It was literally yesterday that I posted a comment about not wanting to buy products with mandatory and pointless "apps". Sonos is a speaker. Why does a speaker need an app? (I recall that a few years ago I was looking for a new Bluetooth speaker, and Sonos had some good reviews, but this was a deal-breaker for me and I bought something else instead).

I would go further than that: Never buy a product that needs a smartphone app to work. If the product needs switches, knobs, and/or a remote, all those things had better be included in the box.

This is a rule that's getting harder to follow all the time. I used to have a Philips RGB lamp with a nice, solidly built remote that let you control the color, saturation, brightness, etc etc. I tried to replace it after it got lost, and you just can't buy a similar product any more. Every RGB lamp is either 1) controlled by a smartphone app, or 2) comes with a incredibly cheap plastic remote that looks like it came out of a Cracker Jack box.

For an *audiobook*? It's pretty cheap, actually. You can buy a good microphone with a built-in DAC for about $100 ($200 tops), plug it straight into your laptop, and use any number of free programs for editing (and for whatever minimal post-processing you might want to do). The only other requirement is a quiet place to record.

Several important use cases (well, important to me) vanished when they took away the headphone jack.

Use case #1 was as a virtual instrument (with or without a keyboard controller, which could be easily plugged in with a USB-to-lightning adapter). That use case has disappeared because there's no audio out (just Bluetooth, which introduces latency and reduces sound quality).

Use case #2 was as a music player. In the past, you simply connected your stereo/powered speakers/car audio to the headphone jack, and you had a nice interface with very decent sound. (Apple does use good DACs, and whenever they've been compared with fancy/dedicated DACs in blind testing, they've held up quite well). Now you have to use Bluetooth, which is much lower-quality and is also a hassle. (First you have to spend a minute pairing your device, and then you have to find and disable the myriad of other Bluetooth devices that are trying to pair to your Bluetooth speaker instead of letting the Ipad do it).

Don't talk to me about using one of those "dongles" that converts your USB port to an audio output jack. In the first place they sound like crap because the manufacturer only spent $2 on the DAC, and in the second place, they have a half-life of about two weeks before they get lost or broken. They also prevent you from using the USB for anything else (e.g. a keyboard controller or a charger), unless, of course, you'd like to spend yet another $65 on a special adapter to replace the last special adapter which fell apart after a month.

I never said "Texas has your information", I said "you've left an electronic trail"-- which, as you yourself acknowledge, is in the hands of a company that you may or may not trust. If they receive a subpoena for that information from the DA, what do you suppose they'll do? Call up their legal team and fight to quash the subpoena? Or just quietly hand over the information?

(Also, as I've pointed out elsewhere, there is nothing in the language of HB 1181 to stop the website owners from outright *selling* your age-verification info).

Gun purchases aren't anonymous and never will be. The analogy is pointless.

The law in question (HB 1181) contains precisely zero language about what the porn company is supposed to *do* with the age-verification info once they've collected it. There's certainly nothing in there about deleting it. As far as I can tell, they can hire a Goodyear blimp and display the information at the Super Bowl, and it's perfectly legal. I don't know, I'm not a lawyer.

It's not a "conspiracy theory" to suggest that the Texas legislature might wish to restrict online access to information about abortion, when they have introduced a separate bill to do exactly that. See ArchieBunker's post, above.

Also, read the text of HB 1181. It's available online. It specifically forbids "descriptions" or "depictions" of genitalia or the female breast-- something you might find on an informational website on abortion or breast cancer, or on the website for an OB/GYN clinic. Would a court buy the legal argument that such websites are "obscene"? No, probably not, but a law doesn't have to hold up in court to have a dampening effect. If I were running such a website, the compliance department would probably tell me to include age verification, just to avoid any risk of legal exposure.

It's about restricting access to webpages with "adult content", which includes, for example... information about abortion, information about LGBTQ issues, and probably some other stuff I haven't thought of. These are the kinds of webpages that typically get flagged by "adult content" filters. They'll be difficult to access for minors, and they'll leave an electronic trail if accessed by an adult. Potentially quite useful for Texas DAs, if they decide to start arresting people who leave the state to get an abortion.

There are at least two big things you're missing out on: album artwork, and liner notes. (Did you know that there is a Grammy award for "best liner notes"?)

I've never understood why the streaming services never include the liner notes. Half the time, you can't find the liner notes anywhere, even if you look online (I know there are a couple of sites that archive this stuff, but they're very far from comprehensive).

I've found that "Metal Machine Music" becomes more listenable if you pitch-shift it down by an octave or so. Once I did that, I found that I sort of enjoyed it as a piece of weird ambient music.

