The thing that seems ridiculous to me is that these ISPs are getting absolutely hammered by anti-piracy lawsuits that are suing (and winning) for massive sums because the ISPs aren't doing enough to block online piracy. This is really a miserable situation for the ISPs; they either fight these endless lawsuits or start kicking off paying customers (and invite new lawsuits) based on flimsy and questionable evidence.

The solution here is for these ISPs to finally just accept their status as a regulated business and welcome their inevitable long-term profits. I guess some companies just don't know how to win.

I still have my landline; my phone company is also my ISP and though their convoluted billing system makes it hard to know for sure, I don't think I'm paying very much to have it included with my Internet.

In my opinion, the quality of the landline continues to be unmatched by cell phones. The audio quality on my cell phone can be extremely variable but my landline remains wonderfully consistent. Another thing: I can sit on hold for several hours on my landline but my cell phone will typically disconnect after about an hour.

I could be persuaded to go with a VOIP provider in the future but as someone else has pointed out in the comments, until ISPs are regulated as a common carrier, Internet based phone service will never be as reliable as what we currently have.

ISPs could be completely immune from these kinds of lawsuits if they just accepted Common Carrier status from the FCC. Instead, they spend a fortune fighting it every year. In their mind, there is money to be gained by being able to run their networks without restrictions but it sure seems like they've got to be losing more from lawsuits like this.

Yes, my fingers are faster than my brain sometimes, but not as accurate.

Personally, I think the IRS should simply send everyone a pre-filled out 1014 or 1014EZ every year at tax time. If the numbers match, sign it and send it back. If they don't, fix them and send it back. If you think that a CPA or a software package could do a better job, use them and send in their forms.

As I understand it, the majority of Americans just don't have very complicated taxes. There's no reason to make tax time difficult for them.

What's interesting to me is that ethernet continues to be more reliable than wifi even though wifi has improved incredibly in recent years. Personally, I would choose 100mb ethernet over 200mb wifi. Part of this is due to latency issues or external interference, problems intrinsic with wireless but not with wired connections. The biggest difference between the two, in my opinion, is in how the operating system handles it. If my Internet connection has difficulties when I'm connected via ethernet, no problem, everything continues to function as expected. If the same thing happens when I'm connected to wifi, my Windows and Android devices start disconnecting and reconnecting, looking for a better connection.

In summation, a big reason ethernet is so good is its simplicity. It either works or it doesn't. The operating system is expected to try to fix the problem for you.

I've played around with ChatGPT and it can produce some worthwhile code for an established new problem. It's less clear to me whether it has any hope of altering existing code, much less to locate and fix bugs in code.

It also seems like ChatGPT has little to no awareness of software versions and always seems to want to write its example code using the latest APIs and grammar. Once again, this is fine for new code, but it causes me to doubt whether ChatGPT could do much with code even a few years old.

I just want to point out how ridiculous it is to build a device that destroys it's contents after 10 failed attempts. They could increase it to 100 without decreasing the security by a meaningful amount but it would give the owner a lot more breathing room to access their data.

I guarantee that will be the case. I have an Android App that I like to install on my phones even though it was removed from the Google Store years ago due to copyright issues. Recently, when I went to download the apk from my Google mail account, Google flagged the attachment as a virus and refused to allow me to download it. That experience leads me to assume that taken down apps are already flagged as viruses by Google and will likely be treated that way by all of their antiviral tools.

I tried Bing Image Creator. It's an elephant on a stick anyways.

I had something similar happen a few weeks ago with Gmail. I had just purchased a new Android phone but I wanted to install a very old app I enjoyed, one that had been removed years ago from the Google Play store. No problem I thought, I have a copy of the apk stored as an attachment in Gmail. I could not download it. I dug up the email on Gmail's website and saw the following:

Anti-virus warning – 1 attachment contains a virus or blocked file. Downloading this attachment is disabled.

The app did not have a virus, I've been using it on my phone for years. It was, however, pulled from the Google store due to copyright violations. So I guess this is the state of play at Google these days, we can expect take-down requests and legal orders to be far reaching, even into our private files

As a side note, I was able to get my file by downloading the entire email as a .eml file, loading it into Outlook, and extracting the attachment that way.

These technical fixes have nothing on the legal questions that are starting to wind their way through the courts. Depending on how these lawsuits go, AI companies may find themselves in the extremely difficult position of needing to prove that certain content is not included in their training data. It will be far, far easier for them to be able to show that their training data was clean to start with.

Of course, this robots.txt flag doesn't help with any of this because there will inevitably be someone who posts copyrighted material on their website and then sets the robots.txt flag to allow crawling. For these reasons I think web crawling will eventually just have to go away and LLM training will have to use purchased and public domain content going forward.

It makes me wonder if the best days of LLM style AI is already behind it. It could be that the latest version of ChatGPT is as good as it will get and that future LLM AIs will have to do with smaller sets of training data (Wikipedia and government docs) that result in AIs that are less knowledgeable and less compelling.

I love LED bulbs and install them where ever I can, but I have found a number of situations where I've been warned against using them. Here's a list off the top of my head:

• Incandescent bulbs work well as heat lamps. Many people have easily installed them in small enclosures that need to be kept warm and they tend to melt off ice and snow during a large storm.
• Many LED bulbs are not rated for sealed enclosures while incandescent bulbs are. Basically, the circuitry in the base of a LED bulb may be less heat tolerant than an incandescent. I've found that many TCP bulbs are rated for sealed enclosures and use those as needed.
• The circuitry in LED bulbs can be noisy and may jam radio frequencies. My garage door opener recommends using incandescent for this reason. There are low emission LED bulbs but the reviews on them tend to be very poor and I've taken to just using regular LED bulbs in my garage door opener; perhaps it does limit the range of the remote but it still works well enough
• A lot of LED dimmable bulbs are incompatible with old dimmer switches, whereas incandescents works fine. The fix is to replace the dimmer switch, which may or may not be a pain in the ass.

I'm honestly surprised to see incandescent bulbs finally go away but despite the above list I will not be too sorry to see them gone. For the vast majority of situations, LEDs really are a superior choice and it makes sense for us all to move forward with them

This falls into the category known as "ai interpretability" and I think it's an excellent idea. It's true that it would likely stop modern AI research in its tracks, but the AI technology we would get in the future would be far more useful and reliable.