What are the odds?

Our health secretary has found promising results in licking toilet seats.

This may be a vulnerability, but it is addressible, and not one targeting an aircraft not sporting 1980s canards.

I have bought about 8 books in the past two years. I finished one. It was dreadful - I certainly chose the wrong one. But the others I've hardly started. There is no moment in a modern day that it the right moment to sit and read. The process of reading brings me no joy at all. No writer feels any urgency to get to the point.

that vegetables are edible.

There has never been a less consequential "innovation" in the online era.

how does this differ from Fiverr?

Oh comb ON. Too many buzzwords.

At least it didn't explode on the drawing board

I designed the Wildfire Assistant in the early 90s. "She" (I never could abide by efforts to neuter her) was an voice-driven electronic secretary (messaging, voice dialing, call routing, etc) that was in the telephonic cloud.

My code was static and ordinary, but well conceived. I had the huge advantage of having my girlfriend as the voice talent and I did the studio work myself, editing down about 2-3,000 voice prompts to create a wonderfully human-like helper.

The personality of Sesame's "Miles" (for instance) is competitive with what I achieved, but freed from the rigid framework of my application-oriented code. He pours the sort of personal interplay Wildfire could only serve in chunks.

It's a good thing money cannot influence our government

Wow. You made this exchange needlessly persnickety.

Exactly. Journalists make mistakes. But old school journos make small mistakes by human error, not in pursuit of an insidious, profitable agenda.

This is irrelevant - the users take this information as convenient gospel. They aren't reading newspapers.

Maria Ressa is a classmate of Jeff Bezos, Princeton University, 1986.