My wife recently bought a new laptop and, to both of our surprise, it was configured out of the box to save data to OneDrive instead of C:. She's not particularly tech savvy and one day Chrome complained that storage was full. She did a web search of the error and it recommended deleting data from OneDrive, which she did, assuming that her family pictures were only backed up there - not primarily stored there - and ended up losing important data as a result of this.

Thankfully it must have been that particular OEM that chose to do this. I had installed "vanilla" Windows 11 on a custom PC build and that didn't happen - and we just bought a new laptop for our new business, different brand, and that was the first setting I checked (not an issue).

Still... companies pushing this type of crap on users is just batshit. Offer as an option, sure. But fundamentally re-configuring core functionality that people who have been using the OS for decades take for granted is just madness.

This is retarded.

1. It isn't for profit healthcare that is the problem, it's THIRD PARTY PAY.
2. I don't use third party pay, ever, for healthcare. I've been insured nonstop for over 30 years, and NEVER ONCE has my insurer paid my doctor.
3. Even when I've had emergencies, I still called around, negotiated a fair cash up front rate, paid cash up front, and billed it to my insurer. My cash up front rate was sometimes below any co-pay negotiated with my insurer, lol.

I just recently had some elective surgery that would have cost me about $2000 on my annual deductible, but I was able to cash pay a negotiated rate of $400 including a follow-up "free". I submitted the $400 to my insurer and they reimbursed me.

Third party insurance exists because YOU VOTERS demanded the HMO Act of the 1970s, which tied health care to employment, and then employers outsourced it to third parties.

Health care is remarkably cheap in the US (cash pay, negotiated) and I don't have to wait months to see a doctor when I call and say I am cash pay. They bump me up fast.

If I knew that, I'd be a tech billionaire inventing them.

The best part of innovations is that they are NOT obvious, but once they are in the world, you can't do without.

Quite so. It's been how many years since something really new came out of Cupertino? Granted, Apple is more profitable than ever, but the company clearly shows what the result of placing a supply-chain expert as the CEO does.

The really sad part is that there's nobody ELSE, either. Microsoft hasn't invented anything ever, Facebook and Google are busy selling our personal data to advertisers, and who else is there who can risk a billion on an innovation that may or may not work out?

That's wrong. I stopped using wrist watches 25 years ago and haven't looked back a single day. I don't want shit on my wrist. Try living without for a year and you'll realize why. It's hard to express in words. It's like having a chain removed.

Headphones, on the other hand, I use occasionally. For phone calls or for music on the train, plane, etc. - and especially for the plane if the noise cancellation comes close to my current over-the-ear Bose I'd take them on the two-day business trips where I travel with hand luggage only and space is a premium.

Do I want a heartbeat sensor? No idea. I don't care. But if there's any use for it than at least for me that's not a replication. I'm pretty sure many, many Apple users don't have a smart watch.

So he claims that social media - the platform where everyone pretends to be more happy, more active, better looking, more interesting, more travelled, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, - feels "fake" ?

Man.

Next he's going to say that artificial sweeteners taste might not be natural.

Seriously, though, social media has been the domain of bots for at least a decade. Even people who actually write their posts themselves use bots to cross-post to all the different platforms and at "optimal" times. Nothing on social media is not fake. Well, maybe your grandmother's photo album because she doesn't know Photoshop exists.

Do you want to bet on the percentage of Fortune 500 companies that use amateur-level procedures for their prod systems?

"Above 50%" seems like a guaranteed win to me.
"Above 75%" is where I start to think "maybe not that high". But I fear I'm giving them too much credit.

It is impossible to do now that half of what we have always considered clear indicators of a scam or phishing attempt are actually being done by actual companies.

But the "m" in npm always stood for "malware", did it not?

The npm ecosystem is deeply flawed. Look at some of the affected repositories. Many of them are just a few lines of code, yet over a hundred other packages depend on them. At least half of them have no reason to even exist. A lot of them have last been updated years ago.

We have an ecosystem where seemingly every individual function has its own package. That is just ridiculous. It is modularization driven to its absurd extreme. It's why you add one package to your project and it pulls in a hundred dependencies.

And the more tiny packages there are, the larger the attack surface and the smaller the amount that can be monitored for malware injection and other problems. I wouldn't at all be surprised if one or more of these packages will never be updated and have the malware in them forever simply because the only dev with the password to the repo has since died or gone to do other things with his life.

The world we've built is built for our shape -- bipedal, upright. While specialist shapes can be useful in limited circumstances, a bipedal human-shaped robot would be adaptable to the world that already exists.

There's your prob.

Mark of Meta doesn't "submit complaints". One of his aides calls the office directly and orders them to take the page down and make sure it stays down.

It's a completely different channel.

War is the failure of politics, not the continuation.

We have all but removed them already. In many kills these days, a human presses a button and that's about it.

But yes, removing them entirely removes that last bit of accountability. Next time a drone slaughters a market place full of civilians with no terrorist anywhere in sight, we won't even have someone to put on trial.

Well, we can try with the LLM making the decision. I'm sure it'll apologize a lot and invent a number of threats to justify its actions, if current AI is any indication.

No it's not "obvious." My wife and I own 3 properties. One is commercial, the other two are residential. That might paint us as extremely wealthy but neither property is huge. We're fairly middle class. We use both residential properties interchangeably because they're not huge houses and we like our space. We could sell both and move into a single dwelling but we like things the way they are. Especially now that our daughters are adults in their twenties, who still live at home for the time being, but have their friends & significant others stay over quite a bit. I'm too much of an autistic introvert to live with that many other people in the same house 24/7 even if the house were a mansion.

The only reason I pay for the highest tier Netflix account is because of the number of devices allowed. Basically for my wife and daughters. I almost never watch it myself. Every time I open it up I feel like I spend more time scrolling to try and find something to watch than actually watching content. So if Netflix comes after us for "account sharing" I'm cancelling our subscription immediately without thinking twice about it. We're a single family, we just occupy multiple locations most of the time.

And our case is a bit more complicated than people who are talking about paying for a family account that includes kids who are away at school or camp or what-have-you. Or families who travel a lot. My wife and I are magicians (our commercial property is a small theatre and magic shop). This gets me thinking about families that travel for work. Army families or entertainers. Imagine being a Cirque Du Soleil performer - many of whom have kids ... they live on the road most days of the year.

The point is that there is no one-sized-fits-all "family" and it's more common for a nuclear family to occupy multiple locations than many would think.

Why are we applauding this?

We've taught machines how to kill us. Doesn't matter which side did it first, there is no way this has a good ending. No, not because of machine overlords and AI uprising - because it removes accountability and the last remnants of warfare that's not utterly "kill anything that moves".