If you think the US is going to fail gracefully, I have a bridge to sell you.

Trump - and his successors - don't care if they're destroying the world as long as they personally feel they get some kind of immediate personal advantage every step of the way.

At some point, the US is going to exploit Amazon, Google, Meta, or Microsoft to cause another country economic pain... and the government won't care that doing so will mean everyone starts disconnecting from the US' newly displayed threat and ultimately hurt the US more than anybody else.

There's a reason Canada and multiple EU nations are seriously pursuing 'sovereign clouds'. They're anticipating an attack and trying to mitigate the risk.

There are also power limits on unlicensed frequencies. Would you like to guess what my experience has been working on police surveillance and whether they respect those limits or not?

Different country, same problem; cops often put themselves above the law.

Fark has no significant redeeming qualities, so I guess... OK, thanks for the update, dustbin of history is just on your left.

...the article shouldn't mention the woes of someone who worked for Meta.

When you work for a particularly evil company, you know what you're signing up for - screwing everyone over else for a buck. I'm not going to cry for you when you find out the company doesn't see a big difference between you and me.

I've worked on police systems that are connected to home alarms. The false alarms got problematic, so police agencies started a 'one false alarm, then you get billed' policy.

Very shortly thereafter, there were multiple vendors offering tracking and billing solutions that would integrate with police call taker / incident tracking systems.

It seems like this would work exceptionally well for robotaxies - give them an economic incentive to find a way to confirm someone is in actual distress prior to calling 911. Like maybe a remotely activated just-below-hearing-damage alarm in the car if you're not moving within 2 minutes of the car pulling up at your destination.

But then there's another fancy option - the car could drive towards the nearest hospital ER or EMS station during the 911 call, with the service's agent reporting location and redirecting or stopping the car if so instructed by the 911 operator.

Writes age it, so the best method is to write once, then plug it in for a while every few years to let it do whatever automatic maintenance can or must be done. And honestly, I'm not sure whether that's baked into the hardware or if you need some software process to check the thing. Not my area of expertise.

In theory you can throw one in a drawer and it'll be fine a decade later... but you can't trust that it will be.

Cool story bro time.

I developed finger-based calculation independently as a 10 year old. Freaked the teacher right out, she didn't understand what the hell I was doing.

Probably not as complex or effective (I have never heard of Chisanbop, but I assume it's well-developed), but my method definitely helped me rapidly finish math tests without the more traditional intermediary steps of pencil and paper or a calculator.

Please keep in mind that a flash drive is next to useless for long term storage. It will randomize over a surprisingly short time if it doesn't have power for data maintenance.

Your typical CD is better but still not good enough - under perfect conditions it will outlast you, but the way most people store them you might be really disappointed when you try to read it a decade from now. You're also going to run into the issue that even 20 years from now there may not be a consumer 'CD reader' available.

For music, your best bet remains a carefully stored vinyl collection. For now you should grab a USB vinyl ripper with a laser pickup and listen to your digital copies on whatever media you like, knowing that there will probably always be a traditional record player to fall back on if you look hard enough.

40% of Canada's land area is covered in forests. It is simply impossible to "manage" that much forest, and it's utterly fucking absurd to suggest otherwise. And to try to take climate change out of the equation is just a way of misdirecting away from the actual fucking cause; GHG emissions raising surface temperatures.

When will humans stop buying the most trivially fucking moronic red herrings? What a disreputable idiotic species.

>What's next, making them learn how an abacus works? Yeah, real good use of time there.

I shall don my fedora for a moment and say, 'ecktually...'

There's value in teaching kids how to use an abacus. I doubt anybody benefits much anymore from learning to use one like an expert, but for basic counting, place value, and addition / subtraction I'd consider it an excellent tool for starting kids down the road to mathematical literacy.

Manual transmissions in a world where we're heading to EVs? Not so much. The ability to drive stick is more a hobby thing, and soon a historical curiosity for niche enthusiasts.

It's almost as if allowing emissions to ramp up with little meaningful effort to control them is having the inevitable consequences predicted decades ago. But let's not deal with that, because it's hard. Instead let's have the President of the United States demand Canada hold back the tides.

My kid lost his Minecraft account due to 'suspicious account activity' that magically registered while converting his Mojang account to a Microsoft account as they were pressuring him to do.

'Customer service' was completely unhelpful and presumably the company knows you're not going to go to the bother of taking them to court over such a small amount of money.

So congratulations, Microsoft - I pirated the game because we owned it and you were denying access. You 'win'!

You can't stop the LLM if it's published... but you can sue the company that scraped data it was not legally entitled to scrape, and the legal sanctions should involve destruction of the collected archive of training data and all copies of the resulting LLM as well as a financial penalty that is sufficiently large to dissuade future repetitions of the offense.

"But that would harm our bottom line" is not an acceptable defense against this. Don't steal. It's easy.

Of course, stealing's easier if you're a megacorp who can buy politicians and pay settlements out of the corporate equivalent of pocket change.

This is exactly what companies like PwC come in and do. The AI just did it faster.

Bullshit. if they are that fucking good then they should also be able to patch it just as fast. Its a zero sum game. Fuck off with your bullshit too.