I find I can do everything I need with old and OWA, and OWA is only really needed for some SP/group stuff that will probably never make it into "old". I'd switch to Thunderbird, but that's coming up short in some areas too and OWA alone won't make up the shortfall there, so my current approach is the least painful for getting stuff done, no matter how much that chafes. I find "New" to be a confusing and broken mess that is missing several key features needed to interact with other Microsoft systems (FFS!), and have fed that back to Microsoft in no uncertain terms every single time I've found myself switched to it and have immediately switched back using the feedback form they give you. No real idea on the Store version as I've only tried it once in the hope it might do everything I need (it didn't), but I hear that's awful too.

So, yeah, GP listed three products, which are the "local" versions, then there is the OWA version, so Microsoft has four totally different products that use the "Outlook" name by my count. Maybe they employed a former cola exec to lead the product development, or something; throw flavours at the wall and see what sticks? Store seems to be the "Diet" version, so maybe next up will "Cherry Outlook" and "Lime Outlook"... Personally, I really want "Outlook Zero", which will be me uninstalling it for good once I can switch to anything else.

There's also Outlook Web Access (OWA) that you use through a browser. All are borked in various ways, but the cherry on the cake is that most of them have some functionality that at least some of the others do not, especially if you are in an Exchange/Sharepoint/Teams environment where you may need to switch between different Outlooks depending on what you want to do.

Even allowing for the fact they wanted to rebuild "classic" in a more modern framework and shipped before it had anywhere near feature parity, I honestly can't even begin imagine what kind of decision process, or lack thereof, must have gone on in Microsoft to get them to this point...

Lets say you have a trendline for the expected impacts of the changing climate. It has error bars to cover the expected deviations caused by short term weather patterns and, since the variables become less certain the further you go into the future, those error bars get further and further from the central trend line as you go. Typical trend prediction graph for any number of fields, in otherwords.

Now, lets say your worst case error bars for 2026 allowed for a deviation of upto 5%, but when the data lands it's actually closer 10% (not the actual numbers, BTW). I think your comments would pretty much align with those quoted in TFA, and especially so since this is only one year out from last year's known data and the margin of error on the trend line is at its smallest. For those that can't figure it out for themselves, and assuming this isn't just an extreme outlier, what that implies is that the models that many sceptics dismiss as "alarmist" might actually be too conservative and the future trajectory could be *far* worse than even the most vocal of the climate change advocates are saying it will be.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

Similar concerns here, both for F-droid apps and DJI's - which require installing from an APK downloaded directly from DJI to get the latest version. I only have a handful of apps I sideload, and when I'm not updating those I tend to have the ability to sideload turned off for the modicum of additional security afforded against inadvertant user error. If I either need to go through this 24-hour process every time I update the apps, or leave sideloading permanantly enabled (which I'd be more likely to do, I think), then this is yet another user-unfriendly move by Google that is almost certainly more about being self-serving than anything else.

If I wanted a walled garden, I'd have bought an iPhone.

In 1790, the US population was 94.9% rural. There is no country. in the world today that rural -- Burundi, which looks like blanks spot in the world at night satellite picturs, is 88% rural.

The largest city at the time was New York, with a population of 33,000. Northern Manhattan was near-wilderness, mid-town was farms and country houses.

In 1790 the US was. country you could "police" with sheriffs and volunteer posses, largely to keep the peace. If you got robbed, you hired a private thief catcher. This works in a 95% rural country with just 3.4 million inhabitants. It would be chaos in a country 87x larger.

8GB is plenty of RAM for what most users use their laptops for, if the OS doesn't gobble it up with background tasks. Probably be a good idea to steer clear of Chrome as a browser on these things.

It's actually more like an iPhone 16 Pro runing MacOS in a laptop form factor. Apple basically rummaged through their parts box and pulled out a mobile CPU that'll deliver 50% more single core performance than what's in a high-end Chromebook with only 80% of the power draw. And Apple's got *massive* economies of scale on those parts, so they can afford to deliver a lot of bang for the buck.

The only place the Neo appears to falls short is in RAM, but this is *not* a power user machine, it's for basic office tasks and multimedia consumption. Realistically 8GB is plenty for many users.

