I have several computers in my office but the only one running windows is the one I use for video editing. Everything else runs Linux and has done for over 15 years.

The only reason my video editing rig still runs Windows is because it's just easier than battling a bunch of limitations tied to using Davinci Resolve under Linux. If BlackMagic Design could provide identical capabilities on Linux that Windows machine would be reformatted in the blink of an eye.

To be honest, I hate having to fire up the Windows machine because I'm constantly interrupted by all manner of ridiculous things I don't want or need and I'm constantly nagged to upgrade. If I step away for more than a few minutes I can sometimes come back to find that Windows has decided to download updates or do something else without being asked to do so. With Linux I am in *full* control of my computers -- with Windows, not so much.

Right now I'm considering altering my video editing workflow so that I can finally get rid of the evil that is Windows. Hopefully this will happen sooner rather than later.

Those who still use Windows for stuff like websurfing, word processing, spreadsheets and other day-to-day tasks are suffering a self-inflicted pain. Freedom and relief is just a download away. Do it!

I demand that UK MPs declare any interests they have in VPN companies. Perhaps the real agenda here is far more personal than we might think and maybe there's many a fortune being made within the halls of power as a result of this new legislation :-)

Yep, along with the slogan "Only terrorists and CSAM pervs use VPNs".

Sadly, the UK is just one of the first-world countries using "won't someone think of the children" as an excuse for usurping free access to the internet and freedom of speech. Australia's eSafety commissioner has already set the wheels in motion for very similar legislation there and even New Zealand is now seriously considering following along.

Nothing gets a government more excited than the prospect of suppressing dissent and opposition to their narratives. Censoring and restricting access to the internet is the ultimate tool for doing this. When the government gets to dictate what constitutes "harmful material" and has the ability to suppress that information we then live in a totalitarian state.

Only those with something to hide have anything to fear from freedom of information and freedom of speech. How strange therefore, that so many Western governments are now rushing to implement these restrictions on our freedoms and our privacy.

In the UK they've even set up a special police squad to monitor social media for anyone who might be challenging the government narrative and as we've already seen, they're prepared to let violent offenders out of prison early so as to make room for those who have said "hurty words" on the internet.

The world is going to hell in a handbasket and as an old hippy from the 1970s it appalls me that so many of those who will be so badly affected by this are simply doing nothing to push back. Perhaps governments are buoyed by the way so many so passively accepted the diktats of the pandemic and they've realized that the general population has no fight in them and are simply looking for more shorts on YouTube, more Reels on Facebook and some Marvell movies.

We deserve the government we get I suppose :-(

I've been creating YouTube videos since 2006 or so and I have a cupboard with about 20TB of archived video and project files on external USB hard drives -- most of that has been created since I switched to recording in 4K about four years ago. With the move to 6K or even 8K raw footage, 30TB is *not* a lot of storage -- although I would be nervous about committing so much data to a single drive in a non-enterprise environment. At the very least you'd want a redundant RAID setup which would mean buying multiple of these drives.

Since my storage requirements don't mandate "online" storage, just archival, I'll stick with cheap USB-connected hard drives in the meantime where any loss is limited to about 4TB maximum.

Tom's basically suggests that Brave is steering requests to one Ponzi scheme to a different Ponzi scheme site that pays them a share of the take. No honor among thieves.

YouTube's only concern these days is revenue and profit.

They breach their own community guidelines each and every day by running scam ads that continue to run despite hundreds or even thousand viewer-reports. Those ads run until the advertiser's spend is exhausted -- however if a creator (the life-blood of the platform) is falsely accused of "scams or deceptive practices" by YT's AI then they're gone in the blink of an eye.

They also allow AI spambots to post endless comments linking to porn pages/sites and claim that their AI can't automatically detect such things -- although that same AI, when unleashed on creator's videos, constantly demonetizes anything that is deemed to be unsuitable.

I hate the AI dross that is overwhelming YT as much as anyone but I really have doubts that YT intends to do anything effective to stem its flow. You see, so long as AI-generated videos are getting eyeballs on ads, YouTube will be happy because they'll be generating revenue and profits.

Let's face it, YouTube is actually *encouraging* the use of AI on its platform. AI suggests ideas for new videos and will create thumbnails for you. VEO3 will even create shorts or entire videos on demand. Google wants to sell its AI services and is pitching them at YouTube creators so they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot are they?

