I'm convinced it's AI scraping. At least some of the bots were following the Analytics links (Fathom), and I could see them swarm the site. Suddenly 100,000 IPs from China are each grabbing one or two pages.

Aye. I wasted some time with Gemini and ChatGPT today. I fed it a citation from the manuscript of an alleged passage from canon law. Both Gemini and ChatGPT gave me the same initial reference, which had nothing to do with the passage. One of the hilarious painful things you learn is that, in these cases, either your prompt hits a home run or it strikes out. You're not going to refine your way into glory. I enjoyed watching the citations dance and the suggestions be always bizarre BS. I got several citations â" probably a dozen, and none of them came close to reality.

Me too. After fifteen years of use, the outermost trace (left line of the keyboard) broke, rendering the Unicomp M junk. I had to switch to the chiclet keyboards they issue at work. Three days later I came down with tendonitis. So now I have a base Cherry Brown KC MX.

The sticky parts here:
Delta is demanding from its contractor reparations for damages that it's refusing its customers. When they reject claims for which they have responsibility, how can they go after their contractors on the same basis?
Delta is not the only airline to use CrowdStrike, and they all had outages on July 19. Delta, however, is the only one that couldn't recover until July 24.

Crowdstrike's test and deployment processes to me look like gross negligence: their business is having companies entrust them with access to the Kernal and deploying timely and safe updates. Everyone else uses a robust testing process including staggered deployment.
But Delta, in going about a lawsuit, will be required to reveal their own IT processes and shortcomings that led to a five-day collapse.

Or they settle for zero dollars.

I remember back when we had chat bots like the Bonzi Buddy in 1999.
Now in 2024, we have the technology to run a full rendered chat bot, using local or online chat apis, but it still doesnt exist.
Tavern AI and other chat apps/services exist, but they are only static images.

Why no realistic person avatar for the desktop yet?

I wouldn't even be surprised if the insurers refused to pay out on this one. It's like a fire prevention company deploying a smoke detector that, at the same time around the world, does an auto-test that, due to a design flaw, disables the detector and starts a fire. No amount of "use this device at own risk. We will not cover fire damage costs incurred by using this product" is gonna fly. Liability insurance might cover something, but not a failure to follow basic software security practices. And, even then, who is going to insure them tomorrow? Who is going to go to the boss and say: "well, these guys can't follow the most fundamental rule in keeping their clients' machines secure, let's hire them as our security solution!"? Nothing short of Russian sabotage is going to save them. Good news for competitors: fresh contracts are on the way. Also, you can probably hire some engineers. Just keep an eye on them.

So this would have been perfectly fine if they paid for licenses to film the music video.

If it decouples the flash from social media, how are people going to find out about it? Once someone starts using it, that person disappears from the major marketing channel of our time. The problem with truly useful tools is that they don't propagate themselves or move as many copies as flashy, trendy crap that breaks or goes obsolete in two years.

So then I see a price of $800 for specs that are a little vague, but which most people are going to associate with a device that costs about $200; of course, those devices are the flashy ones, and they can be churned out for a profit much cheaper, given the economies of scale.

And I'd want to see how this display works before plunking down. So we're doomed as a race.

He has to live with Outlook, which, like other mailing software, scans messages before they are sent for keywords such as "CV", "Resume", "Attachment", and, if it gets a hit, and there's no attachment, reminds the user "would you like to add an attachment?"
Unlike other mailing software, that dictionary includes "Bill". Every email he types his name into generates a "would you like to add an attachment", until he either disables the feature or sets up a signature.
Unlike other mailing software, using / will try to include a file, picking something that resembles the words typed, and by default attaching the file. On the Outlook 365 web client, not even Bill Gates can disable this feature. So, if Mr. Gates ends an email with the signature /Bill on then the helpful Web Client will find a sensitive piece of financial information and automatically attach it to the message.
Unlike other mailing software, Outlook gets bundled into office IT packages for companies around the world, supposedly to offer a comprehensive solution for your basic business infrastructure. Businesses end up including proprietary features and locking their users into Outlook. Sure, you can tell people to set up signature blocks, but you're as likely to get 100% compliance on that as with telling people they shouldn't use tab to indent their paragraphs.

Its sad, dac/amps make headphones sound so much better. The LG phones had them, but LG is discontinued. Think the Sony and Asus gamer phones have them. Samsung tablets don't have headphone jacks anymore. But entry level samsung and motorola do. So the high end and low end users use wired headphones, but the middle class will gladly buy bluetooth?

Its strange, I can understand replacing sdcards since they could include a TB internally, but most are still cheaping out on internal storage.

But dac/amps are still light years better than bluetooth. I use one in my car to hook up my phone, its louder and better than bluetooth.

For a world with needs/options, removing a simple headphone jack seems very insulting to users.

Prob not a bad idea to keep AM around, since many rural communities still have AM.
Even better include HD Radio for AM, for better quality.

https://hdradio.com/all-digita...

As for cost, that doesnt really make sense, as they build everything in bulk for their car lines.
Its bad enough many cars dont include AUX jacks anymore.

Removing simple things that people use, to save a few pennies is kinda absurd.

I use IRC!

Yeah, they don't see it as useful, but many people do, and it's part of national heritage. Maybe the government should take care of it? After all 4.5 million quid a year is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of digitization and the recurring cost of ensuring the integrity of the data. Oh, this is the government?

Digitize their whole collection? Okay. How big is that? 8 million objects? So, digitization means what? Full scientific photography of each object? Or are we talking 3D-scans too? Let's assume just the photography part. Each object needs to be signed out, transferred to the digitization center, set up on the digitization apparatus with controlled lighting, color control cards, rulers, whatever other targets you want, and photographed completely, before being returned to storage. Meanwhile the digitization team needs to prepare the metadata, verify the images, archive the images and metadata, as well as generate a reproduction master for use on the website. And you need a long term archival plan, with offline copies being remotely stored and routinely checked/corrected for bitrot. The cost of preparing the metadata alone will exceed $12M. Heck, the cost of having employees move those objects around the museum will cost more than $12M. If digitization only costs $1.50/object, we'd have a lot more digitizations in the world.

You mean the Chinese server farm that can't respect robots.txt and DoS'd my server? They have a social media wing?