In any case, the desktop isn't the center of most users's universe anymore; the switchboard of their life is their smartphone. This is a gateway drug to MacOS IOS integration, and eventually onto the upgrade treadmill. Users will switch seamlewssly between their iPhones and Neos all day long, with data on iCloud and iMusic etc., and when it comes time to upgrade their phone or their laptop, they won't be *stuck* exactly, but if they leave the reservation they lose a lot. But they certainly could upgrade to a *much nicer* Macbook....

It's no wonder the other laptop makers are sitting up and taking notice. Apple has set up a one way conversion ratchet for people tempted by a really nice and perfectly adequate entry level machine at an entry level price.Nobody else has the vertical integration -- chip foundries to device manufacturing, to software platform -- spanning desktop and phones that's needed to do this.

Anyone who's watched a house go up has marveled at how quickly the framing goes up, then how long it takes everything else to get done.

Framing is about 1/l4 of the build time for a house. The *labor* for framing is less than 10% of the build cost. If the machine cost *nothing*, and framed the building *instantaneously*, those are hard limits on how much faster and cheaper the house building robot could make the process: about 25% faster with about a 10% cost reduction. But the machine wouldn't work instantaneously, nor would it be free.

There already is a better way of doing this. You prefabricate the house in units, ship them to the site, then bolt the units together. The modules could be completely finished at the factory. Savings over traditional construction would be substantial -- 40%. The problem is, can you build houses people want to buy and which local building codes will allow you to live in. If you throw out expectations that a house looks like a house a child would draw with crayons, you can build a really nice. So with prefab houses you either have things that look like mobile homes; or things that look like they were designed by a scandanavian architect. Houses that *look* like mid-range, hand-built homes are a tough nut to crack.

There was a movement among architects to use pre-fabricated construction to solve the problem of housing returning GIs after WW2. It didn't catch on as the kind of democratizing mass produced housing the movement envisioned because people wanted a house that looked hand-built. But if you can get over that, it produced some really great houses. One of the more famous examples (although not completely pre-fabricated) is the Eames House. There's a company from that period that's still in business, but they pre-fabricate million dollar luxury homes, not mass produced housing.

The obstacles to prefabricated houses are regulatory, which is why it can't reach the middle of the market. Anti-mobile home rule discourage really cheap pre-fabricated houses, but high end producers can afford to jump through the regulatory hoops. For mid-range houses, the regulatory burden outweighs the economic advantage of prefabrication. This could allow a framing robot to have a niche, although as I pointed out it won't save much money on the build cost.

THis is true. You also get a better understanding for AI's limitations, familiarity of where to be skeptical, and a feel for when a context is losing its mind. I like to put it this way: nobody who can't outthink an AI should be using an AI for anything important.

It wouldn't be news if you looked at their terms of service -- which you should. The ToS explicitly say they use a combination of automated systems, human review, and reports to identify and investigate violations of their usage terms, including violence, abuse, fraud, impersonation, disinformation, foreign influence campaigns , abusive sexual content, and academic dishonesty. This includes "anonymous" sessions that are saved for a minimum of 30 days. You have no expectation of privacy from the provider's compliance teams.

This is *absolutely* standard among the major online players. So why not use a local AI workstation with a couple of big-ass GPU cards in it to run the campaign? That's what they *should* have done. But the major online players like ChatGPT and Claude are much better at realistic content generation than the widely available local models you can run.

What they should have done is design and run the compaign on a local AI workstation, and used the local workstation to generate prompts they could feed into burner accounts on public services like ChatGPT and Claude. But they got lazy and ran the *whole* operation in ChatGPT, right in plain fiew of the OpenAI compliance teams the ToS they evidently didn't read would have told them were there. They even did *performance reviews* in the same account.

Remember folks, these "spooks" are just mid-level paper-pushers in an opaque communist bureacuracy. You can never discount inertia in such an environment. Because this was something new, they might even have had trouble getting the purchase of some high end GPUs approved.

I don't hate Trump. I pity him. No matter how much shit he slaps his name on, it won't fill the hole is daddy left in him. But people that damaged shouldn't be let anywhere near power.

Well, no. It's true you can't buy books for the purposes of scanning them *and then making them available online* (Hachette v. Internet Archive). Scanning them for AI training is not settled law in every Federal District, although in at least one that has been ruled transformative and therefore allowable (Bartz v Anthropic, Northern District of California).