This is why I'm moving to self-hosting my own videos on an instance of PeerTube and I encourage other creators to do the same. When you self-host you have *FULL* control and you no longer have to worry about censorship or losing your entire community just because one of YT's AI bots has runamok and identifies your cute cat videos as CSAM.

And I have a 1994 Toyota pickup. There are literally millions of "old" Toyotas on the roads which will likely continue running for decades -- because they're so well designed and built. I'm 72 years old and mine will certainly outlive me.

Non paywalled version

Has AI already become sentient and perhaps simply hiding the fact for a very good reason?

Gemini says this is impossible... but then again, it would... Is AI lying to us?

They should have paid their TV license eh?

Hahah!

Do you know how many Saturn V rockets (you know, the one that was used to take men to the moon) failed in flight?

NONE

Not bad, considering there were 17 Apollo missions!

*Some* failures are inevitable -- but what happened to Elon's promises of Starship reaching Mars in 2020 and manned missions landing by 2024? Instead all we've got are fireworks and skies over the Bahamas that look just like the skies over Israel right now -- raining hot metal.

Remember... Elon claims to be an "engineer" and has told us that he knows more about manufacturing than anyone on the planet -- yet he's so far off with his promises and the capabilities of his products that he paints himself a fool with every utterance.

Yeah... using craft that *aren't* made out of stainless steel!

Yet, strangely enough, it worked *very* well for the Space Shuttle -- right? In fact, Space Shuttle Discovery flew almost 40 missions -- starship can barely manage one at the moment -- primarily due to structural issues.

Another problem with stainless steel is that it work-hardens *really* quickly when subjected to vibration and cyclic stress caused by physical or thermal forces. Once it hardens it then forms micro-cracks that ultimately result in structural failure. Rockets are very "vibratey" machines so this work-hardening is far more of an issue than any change in temper that might occur in aluminum as a result of thermal cycling.

As for cost... this is supposed to be a *reusable* spaceship right? The cost of its manufacture can be amortized over many, many uses. Others in the rocket industry are using more expensive materials and having great success -- so why is SpaceX cheaping out so badly with predictable results when, even if they used these more expensive alloys, the cost per flight and per Kg delivered would still be significantly lower than that competition?

Back in the 1960s, NASA got men to the moon by careful and clever engineering -- not just blowing a snotload of stuff up until they stumbled on something that worked. I suspect that if Mr Musk had been in charge of the Apollo program, we'd still be ducking bits of Saturn V boosters to this day and, at the very best, we might have dumped a lone banana on the lunar surface.

Starship is a bust for so many reasons but one of the primary reasons is that it's built of the wrong stuff -- stainless steel.

As a result of this poor material choice, Starship can't be built light enough to meet its original design objectives because stainless has inferior strength to weight ratio. This means the Starship is either going to be heavy or weak. If it's built weak then we see the type of fuel-line and tank leaks that have been so common because there is significant physical deformation occurring under load. If it's built heavy then the motors will have to be over-driven to get the necessary performance and that means poor reliability and vastly increased risk of catastrophic failure.

Another significant problem with stainless alloys is their COTE (coefficient of thermal expansion). Stainless expands far more than aluminum when heated and that means huge bending stresses are created during re-entry when one side of the craft gets a lot hotter than the other side (despite the thermal shielding). Think of a flying banana -- oh yes, that's right -- maybe that banana inside Starship was the engineers getting the final word -- despite Elon's insistence on stainless steel being used instead of more suitable materials.

Remember, the Space Shuttle (the world's most successful re-usable orbital spacecraft) was made largely of aluminum -- not stainless. Remember also that although stainless has a higher melting point than aluminum, it's not that much higher and still well below the temperatures encountered during orbital re-entry so SpaceX would be far better off focusing on a decent thermal barrier than trying to "brute force" their way through the heat of re-entry.

Nobody else in the rocket industry is using stainless steel and nobody else seems to be having the problems that SpaceX is having with the Starship. All of SpaceX's other craft are built with more conventional materials such as aluminum and composites -- they seem to fly just fine.

Unfortunately, Elon likes stainless "ooohh... shiny!" so I expect this is just another example (like the Cybertruck) where a non-engineer tells good engineers what to do and the outcome is a disaster.

Given the way that YT has "shaped" the content it hosts, by way of its community guidelines and how it considers certain types of software to be "harmful" content etc... the odds are that the output of any AI system trained on YT videos will not be totally balanced. How would it handle this prompt:

"Create a video of an anti-LGBTQ zealot installing ad-blocking software on their computer with a swastika on the wall behind them"

Sorry, I have no matching material in my training data