This.

Spammers have been doing this for, what, at least 25 years now? Because that is how long I've been teaching people to never click any links or unsubscribe buttons in spam messages. Those "unsubscribe" clicks are of course especially valuable to spammers - they not only confirm that your email address is valid and active but that you also actually read the spam you receive. Would you expect them to honor your "unsubscribe" request? The more fool you.
Other sneaky methods regularly used to identify active spam receivers have included invisible 1x1 pixel image links, unique per message. When you open the spam email, your client tries to load the image from the spammer's server and fails - but the spammer gets a log message indicating that you tried to access the image, correlates it with the message sent, and knows now for sure that you are reading their spam. Expect more in the future.

But this is really old news. Blast from the past. TFA writers invented a time machine and didn't bother to tell that?

Also, in the past, hardware solutions for producing true random numbers have included...yes, you guessed it, photon-based quantum randomness. ID Quantique, for example, has been commercially offering photon-based hardware random number generators for over 10 years already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So TFA is basically yesterday's news and marketing. Move on, nothing to see here.

Sorry, but the math here doesn't add up. You mean that Putin won his current presidency with 0.01% of the votes given? What an utterly bizarre voting system.

If you vote for Putin, you support his policies and therefore accept & deserve what you get.

And of course, if the above is still too trivial for you, don't worry.
Today, the sky is the limit on how ridiculously large Rubik's cubes you can get:

https://mastercubestore.com/yj...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Definitely the one for math professors with too much time on their hands!

The starting setup should be randomized sufficiently. Otherwise, you could simply skip the analysis part in your algorithm - you could simply precalculate the optimum path solution to a known problem. Having to figure out the correct (or the best) solution is an important part of the challenge.

Of course, it is important that the randomization is done by rotation. If you remove the pieces and reassemble the cube in a random configuration, the chances are you are out of luck. Only a very small subset of possible reassembled configurations can be solved by rotation alone. (Try that as a party gag for someone who boasts their Rubik's skills!)

But once 4x4 cubes are child's play for you, try your teeth on one of these little cuties:
https://www.amazon.com/Shengsh...

So I take it you haven't tried Perplexity?

It not only gives you an LLM answer but also links its sources so you can check them out. Personally, I have found it quite useful. In fact, tons more useful than anything Google, for any serious (work-related) stuff. You can formulate a very complex query and even refine it, if it didn't quite get you the first time, plus validate if it got the answer right. With Google, no matter how well formulated your query is, it will spam you with a dozen loosely related (but not what I asked) SEO ads and then pages full of results that are somehow related to what you asked but do not solve the exact problem you had.

So yes, I would say Perplexity has cut down my Google use by 90%-99%, and I really can't see myself going back (unless Perplexity get enshitified somehow).

While that may seem ideologically sound, technically - in a two-party system - when you vote for Mickey Mouse, you are effectively voting for the guy who wins the vote. Because you did not vote for whoever came second, your invalid vote ends up paving the road to victory for the other guy.

When you know that one of two candidates will be elected and you think both are terrible, it is always better to vote for the one you think would be less terrible than not vote at all or vote for Mickey Mouse. Otherwise you are just making it easier for the really terrible candidate to win.

In this case, Donald Trump would like to thank you for your Mickey Mouse vote.

Funny, to me the above describes CUDA quite accurately.
Speaking as someone who has to re-engineer CUDA based AI scripts for every Nvidia card generation just because they cut the support for older CUDA. And there are some that aren't just worth the effort and gray hairs required to make them work...so that Nvidia will just trash them in a year or two in its newest CUDA.

I would love it if what you wrote about CUDA were true. But in the real world, CUDA is not downwards compatible. When a new CUDA version arrives, you will have to migrate and re-engineer your codebase.

This.

60 day password rotation is not a solution. It only gives the bad actor a slightly shorter timeframe to perform their unsavory deeds. Meanwhile, it also encourages the users to use easier and guessable passwords, otherwise they'll forget their own passwords.

For something that actually works, try MFA, geolocation and device certificates instead. Preferably all three, but if you can pick only one, take the last one. Allowing known devices only based on device certificates is a killer.

Or how about this?

public class ProcessApplication {

        public static void main(String[] args) {

                System.out.println("Application denied.");
        }
}

Simple and efficient. Now you can fire all those DOGE Java developers, in the name of government efficiency!

Exactly.

IDQ for example has been offering photon-based quantum cryptography devices commercially for...a little over 20 years now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So TFA boils down to nothing but marketing BS. "Look, this is a breakthrough since it is the first time WE did it!"

And Diablo in turn got it from the much older roguelikes, where drew its inspiration from. In Moria, Nethack, Angband, etc. deaths were always permanent, making for a much more intense playing experience, even in ascii only. Get your character to a high level and impressively geared up, then get ambushed by a poison breathing ancient dragon from around the corner, instant game over, start again. That's life (and death) in traditional roguelikes.

But MMORPGs are fundamentally different from solo games.

You thought wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

While the Sony case was probably the most notorious and the most audacious one, it was not the only one. Cactus Software was far more widely used although not as intrusive as the Sony rootkit. You need to understand this against the background of suddenly emerging P2P networks and more specifically Napster but there were others as well (such as hidden IRC channels). The record companies were caught their pants down, desperately fighting a sudden collapse of sales, and they would buy anything that at least promised to stay the tide.

Ironically, Sony was historically one of the companies that had designed the Red Book specification. OTOH, Philips - the other key player behind the Red Book spec - argued that DRM software copy protection was not compliant with the Red Book and audio CDs that had it should no longer be called audio CDs or labeled as such. Philips even threatened to sue companies that misused the "CD" marking on CD-like products that were not strictly Red Book compliant.

Indeed, I do remember seeing a good few audio CDs back in the day that carried no "CD" or "audio CD" marking in the case, typically the list hits of the day. You'd buy those faux CDs at your own peril. They might not play back correctly - or at all - in your car CD player. Insert them into your computer CD drive and your OS could get crippled, rooted, or even hacked. Caveat emptor, indeed!

#include what exactly?

As written, won't compile or run, so it doesn't even need a CPU...I suppose that's one better.

My 66MhZ DX2 "only" had 8MB RAM initially. Well, technically 4 straight out of the shop but I paid for an extra 4 because mere 4MB would have been too debilitating. Memory was actually quite expensive back then - more expensive than the processor/MB and the HD - so vendors skimped out on memory chips to keep the list prices for new computers attractive. I think Doom would have run on 4MB (ISTR that was the official minimum) but would regularly crash to out of memory errors. You needed 8MB or more to play Doom engine games smoothly. The more the merrier. A slightly beefier 486 (I upgraded to an AMD 80MhZ chip) with enough memory (16+GB) could keep up with the early Pentiums for those games, no sweat.

The next generation of ID Games, Quake, was different. It relied heavily on FPU math, and Pentiums ran it much faster, the Pentium bug notwithstanding. Players with Pentiums easily butchered 486 users.