Mozilla to users: We have open source standards with end-to-end encryption.
Users: Meh, we prefer Zoom.
Mozilla to Zoom: You should have end-to-end encryption.
Zoom: Meh, why should we listen to you when the users don't?

I wish Mozilla would get their head out of their ass and produce something worthwhile instead. I mean it's been 10+ years since they peaked, the only product of significance they've produced is Firefox which beat IE6 which was like beating a comatose quadriplegic. StatCounter now ranks them third (after Safari) on the desktop with 8.92% market share, zero on mobile and that's their one trick pony.

eBay? Amazon? Etsy? I feel like this business model is well established and probably has examples that are hundreds of years old. Nobody has the right to list products at your store front. Of course, the problem with Apple is that there's no other store front. But if there was a fight here it should be to side load apps from other sources.

I agree with the balls to shut down to the border. Actually executing it, I'd take New Zealand any day of the week. With a land border you're disrupting a lot of border communities much harder than everyone else. At least that's a bit how it felt here in Norway, in practice the border to Sweden, Denmark and Finland has been open since the 1950s and suddenly now there's a new Berlin wall in a place nobody expected one. We've had lovers caught on different sides, people who can't use the cabins, shops and resorts right across the border, even frustrated people going on bicycles on back roads across the border to avoid the quarantine. Once you shut down the NZ airports for international flights it takes exceptional motivation to get there any other way and nobody expects to cross it multiple times a day.

It's basically the same logic as "taxation = theft", the moment the government imposes a burden on you it's inherently wrong and the whole of society should be based exclusively on voluntary cooperation with personal veto rights for everyone about everything. Often in black and white opposition to a world where you can be turned into Soylent Green for the greater good. I'm not saying you're wrong - it's an accurate description - but I don't think it matters to those who make the argument. They've usually decided having extreme personal freedom is more important than the ugly ways some will choose to use it.

P.S. In practice it'll be more like might makes right with relatively little freedom for most. But everyone likes to think they'd be on top.

Nobody would tax wealth at 50%, that'd be insane. We do have it here in Norway, tops out at 0.85%/year. Normally not a big deal, but it hurts one group in particular and that's start-ups not paying dividents but with a booming valuation. We have people who've really struggled to pay their taxes because it's all paper wealth that would be silly for a founder to sell at that time.

Note that the way you normally construct these neural networks is through GANs, a generator to create fake images and a discriminator to tell whether it's real or fake. By training them alternately you get better and better forgeries and better and better forgery detection. So far the focus has mainly been on the purely visual, not whether a forensic algorithm can tell it apart from real data. But there's really no reason why you can't add a forensic loss in addition to a visual loss, in fact I think I've already seen variations on that. It doesn't end until you really can't tell them apart.

If it's all in people's heads why is there way more sexually inactive males 18-24 than before, without a similar increase in females of the same age group? It is well known that the average age of first child birth has been going up, for many their late teens and college years are casual hookup and FWB years and they don't start looking for a life partner until their late 20s so they can have children around 30ish. Obviously then they have to match up one-to-one so it becomes a run-off lottery, these men are already taken so pick from the remaining pool. Now that's an oversimplification, but it explains why it evens out as people get older.

The same is not at all true for just having sex. Tinder has made males be almost a living sex toy catalog and with so many to choose from why settle for anything less than the best? It's ridiculously superficial but it's become more like going to a restaurant, you have some places you keep coming back to (FWBs), some you occasionally go to (booty calls) and some to experiment with (Tinder). But you'd never really need to go to the shabby pub to try out their food on the first place. Maybe it has charm. Maybe the food is made with lots of love and attention. But if the exterior and first impression isn't great people are already walking (swiping) past you.

Of course some people are just toxic from the beginning, but it seems like the transparency has made a very fuzzy market where most people would get lucky if they just tried long enough through a combination of persistence, timing and intoxication into a much more objective market where some people get the dates and others don't, with a much cleaner division than before. And then of course that inexperience and rejection grows into even more unhealthy tendencies. Then people try to convert these into life partners and find either players who are used to more than one pussy on one end and incels who's had none for too long on the other.

They don't have to be in it for China, most countries will be in it for themselves. Being hooked on "made in China" is soft power, there's a reason for the saying "put your money where your mouth is". As long as the rulers get to keep ruling and it's better for their economy Putin is in it for Russia, Erdogan is in it for Turkey, all the shitholes in the Middle East - you think a super Islamic dictatorship like Saudi-Arabia can't flip sides? Many former colonies in Africa will go "Fight for our former colony masters? Fuck that" and stay out. And it's not countries really like to jump into somebody else's war, the UK was happy to wave Chamblerlain's "peace in our time" around as long as they weren't in Hitler's sights. The US didn't really get into WW2 until Pearl Harbor, for us here in Europe thank god for arrogant Japanese fuckers. I'm not sure the US would have been there for D-day without them.

Eh, a lot of people are essential eventually. Not that many people are essential on the order of weeks. If you have a fleet of police cars you don't need an oil change or new tires right now. You don't need spare parts or car mechanics right now. As for delivery drivers, nobody needs a takeaway pizza. Most packages are stupid trinkets people bought because they're stuck at home bored not some essential need. If surviving this disease was more like a coin toss you'd see how little is actually absolutely needed.

Well duh, it's too big and heavy for almost everyone. It's a niche but for the right people this is exactly what they want. I lugged one around as a consultant, 99% of the time I was on AC power at a desk it just so happened it was rarely the same desk all week or even all day because 2-3 client projects would overlap. All I wanted for portability was to be able to close the lid, put it in my backpack (not carrying that monstrosity in a bag very far) and be on my way. The rest was all performance.

We're not quite there yet but I did recently read about this model, given a header and subtext it'd make a 200 word text blurb that was quite hard to distinguish from a human, IIRC it was 52-48 and within the margin of error. It did lose considerably more on the 500 word blurb though, the sentences were fine but the text didn't really come together. It's a language model, not really a story telling model. Though I guess you could use it as an outline-to-flowery language model though.

Yeah, there's a difference between decent and excellent facial recognition but that's not where the money is. There's mainly three markets:

1) Face verification like FaceID, Windows Hello etc. which is a mostly solved problem. At least adequately well enough solved that anyone that interested in getting your data would pick a different method rather than creating an advanced 3D printed face mask.
2) "Kind" face recognition like spotting your friends and family members in photos you upload. Can be trivially done with open source algorithms.
3) "Adversarial" face recognition for surveillance. Unfortunately it doesn't work well enough unless you also do mass surveillance to bring the number of potential matches down from hundreds of millions to things like everyone that's got a cell phone signal, used electronic cash or tickets, been spotted by a license plate reader etc. recently and in the vicinity.

It's only the last one that needs high end facial recognition and then you're talking either illegal spying or governments running their own secret programs. Neither of which are going to want IBM as their business partner.

Sounds like a crappy excuse to me, don't the US have speed tiers on cable? They could just give this guy a new, slower tier but is instead trying to create a neighborhood mob to find the guilty one.

Same here in Norway but it must be driven by pedals to go faster than 6 km/h. You can also make electric scooters, but they go max 20 km/t and is under a different set of limitations.

The problem is that you don't get rid of a platform until everyone you talk to drops it. After WebEx refused to work with the company laptops we're now down to two, Skype for business and Teams depending on who we're collaborating with. Then again, at home we did drop Skype for Discord for audio chats so... if it works well, it's not like we have any loyalty. That's the one good thing about video conferencing, there's no real penalty to switching.