I think it was brought up because a youtuber brought it up recently in one of their videos and it probably went viral.

He mentioned how it was billed as supposedly a relaxing spa type retreat that wasn't, and what was a disaster for some, others found fun and team building.

It wasn't captured as anything other than "CEO misreads room for team building event". All I know is such activities aren't for me so I don't know if those who weren't equipped to do that sort of thing had an alternative thing or they were forced to participate.

Microsoft issues the secure boot keys that are used by all Linux distributions.

If they can just arbitrarily yank someone's keys like this, apparently without explanation or appeal, then what does that mean for those Linux keys? Are they subject to withdrawal for no reason as well?

Incorrect. Microsoft signs the boot shim. This lets you use Secure Boot with the default Microsoft keys you use to boot Windows. So any PC, with Secure Boot enabled, can boot Linux. The keys built into every PC are Microsoft's, and even if you hard reset the machine, they will revert to those Microsoft keys.

You are encouraged though if you run Linux, to create your own keys, and install them on your PC. Doing so would require you to re-sign the Microsoft bootloader but you are free to use your own keys. The only reason Microsoft signed the shim is because some OEMs do not make it easy to install a third-party key to secure-boot a non-Windows OS. So the Microsoft signed shim means if it can boot Windows, it can boot Linux.

And I say shim because that's the actual component signed - major Linux distributions re-distributed the signed binary. But it's bootloader independent - you can use the signed shim to boot your own version of GRUB or other bootloader and continue the secure boot chain if desired. (If you use something like Ubuntu, you're likely to encounter this if you try to compile your own kernel or module where you then h ave to add a key to the shim so the kernel can run your new module.

Microsoft can stop signing new shims, but that has nothing to do with Secure Boot. It's just a way so everything that can boot Windows can boot other OSes even if the OEMs lock down the computer.

Big companies often use their own keys for secure boot.

Then again, Apple's treatment of the Vision Pro perplexes me, so who knows what Apple is doing there...

I think Apple is trying to figure it out too, so they're just letting it be a developer's playground as in "Here's some cool hardware, now do something with it".

It's a device looking for a purpose, and Apple is just trying to see where that goes. I'm sure most of what we do with smartphones today wasn't what Jobs envisioned back for the original iPhone, so the Vision Pro is similar. Maybe hoping to see if an interesting use case pops out.

The pilots carry a transponder. If you make it down to the ground alive, you hide, turn on the transponder and wait for a rescue.

There was an article about the Boeing device that is just this.

It uses spread-spectrum wideband technology in fast burst mode so you can communicate. It's encrypted, digital and the fast burst means every transmission lasts well under 1ms which means by the time you detect it, it's too late to triangulate the position. (Think of the annoying beeping prank toys you can get)

Wideband technology means even if you pick something up, the location is spread out, and is a much weaker signal as it barely disturbs the noise floor.

It's also a 2 way communicator so you can send messages to it and they can reply back, and basically handheld. You strap it on, turn it on and it transmits your position in those bursts.

Of course, the biggest farce is about the second pilot being reported in the news. Which is a farce because if you know anything about the F-15E, you know it's a 2 man aircraft. So you know if you shot one down, there are two people you have to account for. It's not just public information, it's basically well known information. The fact that one was rescued means obviously there's one more to look for.

To put it in perspective, by then you could get IBM PC clones for under $1,000.

Not in 1984. Clones were cheaper, but the $1000 PC era didn't arrive until the 90s. The cheapest IBM PC was around $2000, but you were looking at like 128K of RAM and NO floppy drive. (The original IBM PC had a tape interface so you could use ... audio cassettes. While not unusual since every other computer had tape interfaces, basically nothing used it other than CBASIC - cassette BASIC which was a ROM BIOS option). That configuration was rapidly dropped and prices rose because you really needed 256K of RAM and 2 floppy drives.

Though one loading MS-DOS from cassette tape might have been an interesting alt-universe thing.

Among the 8-bits, the Commodore 64 was probably the cheapest around $500-600 (and another $400 for the disk drive, or $200 for the tape drive, I think).

Computers weren't something in many homes in 1984 - if you had one, it was likely an 8-bit one. PCs didn't really land in the home until later on when clones started coming down at half the price of IBM, But that was still several thousand dollars. An IBM with hard drive, single floppy and 640K was north of $5000, so a clone would likely be between $3000+ for a similar configuration.

The thing is, the MacBook Neo was done so Apple could experiment - to comply with upcoming EU laws, use up some chips they had sitting around and other things. They didn't expect the sales they got because honestly, if you survey the sub-$600 laptop market on PCs, it's rather dismal. Apple somehow packaged together something with a stunning screen, metal case and decent battery life. The CPU and RAM were middling, but for light tasks decent enough. But the display is bright and vibrant and outclasses anything you can find, the case is sold and not creaky plastic, and the battery life isn't abhorrent. It's also not a thick beast and retains the Apple aesthetic. And no stickers.

