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Comment That seems reasonnable (Score 1) 86

They are asking the court to ensure that they have permissions to do it. This is way cheaper than broadcasting the ad and getting sued later.
Now if they lose the suit, they are just out lawyers expenses.
If they push the ad, they could get sued for a billion dollars. So the liability is a lot lower now.

I am not sure why you would want to make that particular ad SO MUCH that paying lawyers to sue disney for permission makes sense. But maybe the ad is just THAT good!

Comment I'm not sure this is really about hardware (Score 1) 147

TPM should be optional. M$ is just colluding with the hardware vendors to increase sales.

Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.

Comment Not terribly surprising (Score 1) 24

Of course, this being /. I have read TFS but not TFA.

what is it that they are detecting really. Some text was generated by an LLM is not terribly surprising. Lots of language tools like akin to grammarly are powered with LLMs.

The abstract was partially written by an LLM is not really a problem either. Abstracts are summary and LLM are somewhat decent at that. As long as you proofread for accuracy, it's probably fine.

Now if the paper and the results are LLM generated, then yeah, it's an issue.

Comment Re:Yeah... no (Score 1) 191

You will never make fresh food cheaper than manufactured food, because the latter is shelf stable and can be made from poor quality ingredients which are cosmetically unsalable. Ultra-processed foods are cheaper everywhere.

This is comparing apples and applejacks. If you only care about cost per calorie, people may as just drink canola oil and take a daily vitamin pill. What we really need to do is look at the total cost of living when eating real foods vs packaged trash "food". If we were honest about adding up the related external costs of illness, healthcare, discontent, disability, etc and look at it more holistically, I believe the "cheaper" shit food starts to lose out fast. But nobody wants to do that. Hell, we can't even get people to agree that being a fatass is unhealthy.

And the idea that it costs a lot to eat healthy is a myth that needs to die. Some things are more expensive, sure, but you can make a healthy meal with cheaper options as well. The truth is that people are lazy and addicted to the results of 50 years engineering to create the mouth porn that line most store shelves.

Comment Re:No agreement (Score 2) 191

Permanent UTC now.

Easy to say when you live in or near London (which as I recall, you do).

There's nothing wrong with local time, and there are good reasons humans have used it literally for as long as we've had clocks. You are trading one mental adjustment -- "what time is it where Bob lives?" -- with a different one -- "what time is it where I am when the sun is directly overhead?" Guess which one you need to worry about more often?

And if you think adjusting to time zones is annoying now when traveling, imagine needing readjust your entire mental model of the solar day - where sunrise, noon, and sunset are on the clock. But hey, I guess you didn't need to adjust your watch. Hurray?

Local time is a "human sized" solution to the problem of timekeeping while UTC is a planet-sized solution to it.

Comment Re:No agreement (Score 1) 191

No one is "free" to set the times of their business hours.

Nonsense. Every single business has a list of their operating hours posted. Some open at 6am, some at 10am. Some are open on Sunday, others closed. Some close for certain holidays, others for others (or none). Some receive deliveries earlier than customers, others don't.

Most people in the US may not be accustomed to the idea of summer hours, but it's not a complicated idea and people would catch on pretty quickly.

Comment Re: For those getting pitchforks ready (Score 1) 153

You can't really use a wok on any home cooking appliances, regadless of heat source. The only exception are the specialized wok-specific ones some others mentioned, and even those kind of suck because they limit how much you can move the pan around.

I had a gas stovetop for years and a wok (both round and flat-bottom) was pitiful. There's a reason that restaurants basically use a 100K BTU jet engine to cook with a wok. Can you cook food in a wok on a standard stove? Sure. Will it ever be on par with asian restaurants? No. You're better off just using a griddle or flat frying pan on home stoves.

Comment Re:Denuvo, accounts, and always online (Score 1) 57

I probably would pay $100+ for a game that I consider interesting and $250 for a ground-breaking title (Skyrim, etc.).

Todd Howard loved that.

I think even the idea of dropping $250 for a video game is absolutely bonkers, and calling Skyrim "ground-breaking" is being vastly too generous. The only reason Skyrim has had the staying power it has is (1) modders and (2) Bethesda's inability to release more than 1 game every 5-6 years, leading to 10-12 years between each franchise game.

Comment Re:This is as old as computers and modem (Score 1) 56

Me too, though of course in our day, the world was much less connected and much less reliant on the technology. The worst we could have done after getting root access to the entire IT infrastructure at my school would have been look at what our classmates had been drawing in Paint or something. Today these systems host much more important and sensitive information and security breaches would be a much bigger deal.

And on that note, am I the only one less concerned by the behaviour of an impressively curious seven-year-old and more concerned by an official, professionally-managed system holding potentially sensitive data that is so insecure that even a seven-year-old could hack it?!

Comment Re:Does Max even have much content? (Score 2) 70

8-10 episodes per "season" seems to be the new standard across all streaming services. It feels like a cruel joke to people who knew 26 episode seasons were once a thing.

I think it's a symptom of streaming services. They want to offer a massively wide variety of shows to try and capture as much of the market as possible, which means a large number of titles. But money and human resources (writers, actors, directors, etc) are still finite, so now they spread those resources across twice or three times as many shows as they used to back in the 24/26 episode seasons. Then multiply this across a dozen different "platforms". So now we get 8 or 10 episodes per "season".

Add to that their desire to keep people hooked and subscribed. If they drip-feed seasons, people will be more likely to stick around because several shows they have started are still unfinished (some kind of combination of inertia and FOMO). So now we wait 2-4 years between seasons (which, to be honest, bothers me a *lot* more than the shorter seasons).

It really sucks in a bunch of ways. Aside from just making everyone spend 10 years to watch a 4 season show, huge breaks make for problems with the availability and visual appearance of aging actors. Writers and showrunners come and go more frequently, making seasons inconsistent and lacking a coherent plan, and the small number of episodes means every episode must be SUPER EXCITING AND IMPORTANT or people feel like it's a waste of precious screentime (which it kind of is). This means there should be fewer "filler" episodes (even though there are still a lot of them) and a lot less episodes that focus more on character development vs plot movement.

Oh, and episodic storytelling has completely died as an art, so every season has to be part of one HUGE IMPORTANT series arc which is almost always disappointing because none of these shows are planned more than one season ahead. Companies want to be able to cut any show at any time, so nobody is willing to commit to 3 or 4 seasons with a planned story. And it turns out JIT storytelling mostly sucks.

Streaming kinda ruined dramatic TV.

Comment Re: This is clickbait (Score 1) 144

Increase in 8 years: $17T, or +54.6%

I agree with your larger point, but it's not entirely fair to lump covid response in with the tax breaks. From a quick look, it appears that something like $5-6T of that $17T can be attributed to tax breaks and spending related to the first couple years of the pandemic.

But $11-12 trillion in 8 years is still absolutely bonkers.

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