You can have subscriptions without annoying paywalls. I have no subscription to NYT and I make no effort to try to get their article details without one. But I still wind up in their subscription funnel because they purposely pursue a strategy of providing just enough access to get the link. It is at least mildly annoying to me and I don't think NYT is planning on compensating me for my wasted time the way they want to be compensated for their effort.

(That said I don't care enough to say there should actually be a prohibition on them doing that.)

Illegal doesnâ(TM)t mean I donâ(TM)t have the right to record, tho. Government doesnâ(TM)t give rights.

Closer to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tradition. All they need are the words "Don't Panic" on the front cover.

If it doesn't, it has no real value.

Almost nothing on Wikipedia is true, but all of it is "verifiable" in that there's at least one published source making the claim. Even if 99.9% of all other sources say the opposite.

(The Haka is not, for example, a war chant. Which is attested to, but because it's claimed to be online, it is "verifiable".)

The number of errors is huge, the number of "official editors" who know anything about the subject is extremely small, and this has always been the case. This is why nobody reputable cites Wikipedia. Wikipedia is where you go to find out what is potentially interesting, but you ALWAYS obtain the facts from elsewhere, if you've any sense.

Your best engineers will be AuDHD, and AuDHD folk don't do well in these sorts of synthetic tests.

I can code in 20+ languages for over 12 different OS', write code that's good enough for CERN to run for particle accelerator data collection for a decade, have accelerated systems by an order of magnitude by understanding the poem space better than their previous engineers, but I am abysmal at exam style settings.

The software industry is riddled with SEs who write abysmal code but can pass a coding test easily. They're the folk that you have always needed to reject but didn't because they ticked a box.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

The DOD/DOW have been working on this for a while. They discovered, early on, that the device had a propensity to cause permanent nerve damage.

It's very unlikely the US have fixed that, as they'd largely sidelined the work as a failure. However, at 36%, Trump needs something he can call a win, no matter what the long-term consequences.

You could make the same observation about an obstacle course: completely artificial, simple engineering to make one no human can pass, but typically dialed just to where some humans can manage it.

What are weight classes other than a way to artificially give people opponents they can beat?

As far as sports go the point is simply that the outcome isn't guaranteed. That leaves room for human ingenuity, risk taking, and showmanship, with possibility of both reward and consequence. (In this case, even if the robots were a literal pushover, the spectators and maybe even the opponent couldn't have known that for sure. Any future of the sport would have to adapt to preserve those unknowns between bouts.)

2001: Windows XP ran on as little as 64mb with 128mb being the recommended.

2021: Windows 11 minum is 4gb is listed as the minimum. I've never even touched Windows 11, so I don't know if that is realistic.

The minimum specs for each system is a 64x multiple, as you said. That's a good observation. I'm pretty sure in the late 90s I was running Windows95 with 96mb and my motherboard was capped at 128mb. Negligible ram on the graphics card. It also could have only been 64mb. I don't have a clear memory of what I was running when I first got XP.

Today my PC is a partially upgraded (old) i7-4790k with 32gb ram and 10gb of ram on the video card, so approximately 448x increase in memory in ~25 years.

My Mac is 256gb unified, so ~2,730x multiple.

Still not to the Moore's Law rate!

This is probably the best sentence (and post) that I have read on Slashdot in some time. Amen.

Debt is indeed a rising threat. Us federal debt has reached $40 trillion (greater than the total GDP), with interest payments now the second-largest expenditure after Social Security. The bill works out to $4k per person, or $12k per tax return filed.

Really consider that the first $12k on your tax return bought you nothing. Not just nothing personally, it funded no library, no road, no food stamp, it just evaporated into financial fees. And we're hitting a higher-interest era where borrowing is more expensive.

AI related growth and investment is what's been keeping the present economy floating in the wake of tariffs, accounting for something like 30-50% of recent GDP growth and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

It also the only thing that could possibly result in enough growth to offset the rising debt ratio and prevent a painful economic future. (Even then the growth will have to be on the very high end of projections.)

So it's weird to come away from that and imply AI is imposing an existential risk ("The Real AI Threat") due to "weaker or less durable investment and profitability in artificial intelligence". That's like if your take on medicine was "medical research is a catastrophic thing to get involved with, instead of curing all cancers we might only cure certain varieties, do you want a future in which you die from those cancers?"

Another thing that I have found Claude is really good at doing is taking an error from a log and doing a deep dive analysis of what happened. I give it read-only database access, access to www logs, access to application logs, access to a checked out source tree, etc. I paste in the error message (or in some cases paste in a tech support email from a user) and have it write up an analysis, a proposed response to the customer, and any recommendations (if there is a bug or actual problem).