They are probably thinking that they want to be like the computer on the Starship Enterprise. A kind of ambient AI device that you can have a natural conversation with anywhere, anytime.

That was Google's original goal too.

Funny how it apparently takes a communist to balance the budget, while still delivering on the socialist policies he promised.

EVs are at least manageable, since most people don't need to charge at a specific time. In the UK we have a system where you get a discount if you let the electricity supplier decide when charging happens. You tell them how much charge you need and by what time.

Most of the world doesn't have DST. It's really just Europe and the US. Somehow they manage.

To be honest I'm not sure there is a really good solution to this. It's very difficult to implement a backup system where you can rebuild a corporate network and devices quickly and without significant data loss. Getting as close as possible is expensive too.

I don't want to diminish the accomplishment; that seems like a very cool dataset and probably one that was really fiddly to pull together; but, if you are talking single-neuron resolution; I am curious about whether you can still call an individual sample "the human brainstem" rather than "a human brainstem" and what comparative purposes you can use it for without running into trouble with cases where there are multiple ways for a brainstem to be adequately healthy, so long as certain requirements are met, so you'll need considerably more samples to draw useful inferences about exactly what the problem abnormality is.

Same sort of thing as when "sequencing the human genome" was a big project. Obviously a major exercise in gene sequencing and a basis for situating subsequent sequencing operations; but once you start talking detail there isn't 'the human genome'; literally everyone has one; and it turns out that different differences matter or don't at radically different levels.

Presumably the methods used to do it once will be helpful in doing it more often in the future; but I'll be curious what we discover about the balance of 'normalcy' vs. some relatively subtle and confusing combination of surprisingly variable ways to have a brainstem that seems to work just fine along with surprisingly subtle, no ghastly big lesions, ways to have one that ends up being totally dodgy.

I find "NOTE: Experiences vary by region." to be a bad sign for something that would be so trivial for MS to alter the behavior of; and where they are obviously not earnestly making improvements that were previously impossible but grudgingly rolling back bullshit they thought they could get away with.

Probably means good news for users in the EU; same way they get left out of some of the most egregiously bullshit 'AI' stuff; may help EDU and enterprise; but I'm guessing that it's no promises for less favored users.

I find that Anubis is a lot, lot less of a pain in the arse than Cloudflare's captchas. Usually I said right through Anubis in a second or two. Cloudflare usually requires at least a click, and often a stupid game.

Two reasons it's allowed.

1. The iPhone sells well.

2. Android lets you replace most of the OS, including core parts like Google Play Services.

There is definitely a case for requiring better interoperability where people do things like replace Play Services and then find that their banking app won't open because there is no way to tell it that the device is secure, but it's mostly enough to ward off Microsoft style anti-trust issues.

Sucks for people with accessibility issues though. Moving the mouse in a straight line, say because they have a joystick or their eye tracking software interpolates, is going to get them blocked or forced to do a long captcha challenge that isn't very accessible either.

The games industry is dealing with a saturation problem. There are so many games, especially from indie developers, because the tools have lowered the barriers to entry so much.

Most of those games barely get noticed because there are dozens more being released every day.

It will happen to TV and movies too. I've already seen AI generated TV shows gaining traction on TikTok. People pooh-pooh it as slop, and it is, but like indie games that rely on a lot of off-the-shelf assets what matters is that people watch/play them.

Eh, HDD failure and ransomware are not the same things. If you have two HDDs in a mirror configuration, and one of them dies, you lose nothing. If you get ransomware, both are encrypted.

If one machine suffers an SSD failure, you lose one machine and inconvenience one user. If your network is hit with ransomware, potentially it spreads to every machine and through file servers, affects all users.

Obviously you should have a 321 backup system, but management tends to resist anything too robust. And even with that, there are the competing needs of getting machines back up and running, forensics to figure out what happened and stop the same thing happening again, and the insurance company audit to see if they feel like paying out or not.

6 weeks of shutdown for a manufacturing company is not something that is easily survivable. Customers will be looking for alternative suppliers, and many won't switch back. Contracts may have delay and non-fulfilment clauses. Few places are going to have 6 weeks of stock to cover such an event.

What seems unforgivable is that it took 6 weeks to fix.

Aren't the ISPs motivated to fix their shit anyway? If their customers become part of a botnet, there is a good chance that their network will get blacklisted.

Microsoft is panicking because Linux market share is increasing rapidly. Now that you can play a lot of games on Linux, AI bypasses the toxic community, and a lot of major media outlets are promoting switching to Linux as a way to de-shittify your computer, they need to take action or lose their dominant position.

Worse case scenario would be that people start buying computers with Linux pre-installed in large numbers, and their bread-and-butter OEM Windows licence revenue starts to decline. AI taking all the RAM and SSDs isn't helping sales of new computers either.

So I think they are at least somewhat sincere about making Windows less of a pain in the arse. Microsoft tends to go in cycles. Enshittify, fix it, enshittify, fix it... Windows 7 was decent, 8 was a disaster, 10 was decent, 11 is a disaster... Hopefully they fix 11, and we don't have to switch to 12.