I don't think the main issue is the end-user software. It's all the other stuff that makes the company work. I work for a small startup, and I can list at least a dozen software platforms that we use, and I'm sure there are dozens more; none of which we could trivially migrate away from. (Fortunately, most of which I don't really want to, as they work fairly well.)

Besides the technical stuff, there's the HR benefits, the expense reporting, the door lock manager, the office reservation system, etc. I'm sure all of these are subscriptions. Many are probably quite inexpensive, but some aren't.

At some point, it will be cheaper to tell Claude, "We use the OverPriced platform. Examine our usage of it, and develop a replacement platform tailored to our needs, and include a transition plan to suck all our existing data and configurations over to the new system." But then there's one more system to support locally, which may not be worth the cost. Or if OverPriced is too ridiculous, do the same, but spin it off as FairPriced and compete.

If they can use drones to recover wounded soldiers, they can use them to deliver soldiers to or beyond the front. While in most cases they prefer to use this for unmanned ground vehicles, there's no reason they couldn't fly in special forces this way.

While they're currently only applying this to people with extreme cholesterol problems, there's no reason the same treatment wouldn't work for anyone on statins. They use different dosages to impact a different percentage of the liver cells to adjust cholesterol levels, essentially introducing a mutation found in a small percentage of the population where a particular gene is inactive. For people with more manageable cholesterol levels, they would presumably just need a lower dosage to get levels below that where medication is required.

So for now, this will likely be only used in extreme cases, but over time, this could be an alternative to statins just like lasik is an alternative to glasses.

I would love to stop taking my statins, and I'm sure many other people would also opt for something like this. Once they get more experience in the more extreme cases, there's every reason to believe they'll open it up for wider usage. Apparently between 50% and 65% of people fail to take their statins consistently for various reasons, so this could be much more effective and reducing heart disease.

They're effectively introducing a rare genetic mutation. They found some people who have extremely low cholesterol, and it's due to one broken gene, so they introduce that change in some percentage of the liver cells to reduce the cholesterol levels. They can do studies of people who already have the mutation naturally to get an idea of any expected health impacts.

I think the Rivian approach is the best. They're basically copying the Tesla model of having their fleet send the sensor recordings back and then using them as training data. While they're far behind right now, they'll catch up quickly, as they can copy a lot of the basic technology that's now established instead of having to invent everything from scratch and make wrong decisions along the way. The difference is Rivian is including lidar, so they just include the matched video and lidar recordings as a larger training data set. I'm convinced that if the price of lidar was more like it is today back when Tesla started selling FSD in 2016, then that's exactly what Tesla would have done, but Tesla is now stuck with their solution with ten million cars already on the road.

But in clear weather conditions, I don't think lidar really helps that much. Most human accidents would be avoided if drivers had better situational awareness and didn't have gaps in paying attention, and the cameras solve that.

I don't know what expectations these are defying unless they're from those created by anti-EV FUD. I thought it was pretty clear that EV batteries usually last longer than the cars themselves. If 250K is exceeding expectations, then the expectations are wrong and haven't been supported by the data for a long time.

Yeah, that's not really a thing in LEO where debris clears itself fairly quickly due to atmospheric drag.

This is about reducing ewaste, so how about phasing it in by requiring increasingly long warranty periods for non-replaceable batteries?

I love that I can self-host Bitwarden, and I do it with Vaultwarden, which is open source, so I have no fear of it going away. But if the company got really obnoxious and blocked self-hosted servers from the browser plugins, then I would be in big trouble. I don't think the changes listed suggest that they're going to do that anytime soon, but it's something I want to keep an eye out for.

How exactly do they ban updates? If they publish an update for Canadian owners, nothing stops Americans from installing it.

We should rewrite SystemD in D and call it DsystemD.

(Yes, I program in D, but I avoid SystemD, thanks to Gentoo Linux letting me stick with OpenRC.)

I'm used to Dungeon Masters being cryptic, and my party often ends up in crypts, but I've never had the DM encrypted. Sounds like a nasty curse.

I have Powerwalls, and also happen to live in Massachusetts. I participate in the virtual power plant program, where the batteries dump to the grid for an hour or two during peak demand in the summer (typically 5-7pm on hot days). I get paid nearly $1000/year for each Powerwall. Car batteries are much larger. I would love to be able to have my EVs participate in this, as well, but our cars don't support bidirectional charging. If they did, we would love to be part of this, assuming the terms are similar.

How does this compare with Samsung DEX that has been on Android for years to provide a desktop experience? I played with it a bit when work started requiring us to be in-office but without assigned cubes and static equipment, as I could, at least in theory, do everything I needed with a keyboard, mouse, screen and my phone driving it all with a VNC app to do my real work on a Linux server.

I rather liked it, but it had some glitches where it wouldn't always recognize the monitor from the docking station, and it couldn't make use of a second monitor.

With so many workers now in this situation, and phones having so much processing power, this seems like an obvious solution.

When Lucas sold Star Wars for $4B, it sounded like a ridiculously low number. Even without the rights to make new content, that was worth well over $1B. If he were shopping around instead of giving it to Disney, it probably was worth closer to $10B. With honest accounting, that's probably in the range of value Disney has received, and that's with having produced the worst possible sequels.