Complete bullshit. Even for fullscreen video, the website doesn't need to know my screen size. It should tell the browser "here are the resolutions I can offer you" and the browser picks one of those. All the website needs to know is if I prefer 1080p or 4K. And I might pick 1080p even if my screen is 4K because, say, the hotel wifi is slow.

Complete bullshit. None of these things break if I don't tell you my OS. I've got extensions in this browser that can fake my agent string and nothing breaks. Fonts? Are you kidding me? Be more specific, what exactly do you mean by that?

And there's no reason it needs to. What legit use case requires a website to know whether my GPU is an NVidia, AMD, Intel or whatever chip? A shitload of the capabilities are only needed for 3D scenes (like max texture size), which is 0.1% of the websites I visit - they can ask and I can whitelist just them. Why does it need my refresh rate?

Again: All of these things have a legit use case, sure. Often exactly one. That is rarely if ever used. There's absolutely no reason that EVERY WEBSITE can query information that only one website in a thousand actually needs.

You don't tell the baker, florist and car dealer your shoe size just because the shoe shop needs it to serve you, right?

Because I want to be irrelevant to the fucking ad industry. I don't want them to track me, profile me and try every trick in the book to manipulate me into buying shit I don't need.

Sure, the same way that putting a finger into another man's ass has a legit use case (prostate examination) - but that doesn't mean I want every man to do that to me all the time.

The point is that tech companies are exploiting the legit use cases by abusing them when you're not in that use case. Basically, they think they can finger up your ass whenever they want, because once a few years ago you consented to a doctor to give you an exam and maybe you will do that again in the future.

I don't mind it being capable of. I mind it doing all kinds of shit without telling me and without giving me a choice. For example, I absolutely do not want websites to access my microphone. Or even know that I have one. For the once-a-year case where I might actually use that, I can enable it.

The problem is the same problem that the cybersecurity field has been fighting for 40 years: Permit All being the default.

Considerably. Also wider spread.

It doesn't NEED to know any of these things. My browser knows the window (not screen) size and if your CSS is well-formed, it'll manage or maybe your page looks shit if you build it shit. It needs to know my OS only if I want a download link, not on every page I ever visit. It doesn't need graphics capabilities unless it wants to bypass the browser rendering engine, in which case it should ask for permission or fuck off.

The thing is that we give up too easily and the major browser manufacturers (one of which is an ad company themselves) are complicit.

I want "fuck the ad industry" mode, where the browser generates random but plausible values for every non-essential information a website requests. Different ones every 5 minutes.

Well, IIUC the actual models generally say more "nuclear autumn". It's still enough to cause massive famines and various other really undesirable effects. (I didn't say side-effects, because they are really components of 'nuclear autumn.)

OTOH, that was the prediction decades ago for a nuclear war between India and ... Pakistan or Afghanistan (I don't remember which).

I doubt those methods give the estimates for 10m below the surface of the ocean. It *is* a short record, but it's what we've got. Also, I don't see any reason to doubt it, except that I'd rather the answer were different.

Still, don't put high certainty in this particular measure. The problem is that it agrees (in general) with lots of other measures that have a much longer span. There are arguments against pretty much every one of them, but they aren't convincing and even so you have to have dozens of special cases happening at once.

Whether it's profit or not depends on whether people buy anyway. I've decided "no upgrade this year".

You left out informative, but otherwise I pretty much agree with you. The problem is that I expect MANY jobs are going to evaporate. Whether enough new jobs will appear (that are easy to cross-train into) is another question, and I really find it dubious.

We won't find out the answer this year, but we may find out next year.

You may think it sounds like gravitas, but to me is sounds like a desperate ad man.

The methods the summary implies that they use are quite unreliable on an individual basis, but probably pretty good on a population level. So talking about the increase in frequency is probably valid.

This is essentially a high-stakes gamble. The payout is potentially millions, so they just try whatever. And I bet if it all turns against them and they're forced to pay legal costs etc. they'll just file for bancruptsy.

Perfect illustration of the thinking problem here. You don't even get WHAT the problem is.

Why is a driver able to fuck up a system? The OS should be the watchdog that says "WTF are you doing there?", not the obedient slave executing whatever.

A great illustration is W^X - first found not in Windows, but in OpenBSD. Because Windows happily goes "whatever you say, master", while the guys at OpenBSD said "no actual use case of non-broken, non-malicious software should ever behave like that, so we'll block it".

If you are responsible for a sensitive location, and a five-year old kid from the neighbourhood one day just wanders in and take a look around out of curiosity, pressing a few buttons to see what happens - you would definitely not keep your job by claiming that the little kid is actually the problem here.

The summary implies a very bad wording of the measure. Any requirement that "no AI be used" fails, because you can't tell whether it happened or not.

And you clowns don't think that your OS is a fragile pile of crap if it's that easy to fuck up?

Seriously? Do you even know what the job of an OS _is_ ?

...because they merely expect AI to replace existing tasks. Whether it actually does is more nuanced. For example, many employees pressured to use AI say it makes their tasks harder by creating AI slop that needs cleaning up. They have to deal with mistakes that wouldn't be in a human draft or in existing time-tested templates. If and how fast employees will get better models or learn to prompt better is unknown.

It's essentially management's gamble. Those in the C-suite often don't spot or are slow to understand front-line patterns, as nobody likes delivering lackluster news to higher-ups. They'll typically hear, "There are a few learning curve hiccups, as expected, but we're making progress" even if the productivity ship is taking on a little water.