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Comment Re:Safer? (Score 2) 67

HEIC is worthless because it's illegal to implement unless you get permission. Maybe in 20 years it'll be usable.

Don't like that fact? Then we need to find and support (oh no, and be?) political candidates who oppose software patents.

You shouldn't need anyone's permission to write a computer program. It's infuriating.

Comment Long Road (Score 1) 67

JPEG-XL is a good format but I just realized yesterday that Google Docs on Android doesn't support inserting a webp image a decade after Google was pushing it. I had one from a website and needed to run it through imagemagick first.

Android supports it, all the apps using android image primitives supoort it, but one of Google's flagship apps still doesn't.

We used move much faster thirty years ago. If an app supported say GIF, PNM, and TGA when JPEG came out it was supported in the next release.

Hopefully this round will be better. It's probably a management problem ... maybe they will listen to their chatbot since they don't listen to their engineers.

Comment Re:Aux port - how could it even technically pause? (Score 1) 47

I don't know the protocol but old phone headsets had a 2.5 or 3.5mm jack with an extra ring that got you play/pause/hook/next/last.

Hypothetically that could have been implemented. I had a collection of Alexas that got binned as soon as they got caught spying for police so I never got that far. ESP32 is better for nerds anyway.

One thing Australia does right is a statute naming removal of features as a violation of contract requiring full refunds in these circumstances.

Comment Anonymous tip (Score 1) 127

If the cops receive an anonymous tip that CowboyNeal is an insensitive clod, and then decide to arrest him without checking out any of the evidence, I blame the cops. There's plenty to bitch about with Flock but "the cops don't care about doing their job" isn't one of them. That's a cop problem.

Don't treat any stupid robots as somehow "better" than an anonymous tip called in from a payphone. It's just, like, something's opinion, man.

Comment Re:Correct. And oh, no. (Score 1) 54

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

Comment Re:Elections are cheap (Score 1) 38

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Comment Re:If they are thermally efficient enough (Score 1) 124

Stupid and malicious are different.

The offered narrative is "let us build the data center AI control grid now because it's only temporary until we can move it to space".

You and I both know that's not thermodynamically possible with known science.

So do the people saying it.

We have a real problem with Positive Projection where we are decent folks so we project that on people who are not. That is an error even though most people are decent folks. The parasites are not.

I only recent learned that Hanlon's Razor comes from a humor book about Murphy's Law from the early 80's. It's not some ancient axiom of wisdom - it is used by the Cluster B disordered to mask their nefarious deeds.

If you talk about this with most people these days you'll get the Positive Projection script executed like an autorun.

Everybody should turn off autorun whenever possible. Major risk.

Comment Excessive fine under 8A? (Score 3, Insightful) 38

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.

Comment Re:We're probably going to find more (Score -1) 34

> Gardasil

It's sold as an "HPV vaccine" but it only targets about 4% of HPV viruses, specifically the ones most likely to cause cervical cancer in women in their 40's. It's described in the Merck literature.

Not even the HPV most likely to cause throat cancer in men (usually acquired from lady parts).

If cancer treatment advances at the current rate (AI discovery docs estimate 9 years for the supermajority) it's possible that the Gardasil fatalities will have killed more teens than prevented deaths of women.

It's like a Drake Equation for cancer - the coefficients will determine the narrative either positive or negative. This is where free choice is ethically mandated.

Unfortunately there is considerable religious fervor about such things so very few people wants to scientifically discuss nuances.

Comment Re:Constructive responses anyone? (Score 2) 70

Why isn't EU sponsoring specific features and fixes it needs?

Or assign some of their own developers to submit pull requests.

Or hire *some Europeans* who are unemployed because their war is killing industry.

Let's hear from their project manager instead of faceless wankers and the people responsible for sales.

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