Holy shit what a bunch of assholes criminals.

Or was this a Linux promotion stunt?

The world is a gruesome place. No: America is a gruesome place.

A lot of places are not like this. However, that means they are "socialist" and America is terrified of anywhere that does not treat poor people like shit!

With their COVID vaccine, the first time was the highest dose they knew would have only acceptable side effects, and they reduced it for the next iteration when they saw how effective it was. (If you remember the myocarditis rare side effect, that was only seen with the first version.) I would guess that the next step is backing off on the dosage to reduce the side effects now that they have results on effectiveness, which will also let them make a better case for younger people at less risk from the flu.

Some important background for this is that, around 1900, mathematics got formalized to the point that there is a standard for whether a proof is valid or not that doesn't depend on humans thinking about it, just doing a bit calculation following an algorithm. However, it is such a large calculation that nobody wrote complete formal proofs or verified all of the steps (since they'd be spending huge amounts of time on obvious parts, and not the novel aspects). Then, in the past 20 years, people have made computer systems that work on complete formal proofs while showing you the interesting parts, with the rest in macros, and check these proofs automatically. This means that finding proofs has the form of things like what AlphaZero is good at: something to check if moves are legal and a win condition. However, only a relatively small portion of mathematical research has been put into Lean so far, and that doesn't include the sorts of obscure results that often turn out to be useful in other problems. So the current wave is using LLMs to find results in the literature that might be relevant and producing formal versions of them, game AI to put them together, and deterministic validation to check each of these as it goes along and then people can see at the end that the calculation shows the proof is valid. The only part requiring mathematicians is checking that what the proof proves is what they understood the open question to be.

As a British English speaker, my biggest hate with human call centres is the cultures where they are not allowed to give a negative answer.

eg Should I try "X" is answere with

THIS IS AN ACTUAL DISSERVICE!

If the answer is "No" and you are not allowed to say it - you are not allowed to do the job! (And should not be given the job).

"Bad" is a very popular standard of service (probably not with customers, but who the hell wants customers, all they do is complain!

... it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they access lawful speech.

Hopefully doxing the morons that voted for it.

The Year of the Linux Desktop was 1995, for me. I used to spend time advocating Linux. You can still find my old posts on comp.os.linux.advocacy and many mailing lists. But two things happened: I didn't have time for it due to family/career and Linux just got so easy to use it didn't really need my advocacy or help anymore. It has been on a very slow but as it took over pretty much every market *except* the desktop and nothing short of legal action against Microsoft or enforcement of open standards on the part of the government was going to change that.

Imagine getting millions of people to work for free over the course of 40 years implementing what the people in the product want instead of a corporate agenda and giving the result away for free and still only having single digit marketshare! That's a clear sign of a broken market.

This is the direct consequence of under paying for years.

"Include construction of 2 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power"

At last ... Kentucky Fried Data!

A machine can tell the difference between one and two underscores. Whether a human can do so is dependent on the human and the font. (And a whole host of factors too numerous to name).

The computer _should_ be taught to flag the double underscore as illegal, and flag this as an error. That is obviously not going to happen, However, the guy who used the double underscore should be jailed for using it for assault of ASCII, regardless of any other crimes he committed!

"evidence by the police, and the judge trusted it"

... That is a whole 'nother crime, right there!

Eric S. Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", which inspired Mozilla to make their browser open source. For some reason, this means they name their extended support releases after him.

Most US population centers are in places east of the point in their time zones where the sun is overhead (or due south) at noon, and being a bit west is better than being a bit (or very, for New England) east. This means that DST is mostly the right UTC offset for the wrong reason: Boston should be on Atlantic Standard Time year-round, but Eastern Daylight Time is a name for the same clock setting that is already used there sometimes, so that's easier to legislate. Of course, the people who live west of their true noon line don't think permanent DST would be good, but the fact that we should have no DST and a different map is too nuanced for the position that there's got to be a single simple answer as to how to fix everything, regardless of the situation.

I don't think this is trying to get back into the US market. OnePlus is banned because it's part of a Chinese corporation. OPPO is... that corporation. It's not going to confuse any regulator who found something to complain about with OnePlus. This is more likely a mundane tactic of being liked in Europe for phones and wanting to expand that reputation to the parts of the organization that sell other consumer electronics.