WebKit). The original KHTML developers really couldn’t keep up, and stopped maintaining KHTML back in 2016 (with full deprecation in 2023).

That is the risk for the original developers here. You’re right in that there isn’t really anything out there that can do what ffmpeg does — but if the developers don’t keep up on CVEs then organizations are going to look for new maintainers — and a year or two from now everyone will be using the Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook renamed version of ffmpeg instead.

That’s the shitty truth of how these things work. We’ve seen these same actors do it before.

Yaz

Look — I’m a developer. I get it. I’m personally all for having organizations do more to support the OSS they rely on. But the people in the C-suite are more worried about organizational reputation and losing money to lawsuits. If a piece of software they rely on has a known critical CVE that allows for remote code execution and someone breaks in and steals customer data — that software either needs to be fixed, or it needs to be scrapped. Those are the choices. Our customers in the EU are allowed to request SBOMs of everything we use and pass it through their own security validation software — and if they find sev critical CVEs in software we’re using there is going to be hell to pay. And the people in the C-suite can’t abide that level of risk.

Most software development companies (outside some of the biggest ones) don’t really have the kind of expertise in house to supply patches to something as complex as ffmpeg. But a company like Google has the staff with sufficient experience in this area that they could fork the project, fix the issues, and redistribute it as their own solution to the problem — and now Google is driving ffmpeg development. Organizations that need a security-guaranteed version will simply switch to Google’s version, which will likely slowly become incompatible with the original. They’ve done it before — Chrome was Google’s fork of WebKit, huge swaths of users flocked to Chrome, and now Google has over the years made enough changes that their patches often aren’t compatible with WebKit (and, of course, WebKit itself did similar when they forked KHTML).

Now forking like this is great for the community, but it can be tough on individual developers who see their work co-opted and then sidelined by massive corporations. And that’s really why the ffmpeg developers need to be very careful about ignoring CVEs like this. They do so at their own peril, as anyone can fork their code, fix the issues, and slowly make it incompatible with the original. And a big enough organization can ensure they’re fork becomes the new standard, leaving the original developers out in the cold.

Yaz

Itâ(TM)s definitely about the law requiring pricing to show the final price. I get it that tax rates are variable based on locality in the US, even within a state or a city. Thereâ(TM)s much less variability here in the UK (VAT is the same rate everywhere and only varies if certain goods are deemed worthy of a discount). No reason why taxed and tax free prices canâ(TM)t both be shown in the US. This is also common in some places here, especially where businesses will be buying items with a VAT exemption.

The only time I come in contact with Edge is in my Windows VMs or remote servers and I want to download something directly in to the VM on to the server, or I accidentally click on some Microsoft crap that opens the default browser. My annoyances:

• * It eventually forgets what my open tabs were from the last session. It does this frequently. I have tabs in Safari I've had open for for years, and that's the way I like. You fail Microsoft.
• * Configuring Edge is a headache. Default choices are shit and changing that involves going through too many steps.
• * Whatever the browser core, for decades now, Microsoft defaults to a busy noisy page. Their product manager must have been introduced to browsers in the late '90s when everybody had to have a portal. Most of my Windows access is to remote servers, so the last thing I want is it opening an animated page that kills the performance of the remote connection. Sure, it's not as bad as it was 20 years ago when latency was higher and bandwidth was lower, but still annoys the shit of me. Just give me a minimal page by default.
• * It's not even an independent product anymore. Using it means supporting Google. No thanks.

They couldn't make their browser successful when they developed it in-house. They had to make and cuts opted to wrap somebody else's browser, and even now, that can't make that successful.

I think they're trying to say that the GPUs will depreciate more quickly than expected and thus the expectations of their return on investment (on which the loans financing the GPU purchases) depend on will leave all of these major companies heavily in debt without revenue generation on the assets to justify their purchase in later years.

Conceivably, this could lead to bankruptcies and a chain of failures from companies like google and amazon, with a massive drop in stock value and a "too big to fail" problem for the US government again.

(This is me trying to explain the argument, not saying I agree or disagree.)