At the rate the shutdown is going, perhaps we should take a cue from the billionaires and just stop paying.

So those funny things that look like desktop machines are not? and there's no LDAP or domain controllers involved?

That's funny because the places I'm familiar with have desktop machines, domain controllers, often a NAS or two, and a router with a firewall.

Cloud servers may have more than one user running things on the same CPU. God only knows who the other users actually are. In a corporate environment, everyone running jobs on the server works for the company. It doesn't reduce the risks to zero, but it does reduce them a lot.

Actually, the cloud remains more expensive and less secure. Remember all that meltdown, spectre, row hammering, etc? All largely irrelevant to people who use their own servers in their own environment.

You still need an ISP with the cloud. Somehow, you have to be able to launch and monitor, do updates, etc. Smoke signals won't work for that application. You still need IT guys for the office LAN, server admins for your office infrastructure, etc.

If you decide to go with anything but very vanilla virtual hosting, you still need developers to run on the 'upgrade' treadmill as cloud providers update and EOL things nearly as quickly as fashion designers.

If you go with the vanilla virtual hosts, you need pretty much the same people you need for self hosting only they can't touch the physical hardware and just have to sit nervously twiddling their thumbs when things go down.

VMWare is not the best choice these days since the licensing IS a ripoff.

Swapping a failing disk is easier than it ever has been before.

But you can "Rent to own, Right on the phone!". Well, minus the "to own" part, that is.

How is it that so many fall for a deal WORSE than what most people knew was a deal for suckers in the '80s.

Won't happen, at least not with my books.

There is a reason writing the last one took two years. Many of its passages have very carefully considered wordings. Intentional ambiguities. Alliterations. Words chosen because the other term for the same thing is too similar to another thing that occurs in the same paragraph. Names picked with intention, by the sound of them (harsher or softer, for example).

I've used AI extensively in many fields. Including translations. It's pretty good for normal texts like newspaper articles or Wikipedia or something. But for a book, where the emotional impact of things matter, where you can't just substitute one words for a synonym and get the same effect - no, I don't think so.

This is one area where even I with a general positive attitude to AI want a human translator with whom I can discuss these things and where I can get a feeling of "did she understand this part of the book and why it's described this way?".

Steam does a great job of managing installation and syncing across devices.

As a user it makes the game experience so much nicer than selling me a download of a game.

I've never had issues getting games from steam to run (assuming my computer was capable), even old ones. For most games my saves exist across all my devices, and I can easily uninstall a game for space and install it again later.

Steam also provides a forum for discussion with other users, guides, and game news.

It's significantly more than a store front and your new store of curated games would be a hard sell for me vs just following a few reviewers.

Steam also has the advantage of big data to give me recommendations.

I'm all for curated stores in general (and use them even), but Steam offers more than just a store front, it'd be hard to break into.

I'm lazy too, steam already has all my games, I don't want a second launcher to browse and run my games from.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed that over time Amazon's search feature has enshitified. If that's the correct verb. It used to be fairly good. These days, nah, unless I'm looking for a book or other product from Amazon directly, as a search for the marketplace it's crap.

And since it used to be better, something must be responsible for that. Greed, most likely.

Not 99% but definitely some of the most useful ones. And yes, stack traces are one of the things that only Linux users send you without an explicit request.

And the advantage of debugging a (this specific exception) error in (this specific file) on (that specific line) over a "hey, the game crashed when I jumped out of the car" bug report cannot be overstated.

I assume they mean a 10x jump is outpacing Moore's law.

I would bet though that it'll take long enough to commercialize that it will fall right in place with Moore's law.

but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

My prediction, raising prices even to break even will cause "interest" in AI to plummet.

That's the first thing I thought of, but I think the approach is different. Fabrice Bellard created an x86 emulator in javascript, and ran linux on it (later risc64). Joel Severin complied the linux kernel directly to javascript. If you look at the web page, he describes some previous attempts and how his more direct approach was inspired by them, and some of the limitations (scheduling is offloaded to your host OS, because with the web assembly build, every task in the js linux is a web worker, which because a thread in the webassembly implementation, which your OS decides how to handle.

Basically, it does appear to be novel, and it's pretty cool.

You have an illusion of your consciousness driving your actions, as opposed to the reality of consciousness being a summary of all the decisions you have already made and can no longer change.

Free will is a remarkably easy illusion to break. Here we go, I'm going to do it for you: name your three favorite actors, in order. Do it before you read the rest of this comment.

Did you do it? Was that a conscious decision? Did you weigh pros and cons between different actors to pick your best and rank them? Felt like you did, huh? Like you consciously picked something between those that were available. Was Vincent D'Onofrio one of them? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Clark Gable? Bryan Cranston? Oh, did you miss one of those? Did you miss actors you actually *know* existed, but you never considered consciously for your top pick? Oh my god, did your brain come up with a list of actors for you without ANY conscious input for you to "choose" from, even though you didn't get to choose that list?

There are several studies where we can determine what choice subjects will make before they're conscious of making the choice (picking between picture A or B) for instance. There are also studies where the corpus callossum has been cut as a treatment for people having uncontrollable seizures, and now their two brain hemispheres don't communicate. So the subject can be given a card that says, "go get a cup of water" which they read with one eye. And after they get up, they are asked the question, "why did you get up?" and they answer, "because I was thirsty". Because the brain hemisphere that didn't get the message that was read had to come up with a justification for the conscious mind for why they're going to get water.

This isn't up to debate. You can believe whatever you want. Or rather, you can believe whatever your hardware has decided for you that you're allowed to.

Yay for your anecdotal evidence. Here's mine: I drove cars made in the 80s and 90s, when they had to live in the repair shop. But I haven't had any problems with my cars in 20 years. The only times I've upgraded was because I wanted new features, and after an accident. Which I got to walk away from, because they're also safer. If I had been in a 90s car, I'd have been dead.

Now for the non-anecdotal data. Cost of car maintenance has fallen, which is making public transport less competitve. And in the US, average length of car ownership is at an all-time high, partly because keeping a car for longer is lower risk than it used to be.