You are correct, but are overlooking a possible solution.

You have an average of N software engineers hired by M distributions to backport features. This means that the cost of those N*M software engineers is already built in.

If you hire the same N*M software engineers as a consortium to fix the flaws and regressions in more recent stable kernels, then the software won't break, there won't be the new kernel defects, AND you don't get the security holes.

Cooperation upstream would mean less kernel differentiation, sure, but that's not what most enterprises go by anyway.

It solves all the problems you raise (which are all legitimate) whilst eliminating the very real risks that zero-day security holes create.

Instead of hiring lots of developers for each distribution to backport essentially the same set of features to each frozen kernel, get together and collectively hire vastly more high-end dual-role engineers to proactively find and fix the bugs in newer stable kernels, so that there are far fewer new bugs.

This makes the newer kernels safe for enterprise use, whilst eliminating the security risks.

It costs the same amount, but avoids the reputation-scarring effects of security holes and thus also avoids the economic damage done by those holes.

Everyone gains by fixing the faults as far upstream as possible.

Not anything about that statement is simple. Is it shared only if the user consents every time the company sends that data, or is it enough to issue a blanket consent for all future sending to a specific site? If the former, you're going to break an awful lot of things that the user might want to do. If the latter, then tapping "I agree" to a data sharing agreement once (which the user probably forgot about years ago) is still consent.

Sorry, but that phrasing absolutely is vague, and there's no way that such a simple statement could ever not be vague. A sufficiently clear explanation would be that they share location information only in an emergency or when the user has explicitly authorized them to share information with a specific external partner by establishing a link between the user's online account and that external partner. That's unambiguous, because it tells what users had to do to grant consent, which gives you at least some idea about whether they understood what they were consenting to and did so deliberately, and makes it clear that they do not share that information in response to any form of boilerplate consent.

This part raised red flags: "except in the case of emergencies or with customer consent." I'm not saying that's the wrong policy, so much as that it is so vague that it could be anywhere from a perfectly reasonable policy to an absolute privacy disaster or anything in between.

Reasonable would be a car company allowing the customer to authorize a specific third-party site to access car data (e.g. TeslaFi).

Unreasonable would be a "By using this navigation system, I consent to data sharing with [car company]'s partners" dialog with an "I agree" button that you have to tap before you can do anything with the car nav system.

Both of those would at least ostensibly count as "customer consent".

I'd hardly call $15 competitive. After the demise of Google Domains was announced, I started looking around, and discovered that Cloudflare offers domain registrations at cost (i.e. you pay the TLD registry price plus the ICANN fee). Zero markup. Unless you're getting some sort of bulk discount or credit towards hosting from some other provider, you're not likely to beat that.

For example:

• .com: $9.77
• .org: $7.50
• .net: $11.84

Even the most expensive of those is still less than the Google Domains price used to be. YMMV, obviously.

Almost nobody in the indie AI community cares about whether the training data for the model is open source. We care about the license restrictions on the model. We can re-finetune or further train a foundation however we want, the question is, what we're allowed to do with it.

A lot of people just ignore the licenses, but that can come back to bite you, and I don't recommend it.

The irony is that just a few years after their lawyer made that comment, Apple renamed iTunes to Apple Music like a moron in a hurry. :-D

Give a couple years and energy density of batteries will be on par with kerosene.

A: Has to be at least double. The mass of the fuel drops as you use it up, the mass of a battery does not. So for the fuel/battery power actually used (the bulk of it) you have twice the weight/distance load for batteries vs. fuel at the same energy density.

That's a scientific fact any science aware person is already aware of.

B: ORLY? Citation please.

This. The way I interpret what they said is that they found something that should have been a P1 block-ship bug during late testing, but they decided that hitting an arbitrary release date was more important than not breaking the user experience. That right there tells me that they don't care about quality, and that we should expect these sorts of problems to happen again in the future. That's not a good look for a tech company.

Seems to me this will drive the state-of-the-art on GPS spoofing, to the point that it becomes accessible and inexpensive enough for individual developers to arrange a test cell for not much more than the price of a laptop.

This, of course, would have all sorts of problems, as it would also make it accessible to common criminals and self-funded terrorist cells.

Attack of the Logo Nazis, now playing in theatres everywhere.

Plot summary: big corporation bullies attack small company in order to protect $. A rebel emerges and bombs a ventilator shaft on the giant Photo Battleshop, giving it chronic constipation. Eventually the PB's intestines explode and CEOs hit the fan.

Nobody is actually ahead in AI, because they're all solving the wrong problem, as indeed AI researchers have consistently done since the 1960s.

I'm not the least bit worried about the possibility of superintelligence, not until they actually figure out what intelligence is as opposed to what is convenient to solve.

As for Musk, he's busy trying to kill all engineering projects in America.

If there's an issue that needs resolving, it's best to acknowledge it. Hiding away, like Microsoft does with their abysmal records on reliability and security, achieves nothing.

If honesty is a problem, then neither IT nor science seem good professions. Politics and economics might be better.

In neural nets, the network software is not the algorithm that is running. The net software is playing the same role as the CPU in a conventional software system. It is merely the platform on which the code is run.

The topology of the network plus the state of that network (the data) corresponds to an algorithm. That is the actual software that is being run. AI cannot be considered open until this is released.

But I flat-out guarantee no AI vendor is going to do that.

Which means that a household of 10 can all connect to different sites and get full speed.

What is with this assuming only one person in a house can be connected?