Appropriateness of the response to the emergency is part of the legal considerations. Congress granted the power for a reason. Taking that and assuming it means arbitrary power is not operating within the law, not for Trump, not for Biden.

In what way? Please correct me.

Bah. If a human driver increased their safety and reliability by avoiding certain situations, would you call them a worse driver for it?

They provide full access to the regulators, and they've allowed academic researchers full access. Putting it all online would be more transparent, but they're a business and they have up and coming competitors.

Do you honestly believe that mass debt forgiveness -- after COVID was already over! -- was a necessary emergency response to the pandemic? Suspending payments (and interest) during the pandemic made perfect sense, and that was not struck down. I don't recall that it was even challenged.

No, the debt forgiveness clearly had nothing to do with the (already-ended) emergency, it was just an attempt to skirt the law, and the courts were quite correct to strike it down as executive overreach. If Biden wanted to do that, he should have lobbied Congress to change the law. He didn't do that, of course, because he knew Congress would refuse -- even though his party held both houses.

Your comment mischaracterizes what has happened. The Supreme Court has absolutely bent over backwards to let Trump do what he wants in temporary rulings, including jumping in to to stay lower-court orders that no previous court would even have responded to. But their on-the-merits rulings, when they have to issue a full opinion, have been much less friendly to Trump. There have been some incredibly bad ones (e.g. immunity) but Trump has lost more than he has won in SCOTUS final judgements.

Theres a bit of a magic trick with a lot of it.

These things are *realy* good at drudge work. Shitty reactjs sites. wordpress themes. The kind of stuff you give to the fresh recruit from university, whos still got enough vigor in him to tolerate working on mind numbing web shit all day. But you give it a hard problem, race conditions in a multithreaded code, cache chaos, or worse mashing it all together and debugging memory leaks in a cached multithreaded system across multiple language translation layers in a system designed by insane architecture astronauts on meth, and they fall to pieces. I mean, its impressive, but its not going to be replacing senior devs anytime soon.

Probably one of the most brilliant people of the century who we lost due to bigotry.

Sadly, one of so many. Recently found out my best friend in highschool had suicided likely because he had been outed as gay. All I can think of is he should have told me, I'd have supported him, he's hadly the only gay friend I ever had. And in retrospect it should have been bleedingly obvious, the man would practically run from any woman who showed him affection, and he was pretty dandy. Singing in a hair metal band and being kinda..... camp with all the frizzed hair and leather tassles and shit. Think motley crue or poison or whatever. But it was the 1980s and people where pretty brutal to young gay people back then.

Even if I go back to the 1990s and boxed retail software, you were never actually buying the software, your purchase was for the license to use it.
The real issue here is the gamers being sold software whose functionality is tied to third-party servers and denied first sale doctrine (the ability to transfer/resell their license if they want to someone else).

Thats always been a gross simplification of the rights generally involved with a software sale. While yes, technically its a license to use software, rather than the software itself, license sales have always had a series of expectations associated with them in law, common law and in user expectations. And those expectations matter in a courtroom.

Most of the world consumer law is very clear that if you give a license to use something, and its sold as "buy" rather than "rent" or "time limited" , its not revokable and its subject to the same sort of consumer protection laws buying a toaster or a car has. Most importantly that it remains fit for purpose for the natural lifetime of the product, and that term "lifetime" is absolutely not "until we tire of letting you use that thing you paid for" but rather "How long would a reasonable consumer believe they can use this before its basically bitrot". To simplify that, assume it means "as long as the physical software is capable of running without a rewrite" and NOT "until we send the kill-command to the DRM".

The tension here is that software is attempting to move to a service model whilst trying to retain the language of a product model. You dont purchase a pool cleaning man, you hire a pool cleaning man. Well, unless your in a southern state during a terrible time in history, I suppose.

And thats where cases like this the complainant stands a good chance of winning. Because if California law has strong protections (A lot of america *doesnt* , but europe* and australia but apparently not canada for reasons that are mystifying to me, have strong protections) then if it can be shown that at the point of purchase it was not made clear that this product was time limited or was going to be made unavailable to people who purchased it, then the complainants have a strong case for deceptive advertising.

* I am aware europe just voted down a 'stop killing games' law. I am surprised by that, because honestly, it should have been the default anyway. I smell the acrid stench of industry lobbyists foul deeds

You're treating the current law as a standard handed down from on high, incontrovertible and guaranteed-correct, which must be applied verbatim. And, indeed, laws must be applied as written... but that doesn't mean the laws are perfect forever. Laws are written within a context, and when the context changes, the laws have to change.