Honestly, it's something of a competitor to the iPad itself. Apple sticking a touchscreen on it and you pretty much can't justify an iPad anymore.

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

And the really annoying thing about this is that when the AI bubble inevitably crashes, it's going to be difficult to repurpose all of these specialized AI processors into something useful..

No, it's basically impossible. AI doesn't need high precision math - 16-bit floating point, 8 bit floating point, even 4 bit floating point is all that's required.

There aren't many uses for such low precision ALUs and such other than AI.

According to the writeup; there are two methods: it is possible for an extension to mark some parts of itself as 'web accessible'; and linkedin has assembled at least one characteristic file for 6,1000-odd extension IDs and attempts to fetch it to confirm/deny the extension's presence.

The other is based on the fact that the whole point of many extensions is to modify the site in some way; but the site normally has largely unfettered access to inspect itself, so they have theirs set up to walk the entire DOM looking for any references to "chrome-extension://" and snagging the IDs if found.

Not exactly a 'declare installed extensions'; but it looks like, out of some combination of supporting the use cases where an extension and page actively interact by design and either not wanting the possibility or not wanting the complexity of trying to enable 'invisible' edits(presumably some sort of 'shadow' DOM mechanism where as far as the site and everything delivered with it knows only its unedited DOM and resources exist; but the one the user sees is an extension-modified copy of that one, which sounds like it could get messy), inferential attacks are fairly easy and powerful.

The border collie helps round up the cattle but it would be easier if the rancher knows where the cattle are located to send out the collie. Some ranches can be hundreds of thousands of acres. And that is the main herd. If there are stragglers, they have to be located too.

Border collies generally work with sheep, cows not as much simply because cows don't really give a damn.

But sheep you have to be careful with - an entire flock in the UK had to be euthanized because they figured how to escape their fencing, and if that knowledge spread, it would basically render all farms using that fencing to keep sheep worthless. They apparently are very good at teaching fellow sheep things like that, and it was only a matter of time before the one or two that figured out how to escape taught the rest of the flock, and that flock would then teach neighboring flocks on neighboring farms and so on. It was cheaper to euthanize the flock than to have the entire country's farms re-fenced.

The entire mission is obviously an AI fake. As acclaimed physicist Joe Rogan explained, they crew would be dead once they'd hit the Van Allen Radiation Belt (tm)

That should've been obvious by the fake globe Earth image they reportedly sent back after launching.

The earth is flat. Not a globe. The fact they had to publish this image shows the whole thing is fake.

Where exactly does supporting 3 people on $133k/year count as 'upper middle class'? You could be doing a lot worse, and many are; but that's not just tons of money in a HCOL area; and that's also lower than twice the median salary for full time employees with bachelor's degrees; so you are calling either a single income household doing a bit better than median or a dual income one doing worse 'upper middle class'; which seems pretty ambitious.

It's hard to train a cow to keep its cellphone charged; so you can see why you need something to keep their tracking collars topped up.

Realistically, the status quo has arguably outrun the dystopia there. Your phone already does far more than anything you could get into the power envelope of a bracelet or embedded chip implant, and if for some reason you've raised enough eyebrows that you'd be hauled in for an RFID read DNA is a pretty indelible identifier.

It's not 100% ironclad; but penetration is broad enough that you've basically got the majority carrying highly fingerprintable RF beacons and the minority standing out for their relative radio silence and attempts to deal in cash. Expensive and uncomfortable ankle trackers are good business and feel nice and punitive, just to remind the wrong sort of people we aren't happy with them; but you don't really need to impose a surveillance society when it will build itself for you.

My (admittedly anecdotal from the totally unscientific sample of random stuff I've had reason to work on) impression is that some 'shared' BMC ports had oddities related to network controller sideband interface speeds, since NC-SI is what the BMC is depending on if the NIC is on someone else's PCIe root. It's not like the BMC actually needs a faster link for much(normal management traffic probably doesn't fill 10mb and mounting virtual media may be literally once-in-a-lifetime) so the actual speed of the NC-SI interface was not a burning priority; but it left things up to the NIC whether it would support remaining at gigabit speeds and just quietly slipping the trickle of shared traffic in(presumably slightly more complex; but seems to be what the newer ones do) or if it would knock the link rate down visibly to simplify the case.

You see little echoes of similar behavior elsewhere. The intel desktop and laptop NICs that support 'vPRO' will be GB or 2.5GB when the system is on; but quietly drop back to 10 or 10/100 when it is off and it's just the management engine listening. Some enterprise vendor USB docks do similar things; looks like a normal USB NIC when the OS is up; but drops to a lower speed and operates quietly over, I think, some sort of oddball vendor-defined messages if one of their systems is plugged in but off.