Finding an available slot where all invitees are free is not a hard problem to solve and certainly not one that an AI is required. Although it does point to a problem of trusting Google in the first place to plan meetings this way . Maybe its time to bring this sort of thing back in-house.

Not so great for the supposed victims who presumably number in the millions and will therefore be lucky if they receive even a dollar in compensation.

I will not be surprised if the download clocks in at 250GB or more. I wonder how many people have that amount of space to even spare on a single game.

Not that the physical media will help since it'll probably copy most of the files over to the SSD but at least users have a copy of it - at least for a little bit. Because the normal trend these days is to crap out a broken gold master and immediately drop a massive patch over the top.

On my PC right now I have Microsoft / Xbox store, Steam, Epic Games, UPlay, EA Origin, Rockstar Games launcher, GOG and Wargaming Game Center. That's 5-10Gb of bloat for essentially the same thing - a store, a signon service, an updater and a game launcher. Some services might also toss in achievements or forums but it's the same core thing. Not only is it a burden on end users, it is a burden on developers who have to build, test and support multiple builds for different platforms and are forced into lop sided contracts.

The sensible option, would be a single sign on for the user and the platform would be federated, allowing me to buy from anywhere (and DLC from potentially somewhere else) and the service would be agnostic aside from taking a small commission from the vendor to facilitate things like sign on, feature development, downloading & patching. But that won't happen because every company including Valve is so fucking greedy they want the pie all to themselves. They're not competing on quality of service or value, they're competing on lock-in.

PowerShell is longwinded with a bizarro Verb-Noun fixation and a heavy runtime behind it. Yes there are aliases but unfortunately those aliases suck - e.g. when you type "dir" in PowerShell it is an alias on Get-ChildItem which conspicuously not "dir" in the conventional sense and does not support the same arguments.

Would it have killed Microsoft to have written a cmdlet called Get-DosChildItem that behaved like the old command and alias to that? Same for the other commands - deltree, rmdir, cd, cmd, xcopy move, if, rename etc. - and even cmd itself. If they had done that then chances are command prompt would have gone away entirely because PowerShell would be a complete superset. They could have even written decent analogues for Unix file utils in the same way but they didn't do that either.

The only time I'll use PowerShell is when I'm forced to, when there is no other way to do something from a prompt to manage Windows. Otherwise I use a prompt which is terse and familiar and doesn't inflict verbosity or runtime complexity on me for no reason.

Europe does have some pretty substantial cloud providers but they're minnows compared to the likes of AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. But they provide analogous services, sometimes using the same or similar APIs. So European governments and critical infrastructure businesses need to be legally incentivized to store their data in a sovereign fashion with certain rules about encryption, storage of keys, data recovery, data retention etc. European cloud providers would be defacto sovereign so there is an advantage to these requirements that would help them grow. I know AWS is trying to produce EU sovereign data centres too so its not like US providers can't compete, but not in the laissez faire way they've been working up until now.

Software, software services (cloud, AI etc), chip design & fabrication, satellite internet, pharmaceuticals, weapons manufacture, defence, aerospace and a bunch of other things are vital to European independence and to act as a bulwark against coercion by China and/or USA. It is time for Europe to realise that - it just takes one senile asshole being puppeteered by adversaries for the whole situation to change.

The Las Vegas sphere is a gimmick that has yet to turn a profit and and still has the expense of construction and ruinous electric bills to cover. Even if it manages to break even some day it will be decades before it pays its debts off, if ever. And no doubt we'll see them turn the lights off to save money to hasten that on.

So why the hell would anywhere else want one of these things? Maybe Vegas has a conveyor belt of idiots willing to pay $200+ for a lightshow to make the model just barely viable. Maybe Vegas residents are used to all the light pollution or put up with it because their entire city depends on it. I doubt anywhere else can say the same.

How exactly is any software supposed to know a 3d part is for a gun and not some other purpose? Even if the software maintained a database of every known part and were to somehow match a piece before every print, how ridiculously compute expensive would that be? When - a) the piece could be rotated on any axis, b) trivially modified to circumvent the check (e.g. changing the mesh, STL ordering or superficial details), c) would incur false positives and negatives galore.

3D printers don't even require specific software. There are a multitude of slicers that emit G code for pretty much any printer on the market. Slicers are open source so any check code could simply be removed, not that any open source project would accept the code in the first place. Printers can even be flashed with new firmware, or lobotomized to use push functionality out into software like Klipper. Printers can even be assembled from parts with new mainboards or built entirely from scratch.

How enforceable is any of this? Not even slightly. And it makes criminals of the 99.999% of 3d printer users who are NOT printing gun parts. Would the state of New York also require people in Lowes undergo checks in case they are buying a pipes or nails to make a shotgun?

They would be better off boosting the penalties and consequences of owning such a gun, or printing/selling/providing/importing parts or designs. And focus their attention and investigations on communities that engage in this sort of thing. And 3d printer forensics is a nascent field but there is plenty of things that could be done there too to increase the probability of securing convictions if someone was suspected of committing a crime.

No they weren't involved directly, but the parent company depressed sales for the entire platform by utterly failing to grasp what people want. I think social is fine if there is a reason to be social which I suggested an MMORPG where there are things to do and people can express themselves. But Metaverse as it stands is just trash.

Firstly these companies are not "employers". They hire independent contractors and basically gamify them into working like dogs for a pittance.

Secondly, you know what REALLY adds to the costs? Parasitical services sitting between the customer and restaurant who take a 15-30% cut merely for facilitating the transaction. AND slapping a delivery charge on top. AND processing fees. AND expecting the customer to tip when their own delivery metrics / ratings could reward prompt delivery with a bonus. AND payout schedules to restaurants which disadvantage them even more by withholding money by up to a week.

There is no one remedy for this BS, but requiring these services to break down their charges separate to restaurant's "walk-in" prices would be a major start. And to ban services from scraping menus from restaurants without consent or adjusting their prices. And to ban ghost restaurants. And to treat drivers as employees with guaranteed paid time off, sick pay and a set minimum wage. And some regulatory scrutiny of the whole industry which exists to set customer against restaurant and vice versa when it is the parasites in the middle everyone should be blaming.

I'm angry for pointing out that the Vision Pro is overpriced garbage? Okay. Or that the same experience could be had on a cheaper device from exactly the same vantage point? Okay. Or that the whole proposition is laughable - a niche within a niche.

To anyone with more sense than money. And yeah there may be assholes who'll sit there with a headset on for 3 hours by themselves, paying a fortune pretending they're at a concert or a game. What fun that will be all by themselves. I guarantee you that this is not as compelling as you think. And even if it were compelling well... competing headsets cost 1/7th the cost of this thing.

Yes there is a definite irony that he was a big fan of pseudo science and treated other people even those with subject matter expertise as possessing "untrained brains". He lacked empathy, humility and wildly overestimated his abilities to arrive at the truth. If that hurt his prognosis then oh well.

Not just at the end. There is a Behind the Bastards podcast where they went through books he wrote over the years and there is a theme running through them of blaming DEI and race for his failure to get promotions early in his career. He was hiding in plain sight.