Most apps are barely used and are garbage. They omit what apps were specifically caught proxying and the number of installations.
Was it any of the big ones such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu etc?

No it's not the big ones, because those have reputations to uphold.

It's always the questionable apps - you know the apps you see in ads and such, and there are almost always clones of everywhere. Especially if it's a paid app and suddenly there's a free clone of it.

And they're really there to offer exit nodes for VPN services that haven't been detected by things like Netflix or CloudFlare as hosting a VPN endpoint.

Part of the problem is that the Democrats also need to think long and hard about who they serve. Trump should have been *impossible*. In a healthy country nobody would have voted for a raging whackadoodle like him.

The problem is well, the non-Republican voters. Democrats win or lose by voter turnout - it's why the (R) side is trying to disenfranchise as many voters as possible.

You see, the voter turnout for the (R) side is basically constant - you have people who vote (R) and will always vote (R) every election. Doesn't matter who's on the ticket, as long as it's (R) it's who they vote for.

On the (D) side, it's a lot more variable - they are generally far more complacent. If they don't like who's on the ticket, they don't show up to vote.

Granted, there are small contingents of flip-flop voters - but in the overall scheme of things they don't usually matter too much. Sure they may have flipped a state, but it's debatable in the end if it mattered.(E.g., the LatinX vote went (R) in 2024, because they liked the whole "close the border" thing and "get rid of the immigrants". But of course, they didn't think things through because well, they were the immigrants).

So what matters in the end is the voting contingent - you have (R) when the (D)s don't vote. It's why talk of forcing voters to vote has died down - the (R)s realized that it was a completely bad idea that would have them lose the election because you're forcing basically the (D)s to come out to vote. That's also why there's talk of "steal the vote" and "voter ID" - because the goal is to make sure the (D)s don't vote.

(Incidentally, you can't be for things like "voter ID" and then believe the times when Trump was in power the vote was proper. Because it was improper in the past and thus the 2020 was stolen by Biden, but also 2016 and 2024 was stolen by Trump and thus every one of them was illegitimate without voter ID. Which we all know wasn't true, because the MAGA tried to steal the vote in California and failed miserably to the point of almost getting arrested for trying it. So either you need voter ID, and thus the vote for Trump was also illegitimate, or you don't, and Trump is rightfully the President.

That's really what it boiled down to. Bust Jr. was elected because Gore lost Florida because of potentially uncounted votes.

In the end, all that matters is getting the vote out. All the (D)s though Kamala Harris had it in the bag and stayed home. It's why if anyone claims "they don't bother to vote" or "I don't care" your answer is "so you voted for Trump then". Not voting is the same voting for the winner - if you wanted Harris to win, you'd have gone and voted. If you didn't care, you basically voted for Trump.

You missed the point. Small enough pieces are already understandable. But... Well... It's like the problem with global variables, a few are really useful, but when they multiply the code becomes unintelligible. There are too many interactions.

Whether we know how they work or not depends on how closely you look. If you look closely enough, every single decision is understandable. But it's so complex that nobody understands the ensemble. Even ordinary programs are sort of this way. The Obfuscated C Contest is just an extreme outlier, but any really large chunk of code written by somebody else (or by you over the last few years ... and not all at once) can be difficult to understand. As it gets bigger, and has more patches, the problem gets worse. These things are at an extreme edge of this problem. But every small enough piece of them can be understood...at least by somebody.

In this context inappropriate use of AI is a use that gets unchecked erroneous outputs that you care about or it more expensive than you want to pay.

OK, many people don't know how to use it yet.

AI is such a versatile tool that people keep trying to use it in inappropriate ways/places. Again, like computers in the 1960's & 1970's. I suspect that we're still at the point where most attempts will fail (some horribly), but some will be REALLY successful.

N.B.: Computers didn't become largely successful until structured programming and commodity software took over large parts of the market. That greatly reduced the errors. What's the equivalent for AI? We won't know until after robots become common. (LLMs are just touching the edge of what AIs can do.)

It is (or at least can be), among other things, a good search engine.

The problem is that people don't know how to use it yet. EXPECT most attempts to fail. Most early attempts to use computers failed.

Of course, with AI the problem's a bit worse because it keeps changing so rapidly. Currently the rule of thumb is "You can train an AI do do a good job if it's easy to verify that a proposed solution is correct.",

You already acknowledged the catch when you said "Or, at least, any new ones.". Small groups are really much more interested in the kind that were useful in WW I, because those are easier to make. Doing development for new weapons is dangerous to the developer.

If IQ were valid, it wouldn't be particularly low. Unfortunately, it's sensitive to culture and education, so you are probably right. But don't confuse it with potential intelligence. IQ is basically a measure of how well you could do in school with reasonable effort, so if you didn't pay attention last year, your IQ is lower.

That said, intelligence *is* real. It's just that IQ is a really bad measure of it.

Called standard by who? I guess we shouldn't call the Imperial units, though. But I've *never* heard them called "standard" before.

I really doubt that it's the largest single market. I suspect that's China. The US and India are probably up there in the running too.

I'm not sure. I can imagine software displaying ads that I would not consider malware. E,g, Firefox displays many ads on Slashdot, and only the ones that hide parts that I'm trying to read to I really consider malware.

Define "malware". This would seem to fit my definition. Yeah, it's an edge case, but it seems on the "malware" side of the line.

I learned assembly on the Z80, it is super accessible and fun to use. So glad future generations will get to experience the push and pop of a memory stack firsthand.

Zilog still makes Z80 based things. They only ended production of the DIP40 package for the Z80. They have various SoCs and microcontrollers using the Z80 processor core. It's a little less convenient if you want to build a Z80 based computer.

The other alternative is the 6502 which is still available in DIP package as WDC (western design corporation) still makes them. They also have a synthesizable core for FPGAs as well.

And they are used - the Z80, 6502 and 8051 are still used in many things that need a tiny bit of intelligence (may USB hubs, for example, contain an 8051 core to manage it).

Though I suspect a lot of that is simply being around for the sake of being around because ARM is slowly taking over the intelligent device market. I don't know why RISC-V isn't appearing more in low end microcontrollers, but ARM certainly is. Which is fine, even though ARM isn't designed to be manually programmed by humans (they designed it more for compilers), it's instruction set is relatively simple and orthogonal so it's relatively easy to learn.