Thanks Yuri. How's the weather in St. Petersburg?

Heâ(TM)s arguably not wrong that VMwareâ(TM)s offerings outside of their core product are kind of inchoate(though, in fairness, itâ(TM)s not like the âhyperscale cloudâ(TM) guys donâ(TM)t all have a stable of shit thrown at the wall to see what sticks that surrounds the core of services that people actually care about or trust); but that seems like a pretty shabby excuse in this context; where it would have been trivial to just not fuck with what people were using and liked while making the alleged investments in glorious future VMware; then letting the value proposition of that help sell it.

As it is, itâ(TM)s hard to read this as anything other than an awkward(and almost certainly temporary, nobody ever genuinely stops trying to boil the frog once they start); climbdown after recklessly spooking more customers, harder, than intended.

Maybe if Israel hadn't been politically and financially backing Hamas, it might have been different. But hey, all that counts is "Palestinians bad, Israelis good". Simple is so much easier to cope with than reality.

Hmm. This is like the old military joke, "Everyone wanting to volunteer for this mission, take a step forward...", and everyone but one poor schmuck takes a step backward.

This sort of seems to cancel most of the good intentions of NN. Or at least it leaves a loophole wide enough to drive at truck through.

If you are trying to explain why we haven't detected any aliens, how is "they were massacred by even more advanced aliens" a remotely adequate answer? That just leaves you with "why haven't we detected the even more advanced aliens?". The question was never "why do we detect so many deathbots and so few little green men?"

If anything, superintelligences are presumably more capable of doing high-visibility things(if they want to) by virtue of being more advanced; and, while they could all be carefully hiding because they're paranoid that same explanation would hold for standard aliens as well.

Seems like an awful lot of hypothesis to explain nothing.

They also aren't cheap even if the knowledge problem is solved. Something like a roomba lives in a special case where being more or less a toy RC car is enough robotics to actually attack a real-world cleaning problem(on reasonably uncluttered flat floors).

If you want "look for missing items, get things out of the refrigerator, scrub the kitchen floor, clean the toilets, and vacuum" you are suddenly talking about a *lot* more robot. Not necessarily 'call Boston Dynamics for their most humanoid biped', you might be able to get away with some sort of wheeled platform with robot arms since the arms count for more than the legs(as long as you can reach things that are a meter plus away from the floor); but you are definitely talking a much more involved piece of hardware with considerably more fiddly moving parts; especially if you don't want to overhaul your entire house.

The agony, of course, is that Dieter Rams was all about function, which informed his designs. If Apple had hired him (he's still alive, incredibly) instead of just imitating him, he'd probably have taken a significantly different direction that actually respected the complexity of the underlying hardware instead of trying to butcher it. And the logos would have been smaller!

âoeDonâ(TM)t just read the slide deckâ is more or less rule #1 of not completely ruining a presentation. Is there any room for optimism about the results of a tool that generates video of you reading the slide deck? Even if itâ(TM)s a goddamn miracle on a technical level it seems like a fundamentally mal-suited tool for the job. If anything, the better it works the worse it will likely be, since it will just be doing the wrong thing more attractively and easily.

I'd agree that a production system that actually relies on actual floppies would be rolling the dice in a deeply uncomfortable way at this point; but I'm a little puzzled by the extent of the fuss given that(admittedly, more for hobbyist and niche stuff, retrocomputers and synths from the floppy era, that sort of thing) the practice of emulating floppy drives is quite well established and, thanks to the age and (low) speed of the busses in question, pretty technically undemanding.

If I had a floppy-dependent system I'd have wanted people evaluating commercially available floppy emulators starting 10 years ago; potentially trying to push specific developments if my system requires things that the retrocomputing guys don't(whether in terms of features or in terms of not being hand-built in small runs by hobbyists); but, barring some especially esoteric complication I'm not thinking of, slapping floppy emulators into a floppy-based system and bringing it right up to the present day in terms of media seems like it would be both a relatively simple project and much, much cheaper, lower risk, and more predictable than a full 'upgrade' that promises to rip out the old system and replace it with a full new glorious IoT something something.

Can Musk even define "intelligence"?

The Borland products were so solid. I remember Microsoft was making "Quick" versions of languages/IDEs as competitors. They were nice, but not as robust as the Borland products (but also quite a bit cheaper). I do remember, however, you could call up the developer teams at Microsoft and they'd fax you small white-papers and articles on how to do things... sort of like a rudimentary stack exchange. This was back in the late 80s. They had Quick Pascal, and Quick C. Quick Basic was the only one that seemed popular, probably because it was compatible with QBasic that shipped with DOS.

Ring doorbells, and probably others as well have a GREAT solution for sneaky Ninja stealth package deliverers - their motion detection features are excellent for detecting clandestine drop-offs and alerting you of the fact.

This is especially useful if you're in a high traffic or crime area, you'll know the moment it was dropped off. And the moment it was stolen, if you didn't get to it in time! :) Plus, if you're lucky, a video of the thief's face.

Otherwise, there are security drop-off lockers like olde tyme Milk Boxes, you can have them deliver the items into them and the lid locks closed. Presumably, it's bolted to the porch or too big and heavy to carry off, I don't know for sure as I don't own one.

It's important to note that Weird Al seeks the approval of the artists he is parodying. Technically it's not likely in many cases he has to, since US copyright law generally protects parody, but he's a good faith actor who understands not everyone is going to want to be parodied. Still, the fact that he does seek permission gives him an extra layer of protection.

Yes, training AI on Nazis at Truth Social will be much more effective.

Even if the history of Russian 'import substitution' weren't littered with farces where someone gets a gold star for domestically producing tractors...from imported Polish kits with the serial numbers filed off...or the like; "game console" seems like a strikingly hard target, especially relative to its value.

It's a consumer product, rather than the state or state owned or heavily influenced companies being the customer, so there's a lot less leverage in terms of just making 'domestically produced' patriotic and mandatory; and it's a toy that only some people are even interested in, so it's even more difficult to distinguish between people who don't buy Super Motherland 3 because they just don't play video games and ones who don't buy it because they are playing Genshin Impact on something imported from China or a cracked copy of CoD on the wintel they say they use for work. Obviously possible, if you wanted to divert even more statesec guys from keeping an eye on planned terrorist attacks in order to do traffic analysis to look for game pirates; but not obviously worth the trouble.

It's also a pretty demanding category: customers tend to be pretty cost-sensitive and tend to expect frankly remarkable levels of hardware and software punch that are deliverable only thanks to mass production at all levels(whether you are talking ICs, game engines, asset packs, or very large numbers of sales of the final product). This isn't some military thing where you'd like more; but it's workable, and arguably worth it, to be able to reliably deliver domestic clones of some 20-year-old TI DSP even at twice the market price. Unless you are running a crackdown on the alternatives that would make North Korea blink that's not going to work on the gaming side: expectations are high and prices are low; and 'good enough' is defined in large part relative to what other people have, rather than to specific requirements.