"...or debate politics?" I would agree, the workplace is not a good forum for that.

So why did Google hold "town halls" to "discuss issues of inclusivity"? DEI is one of the single most "disruptive" issues, and one of the most strongly politicized issues, of the 21st century.

The answer to *that* question is that sometimes, "disruptive issues" have a direct and actionable relevance to company policy. Either the company is going to follow certain DEI policies, or they're not. The same applies to the war in Gaza. Either you're going to provide support services to the IDF, or you aren't.

Google might have a legal and ethical right to take action if protestors are grossly disrupting their workplace. But to suggest that employees have no right to any form of protest, or no right to "debate politics in the workplace" when the politics are clearly related to questions of company ethics... this is morally indefensible, and might arguably be illegal as well. (For example, there are whistleblower laws, which protect employee speech not only about workplace conditions but also about "matters of public interest").

The key question is what kinds of "disruption" count as "gross disruption". If you form a picket line outside the office, that's "disruptive", but most people would agree that it is an acceptable level of disruption. If you stand two feet away from my desk and scream through a megaphone, most people would agree that this is an unacceptable level of disruption. In the case of these recent protests, it's hard to say, because there are very few details about what the protestors did.

...except that if you read the very first sentence of TFA, it specifies that the damage is costing billions of naira. One naira=.00087 dollars. So a billion naira is somewhat less than a million dollars.

Can they still prosecute a "deepfake" if it was made without the use of AI? (TFA states that the creation of deepfakes is "facilitated" by AI, which implies that AI is not strictly necessary). Is there any legal definition of what a "deepfake" is, for the purposes of this law? What if I paint a photo-realistic, sexually explicit image of Britney Spears? What if I hire a really good Britney Spears impersonator to create "sexually explicit" images? What if I hire a not-so-good impersonator? Are all of those examples still "deepfakes"?

Back in 1993, Spy magazine published a briefly-infamous Photoshopped cover of Hillary Clinton in dominatrix gear. Under the new law, would you go to jail for having a copy of that magazine?

If a deepfake is legally defined as "something meant to deceive the viewer", and the purpose of the law is to avoid defaming real people by presenting deepfake footage as real footage, what happens if I put on a disclaimer stating "All the imagery here is 100% fake?"

What if I create an AI-generated actor who happens to look sort of like a specific person (enough to be potentially confused with the real person)? Is that illegal? Does it matter whether I intended for it to look like them? If my intent *didn't* matter, then am I legally required to use some sort of filter or safeguard to ensure that my AI-generated actor looks sufficiently different than every real human being who ever lived?

That *is* interesting. I obviously understated things when I said "the military doesn't have any policy against LAWS"-- indeed, they seem to be committed to developing LAWS and have spent a lot of time here developing a bunch of policies surrounding that.

These are, of course, the military's "declaratory policies"-- the ones you put in a press release-- and may or may not have anything to do with the military's actual (classified) policies and practices.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it should be noted that any modern LAWS will use AI technology... and whatever your opinion is of AI, everyone agrees that it's a black-box technology. We know how the programs are written and trained, but we don't always understand how they operate and we can't predict the output. Last I checked, we can't even prevent public-facing chatbots from embarassing their corporate sponsors, they'll still do things like rhapsodize about how much they love Hitler.

Your point is taken, but:

If a machine is capable of autonomous behavior (i.e. still carrying out an objective when completely cut off from remote control), and it's capable of delivering lethal force, it's an autonomous killing machine. Or, to use the term the military uses (which I just looked up), it's a Lethal Autonomous Weapon System (LAWS).

It's possible to think of a scenario where LAWS (LAWSes?) will accomplish an objective without harming a hair on anyone's head-- as you have done in your post. The problem is that it's rather easy to think of *other* use scenarios, ranging from the mundane to the extreme, where there is a different outcome. To repeat the point I made earlier: war zones tend to be cluttered up with a large number of human beings, some of them combatants, some not.

The current status of "LAWS" (which, again, I just Googled) seems to be this: The US military doesn't (officially) field any of them right now, but they have no policy against doing so in the future, and there are no international treaties which would dissuade them from doing so.

(Not that I believe for a second that any treaty would make a bit of difference. The US still uses *land mines*, to a limited extent, despite the fact that almost every other country in the world has signed a treaty forbidding their use. The Russians and Ukrainians are using land mines right now despite being signatories to the treaty. I suppose a landmine would technically qualify as a type of primitive LAWS).

So this is a real-world issue.