If you don't want AI, why would you but a GoogleBook?

That's not a flimsy excuse, it's a plausible one. But considering "Blackstone owned" I'm not sure that I believe it.

Also, even if it's true it's "more than they agreed to".

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

And then technology just froze. No sensor components got cheaper. Computer vision stopped, as a field. Multimodal AI didnâ(TM)t get invented. Robotic hand technology development stopped. Robotic planning and error recovery did not progress. Time just froze, after McDonalds ended its robotic program.

They actually said other tools are regularly used and have been known to find hundreds of issues. So, no, their awesome code is not the reason. Mythos just sucks at finding vulnerabilities.

Or maybe Mythos works and eliminated the the vulnerabilities that aren't. Just because a tool reports 100 errors and another tool reports 5 doesn't mean the latter tool sucks. It could be the latter tool filtered out the pointless issues and returned just the ones that were interesting.

Even cURL had the problem where they kept getting the same hundreds of AI slop bugs over and over again. I'm sure if they got 5 that could be followed up with it would help.

You might ask Firefox. They've reported a few. I think most companies aren't reporting them...which is what should be expected.

If I had known it wasn't checked, I absolutely would have lied.

Yes, it's something of a really bad secret in Canada. In the US, they did check - usually just making sure you used a .edu address and sending them a copy of your student ID.

In Canada, they couldn't do any of that (privacy laws prevent the school from disclosing your student status, and there's no .edu in Canada, so many schools just use a regular .ca ccTLD or a regular TLD).

So you literally can lie - I've done it a few times after I graduated to get cheaper Apple products - they "asked" your school and student ID number, but you could enter in anything as it wasn't checked (like I said, they couldn't verify).

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

I like their products. I just want printing without fuss and without having to learn every detail about leveling, etc. Their product works for me and I do not care about its openness, it is about as important for what I need it as my headphones being open sourced (not at all). So this product is for my use case, not for people who want to control every aspect of their printer and every software feature.

IF they decide to make it prohibitively expensive to operate their hardware, then I will go back to a less capable hardware kit.

The openness isn't the thing, though it's important. The thing is you're reliant on Bambu Labs to keep your printer working. They could easily decide tomorrow that their cloud slicer will no longer support your printer. And now you're left with a worthless hunk of junk - the software still works, but the cloud software stops supporting your hardware.

Or perhaps your internet goes out - and now you can't print. Again, you're dependent on cloud services.

The whole point was that it works locally without needing an internet connection which is how it did with OrcaSlicer-bambu.

Because right now your 3D printer is basically like all the other app-driven pieces of hardware out there you can get - vulnerable to the app breaking or the vendor no longer wanting to support your printer and wanting to encourage you to buy their newest latest and greatest generation of printers.

They could also close up shop tomorrow, and boom, all printers disabled. Go buy a new printer from someone else.

None of that has anything to do with open-source or freedom. That part comes later, where maybe the slicer can work in a different way to produce better prints, but you're stuck with their software that doesn't do that. Maybe they'll offer a subscription that lets you enable new functionality.

This is further proof that plants are sentient beings with feeling. You vegetarians ought to be ashamed of yourselves!

Time to start eating trees. Most of a tree is dead - it's just the stuff under the bark and the leaves that are still actually living. The rest of the tree is dead cells.

Insider information or insider power. Both work just as well.

Insider information is when you exploit information that isn't public. Insider power is when you influence the outcome to your favor.

Many early sports bets used insider power - the player would get a cut of the profits if they tilted the game like faking an injury.

Anyways, news like this is good. If people know these markets are rigged against them, they'd likely avoid using these platforms. It's why regulations exist - the SEC doesn't go after insider trading because it wants a fair market, it does it because a fair market means more people will participate.

Most posters seem to be assuming it's a scam. I can't possibly think of a reason why they might think that. (A few million, yes, but getting it down to one is hard.)

However, that's almost by the by. It's rated for 5G. 5G is old. 6G is the new standard and WiFi 6 has been around for a while now. If you're actually serious about designing a new phone from scratch, and have not yet released it, you'd almost certainly want it to be 6G-capable. Nobody in their right minds designs for yesterday's standards, when they're going to be competing with tomorrow's products.

This, to me, is far far more important than whether or not it is real. If you're designing a product for a market that's on its way out, you've got a serious problem. If you're clamouring for a product that's designed for a standard that could be phased out by the time you see it, then you're not thinking straight.

Why does this matter, if the product isn't real anyway? First, we don't know it's not real, we shouldn't assume that. But, second, it means that nobody thought it was worth bothering with taking the potential customers seriously. The customers are merely meat with cash. That's not an attitude I can respect. Whichever vendor is making these phones is worthy only of my utmost contempt.

Of those, Google will be the hardest to replace. At least without exerting eminent domain over patents.

What's sad is that it has taken so long to reach that decision. I thought it was clear they needed to do this back before 2000. (I'm not exactly sure how long, but plausibly while I was in high school.)

It is insane that the EU hasn't done more to create local tech companies to reduce their reliance on the US. They need their own version of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (among others), just like China does. It's fine to leverage allies for certain parts of your economy, but the tech sector is right up their with military when it comes to industries where the EU shouldn't be depending on external allies so strongly. It's not like the EU has the same religious devotion to free markets that the US has which would make them hesitant to prop up their local tech companies for 10+ years until they could survive on their own.

I found an EU report from 2025 that suggested it would take $5 trillion to do this, which would be about 5% of the government revenue of all EU countries combined if done over a decade. Just like efforts to become less reliant on the US military complex, the EU should really get started.

It's still illegal. Enforcement, however, has always been a problem.