In a world where all cars are driven by humans, if you want to protect highway workers one way to do it is to attach serious prison time to killing one and to publicize that fact loudly so that all of the drivers know that they should be especially cautious around highway workers, even more than they would around other sorts of pedestrians (let's put aside the moral debate about whether we actually should protect highway workers more than other pedestrians).

In a world where some cars are driven by software systems, that strategy doesn't really work -- as your question correctly points out -- but the right conclusion isn't "Therefore self-driving cars shouldn't be allowed", or "Therefore we must identify some scapegoat human at the company to put in prison". The right conclusion is "Therefore we need a different kind of regulation to keep highway workers safe from self-driving cars". What should that be? I can think of lots of possibilities, both pro-active (e.g. require self-driving vehicles to demonstrate in rigorous testing that their vehicles stay far from highway workers, with whatever minimum distance you want to specify) and reactive (severe penalties, up to heavy fines and/or immediate loss of permission to operate). The point is that the law should choose an approach that works with the new context.

And? They still drive 10% better than the average driver. And I realize that number is just an example, not intended to be accurate, but I still feel like I should point out that, statistically, it's too low.

The fact that the self-driving cars will all concentrate their worst behaviors in the same regions of the space of all driving conditions doesn't change the fact that, on average, they're quite a bit safer than human drivers. This wouldn't be true if the roads somehow changed so that the problematic-for-self-driving scenarios predominated, but they don't.

So you consider most human drivers too dangerous to be on public roads.

You're taking a binary position (too dangerous to be on public roads), so you should expect people to evaluate your position in a binary way. Your other position, trying to position Waymo safety within the wide continuum of driver safety, is more nuanced.

My position is that if they're statistically safer than average human drivers, which makes them far safer than the worst human drivers on the road, then replacing human-driven cars with self-driving cars makes the roads safer. This is straightforwardly obvious. It doesn't mean the companies shouldn't be held accountable for their failures, and certainly doesn't mean that we shouldn't expect them to to continue working on improvements.

This might work when there is a simple, easy search that can verify a fact. But that's often not the case. In my experience most cases of hallucination are cases where the LLM needs a fact mid-response, and the fact check requires both a non-trivial query and complex evaluation of the response data, sometimes involving judgement calls. When that happens, the LLM just gets lazy and goes with its guess rather than doing the check.

I'm speaking in the context of advanced models, mind, not the kind of thing that was available in 2022, nor the kind of thing that is available in Google search's limited-capability model, or open source models. Those are far more prone to hallucination. I won't say that, say, Claude Opus never hallucinates, because it does... but the hallucinations are common only when the models is being pushed hard, operating near the limits of its capacity, which makes it prone to taking shortcuts.

Well, I think Trump would be immediately stopped by the courts, too. Probably faster than they stopped Biden, since they've very reasonably gotten intensely skeptical of almost everything this administration does.

Partisanship aside, presidents really should obey the law. If the law is bad, the solution is to change it, not to break it. Yes, that means we need a functioning Congress, something we haven't had for quite some time, but that's still no reason to break the law.

Indeed, truth and accuracy is important to me, and I think it should be important to everyone. It baffles me that so many people don't seem to care about whether what they believe or say is true. I recognize that those people who care are often in the minority, but that just makes it harder to understand, not easier.

Either that or it's a persistent urban legend.

Is that true? I can't find any reference to it, and it seems like the kind of thing that would be documented, if only to make fun of it.

And because they knew the product was going to die anyway. Open source alternatives have caught up and there's nothing to keep customers from switching.

This isn't a justification, but it's an explanation. If they thought VMWare would be a long-term cash cow, they would keep it going. They know that won't happen, so they've opted to squeeze as much cash from it as possible, as quickly as possible. They recognize that will accelerate its demise, but apparently believe it will make them more money, since they won't have to invest anything in maintaining or marketing it.

I'm surprised they aren't more worried about legal action, though. It seems like it would be safer to continue complying with the contracts, perhaps with far inferior (and far cheaper) support quality until those ended. As for the perpetual licenses, it would seem safest to just shrug and say "Yeah, you can keep using it, and we'll keep giving you every update we release", while cutting the engineering team down to nothing. The aggressive approach they're taking seems likely to net them some ugly fines after some uglier legal fees.