Reddit was Open Source until 2017 too.

The source is relatively useless here. This is about users and data. You can grab yourself a copy of that old Reddit source code and run your own right now, but that's pointless without the users, it would just be another empty server on the Web.

Fediverse makes that data available to other servers of course, but so did Reddit via it's APIs, which they are now closing down. There is nothing in the architecture of Fediverse that prevents that or that would make moving to another server significantly easier for the user. User accounts in the Fediverse are still locked to a single server.

Problem with the Fediverse is that it's not really any more decentralized as the rest of the Web. If Lemmy or Mastodon go evil, people still have to find another website and move their accounts and communities over, no different from what is happening with Reddit right now. Only advantage it has is slightly easier discovery of other servers, but even that only works as long as everybody plays nice, nothing stops one server from blocking other servers.

It's amazing how much more advanced mechanisms in hobbyist projects can be compared to AAA titles. For example, here's a video of Tundra Fight School toying with a buoyant chain.

What AI provides to gaming and media goes far beyond just procedurally generating a landscape. What AI can do is much closer to the holodeck, where the user specifies what they want to play and the AI generates everything, the story, characters, rules, landscape and all the rest. There is no longer a need for a game creator. For some genres this essentially already works. ChatGPT can generate stories, can generate puzzles and puzzle dependency graphs, it can generate images, there is AI to segment those images, generate depth maps, etc. That's basically all the bits and pieces you need to create a classic point&click adventure from scratch, completely by AI (this is what StableDiffusion can produce in 20min without any user tweaking). The thing missing is having all those AI systems integrate with each other, but people are already working on that too. If you leave away the graphics, you can already play simple text adventures right now completely in ChatGPT.

The thing I am most curious about is how this will change media consumption in general. A large part of classical media is the shared social experience, people don't watch movies just for the movie itself, but because friends and family are going to watch the same movie. With AI they now have the tools to generate custom content at home, tweaked for them personally. Furthermore that content will be dynamic. With AI you can explore locations and characters that aren't part of the main plot. You can change the story on the fly. So it's not just that AI is making the movie/game/etc., AI is the thing you use to consume the media with. There no longer a need for a finished .mp4 file falling out the other end, it will all be made up on the fly by AI.

VAT is 19%, even if you leave out the rest.

For decades, MS has been releasing news about amazing new features that will be in the next gen product
and 9 times out of ten, it is just vaporware

FUD means Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
It comes from the pre Google/FB era, when MS ruled the roost and it was thought that MS deliberately announced new features that were never intended to be real, just to scare competitors

And Nazi Germany claimed to defend itself from Poland.

Conventional fuel costs less than €1 per liter before taxes in Europe. E-fuel costs at least €10, more realistically €15 before taxes. Electric cars will be much cheaper to use in 2035. Given the cost, the potential market for e-fuels is so small that it can't sustain a network of gas stations.

E-fuels are just a distraction to prevent conventional fuel from actually being phased out.

You don't need a Facebook account anymore. There's now a Meta account that replaces the old Oculus account and isn't associated with a Facebook account by default. Naturally, it's hard to say what they do with account data internally.

To my knowledge, there's nothing truly unusual about using Heroin as pain medication in hospitals for severe cases. It's called Diamorphine in a medical context. Patients typically only get it for a short timespan and aren't told what it is. Withdrawal isn't much more problematic than with other opiate based pain medication.

we have a report from the NYT saying that the gov't will release regulations requiring child care
but so far, as of 4PM teusday 28th feb, those regs are not public

so we don't actually know if this is true or not

after all companies are incredibly invenntive at getting around so called requirements
and lets say Intel doesn't do what it is is supposed to and then gets fined; big whoop

given how fast computer hardware and software is improving, these guys are gonna have to work awfully fast
and even if (big if) they succeed, these organoid brain computers are incredibly fragile things that need a sophisticated lab enviroment eg the slightest contamination with bacteria leads to destruction (which is why mammalian cells when grown in a Petri Dish are grown in super sterile special hoods and the medium has loads of antibotic)

IMO, a waste of money, but we shall see

You forgot the most important ones regarding security: Outlook and Active Directory.

So why give up this leverage?

Well, I've always assumed that Russia has been playing games with NS1 to pressurize Germany. The alternative is what? Russia has had problems fulfilling their contract due to technical issues caused by sanctions and decided that it's cheaper to destroy their infrastructure than to pay any penalties? I wonder if the relevant numbers available.