Well, she did admit she'd made a stupid mistake. Not just a mistake, but a silly one. (Her guess was that the large amount of stuff in her email caused the system to need to compact memory, which caused it to lose her final instructions.)

Well, I don't believe that enslaving corporations is illegal. A bit of a dubious practice if you want to get continued corporate investment, however.

Now the employees of the corporation, that would be a different matter.

If you voted for Trump twice, I won't trust a single claim you make. And if you *claim* to have voted for Trump twice, I'll assume, until there is proof otherwise, that you are some kind of sociopath as well as a liar and untrustworthy.

Check out "Wigner's friend".

Observation requires "making a measurement". You can't observe something without measuring it.

OTOH, "making a measurement" doesn't require that YOU interact with the measurement...so the state doesn't have to collapse, just to get spread out. (Every interaction is "making a measurement", even if it's only an electron interacting with a proton, and you never look.) But the state doesn't collapse until YOU joint the interaction, and become yourself entangled.

At the macro level there's so much entangled that the state is very spread out. It's like tunneling. Heavy particles are much less willing to tunnel than lighter particles, because they are less spread out, i.e. the probability of where they are is more definite. Once you get to the size of a spec of dust, it's almost impossible to keep the state pure. (They've done it to crystals in labs, but it wasn't easy.)

You forgot to mention random ficticous meeting cancellations.

This has been happening on the Outlook via Web interface for a long time. Total PIA, it is.

Actually, cursor and mouse handling by that web app is a god-awful mess.

Well, no. It's true you can't buy books for the purposes of scanning them *and then making them available online* (Hachette v. Internet Archive). Scanning them for AI training is not settled law in every Federal District, although in at least one that has been ruled transformative and therefore allowable (Bartz v Anthropic, Northern District of California).

Anthropic famously bought a lot of copyrighted books and scanned them to ingest into its model training corpus. Arguably they aren't violating copyright because what they are doing is *transformative* -- turning words into a statistical map of word associations.

But what China is doing by inferring the structure of that map doesn't touch on *any* kind of intellectual property of Anthropics. Sure, the map is a trade secret, but they've exposed that trade secret through their public interface. It's not human created so it's not copyrightable. Even if that map were patentable, which it probably isn't, it's not patented.

The worst you can say is that China is violating the service's terms of service, which may have no legal force there.

As a lifelong cyclist, I agree in principle. The problem is over the last seventy-five years we have rearchitected the very geographic fabric of society to make *solving* our transportation problems with bike and public transit impossible.

Before WW2, Dad would leave the apartment and walk or take a trolley to work (usually in the same city neighborhood) while Ma "kept house" -- managed cooking, clearning, childcare, and the family's community and social engagement. In the 1950s and 60s, instead of an apartment, it'd be a suburban house. Ma would drop Pa off at the kiss and ride.

Today Mom and Dad both have jobs they have to get to, usually in *different* suburban employment areas; they can locate to make the commute easy for one, but they keep changing jobs every couple of years while their long-term wealth is being put into a geographically fixed asset: their house. They are financially anchored to their house as their jobs move around the region.

Car-dependency is baked into the very fabric of society, in a way you can't fix with transportation policy or projects--not without decades of projects. But we have reached the limits of the car-dependency model; we can't fix traffic by adding marginal car capacity as has been repeatedly demonstrated by freeway projects that fail to fix traffic because we're in an equillibrium between commute times and job selection.

Transit and bike infrastructure won't fix this, but they *can* make marginal improvements in the traffic situation by taking cars off the road for the minority of people who can use these alternatives at this particular point in their lives. I think e-bikes are going to be key. I personally wouldn't consider a ten mile commute by bike on roads shared with cars a barrier to commuting by bike, but most people wouldn't attempt it. E-bikes on bike infrastructure can make a ten mile commute practical for *normal* people, and take a significant number of cars off congested roads. Public transit could help, but again in a marginal, opportunistic way. In Europe or the US Northeast where car-dependency was overlaid on existing dense urban fabrics, there's a lot of opportunity for major transit projects. But for American cities in the West which have *no* center of mass to build around, solving car-dependency is likely a Moon-shot level project.

My desktop has 64 GB of DDR5 RAM.

When I hit the power button, some motherboard lights and the fans turn on. And then nothing.

It takes a good minute for the RAM test to run. Nothing displays on the screen until it finishes. And that's the fast test. If the computer was unplugged before turning it on, it does a longer RAM test.

It takes long enough that I legit thought my parts were defective when I first built the PC. I tried turning it off and on and checking components a bunch of times. Finally I gave up and assumed something was defective. Left it alone and started talking to my friend about what to do. We were shocked when it finally booted as we were talking.

So yeah, modern DDR5 based PCs take long enough to boot that a lot of people will assume it's broken before anything shows up on screen.

"Burden Foreign Countries with Slop"