Kurtzman gave us Picard. Although it had some severe problems, it did also give us some great moments with Patrick and Picard.

It's a shame it never reached the highs of Strange New Worlds or Prodigy in terms of the writing, but I'm glad we got it.

He brought credibility to a genera that had previously been lacking in it. Instead of cheesy dialogue and hammy plots, he showed that it could be a solid drama with great performances from the actors. Then he did it again for superhero movies.

His final movie, Avengers Doomsday, is going to be bitter sweet.

Thanks. Based in Germany is good. It's a shame they only do a few services. Part of the problem is that to completely de-Google you need to replace things like Google Maps and Android as well. YouTube is another big one. Nothing else offers anything like as much for sharing video, and of course everyone you want to watch is on there and isn't going to switch to a PeerTube instance for the the 3 people who use it.

If only it was as simple as "don't use it". Used to be that communities formed around mailing lists and webrings. Now if you aren't on Discord, Twitter, and YouTube, you are going to be isolated from them.

I am involved in the Japanese electronics and retro computing scene. When many people left Twitter due to Musk turning it into a Nazi bar, the drama seemed to mostly pass the Japanese users by. English speaking communities fragmented onto BlueSky, the Fediverse, and Twitch. So I lost contact with both some of the English speaking ones, and almost all of the Japanese ones. Man, I just want to read about unusual Japanese street lights, or the new project someone made for the FM Towns Marty, but it's all happening on Twitter. At least the Japanese still use blogs I guess.

They have already put far too much emphasis on AI with their phones. When Pixel phones started they had A+ cameras, the absolute best you could get on a phone, at least for still photos. Video was always a bit weak, but for photos there was nothing else close.

A few years ago they stopped really pushing the camera technology and went all in on AI instead. Their CPUs have mediocre performance, but always tout big AI chops, which rarely amount to anything. The supposedly exclusive features that they unlock always get back-ported to older devices within days of release.

Their cameras are maybe B+ now. Some considerable distance behind the leaders, especially Xiaomi and Honor with their huge sensors and optics. It's so sad.

He was cast by Robert H. Justman. Roddenberry had different ideas about who Picard was supposed to be, but in the end going with a British actor with that commanding voice, a mixture of Yorkshire and stage trained, turned out to be perfect for the role. Steward brought gravitas and subtlety to the role, in equal measure.

Crypto makes it much easier. The crypto can be laundered through mixing, and moved to countries that won't extradite.

In this case they are blaming North Korea, which if accurate means that the money will simply be traded with China and Russia.

Are there any good alternatives? Don't say self host, that's a lot of work and your emails will be blocked anyway.

Your best engineers will be AuDHD, and AuDHD folk don't do well in these sorts of synthetic tests.

I can code in 20+ languages for over 12 different OS', write code that's good enough for CERN to run for particle accelerator data collection for a decade, have accelerated systems by an order of magnitude by understanding the poem space better than their previous engineers, but I am abysmal at exam style settings.

The software industry is riddled with SEs who write abysmal code but can pass a coding test easily. They're the folk that you have always needed to reject but didn't because they ticked a box.

If you haven't read the interview, in it she relates a story where her young daughter's teacher asked her to write three things that made her child special. Apparently she is such an awful mother that she couldn't do that, and turned to AI for assistance. The AI shat out some generic Hallmark style platitudes, and she was delighted.

People like her want to dehumanize all of us to that level.

I missed the part that said it involved leftists, fats, or lesbians.

Yeah, let's ressurect a 30-year-old flame war!

Social democracy is the way to deal with it. If everyone has a stake, but nobody has overall or excessive power, and the government truly works for the people, the outcomes tend to be decent.

It probably does cost Google something. They scan apps and devices for malware, and anything that increases the number of apps and ways to distribute them will increase the cost. They also have to certify these app stores, they aren't just going to let anyone set one up and start distributing malware or pirate streaming apps.

It feels calibrated to deter unserious applicants, but not cause further legal woes.

The real issue is F-Droid and similar open source app stores. It remains to be seen exactly how it is going to pan out.

That's interesting. Ours hasn't quite caught up yet, and will do things like limit the size of the inverter you can install because they don't trust the export limiter.