Not being much of a gamer I haven't followed this story (at all!) so the headline and initiative name "Stop Killing Games" made me think it was 1.3 million signatures from people who want to ban games in which people are killed. "No way that's going to pass," I thought. People love virtual murder.

Then I figured out that it's the killing of the games people want to stop, not the games that include killing.

Vaguely related, I had a serious EverQuest addiction ~20 years ago (the reason I gave up on any but the most casual of gaming), and I noticed a few weeks back that it's still available on Steam, and free to play, so I downloaded it and logged on, and even found my old character still there (though with zero gear because I gave it all away when I quit playing). The UI is dramatically different, but the general content seems the same. It's no longer very interesting to me, though.

The pre-installed apps are just as unremovable on Moto as any other (unless you unlock the bootloader; some Motos have unlockable bootloaders). It may be that you define their pre-installed apps as not crapware, but that's a judgement call, not a statement of technical fact.

Yes, that was the joke. Maybe too much of an inside joke, but isn't this supposed to be a nerd forum?

Disable, yes. Uninstall, no. If it's pre-installed it's part of the system image, which is mounted read-only and protected with fs-crypt. Actually modifying that would require root access to remount it rw and to disable fs-crypt.

That would also, of course, completely destroy the Android security architecture, leaving you wide open to all sorts of attacks. If you want to do that, get an Android device that has an unlockable bootloader (e.g. Google Pixel), unlock it, then do whatever you like. And be sure not to hire any evil maids.

I'd recommend ML-KEM and ML-DSA instead.

I also use the Claude Code extension with VS Code. The inline diffs it provides are quite clumsy compared to Cursor's.

The integration is a little better in Cursor; the main difference being the in-line edit diffs. But I bounce back and forth between Claude Code and cursor, so I end up just using the git diff view to look at changes about 80% of the time, so it's not much better.

Honestly, my reason for using it is that I have separate Claude and Cursor token budgets -- though I set Cursor to use Claude so I'm using the same model both ways.

Why do you think they would stop in their tracks every time there's a power or cell tower outage?

Yes, there have been some issues with widespread power outages causing the cars to get confused because things don't look right, but that's a bug, not expected behavior.

And although they won't have fares if they have no cell service, there's no reason to expect them to stop being able to drive. They will do whatever they normally do when they have no fare — find a place to park. Other than for learning about pickups and dropoffs, robotaxis use cellular networks only when they break down, to request remote driving assistance (i.e. relatively rarely).

Oh, yeah, I just realized that this is an expense on the Roku side, so the taxes would cancel out. Ugh.

Then yes, you're correct that there's no possible way for consolidating two businesses to save money without direct job loss, other than perhaps reducing payouts to external companies for things that they both do (e.g. accountants).

If your government breaking into your house and applying hardware-level attacks to scrape your secrets out of the RAM of your running computer is seriously part of your threat model, it's almost certainly very, very far from your biggest concern.

Also, you should probably consider turning your computer off.

Entering and even taking the territory of an invader is fair and reasonable. If you don't want to be invaded, don't invade.

It may not have been in the spec, but if it was widely known that the chip could do it, then it very well could be the case that people purchased the chip because of that, in which case the company unjustly benefitted from the widespread belief that it was supported, and is now seeking to further unjustly benefit by forcing those buyers to spend more money if they want to keep that feature.

Their failure to explicitly make clear that this was a bug and fix it in a timely manner is at least potentially an implied representation that could be subject to promissory estoppel.

In other words, they're probably doing something that violates the law, but we won't know for sure unless someone cares enough to sue over it.

Nope. You forgot the government factor:

($Fox + $Payment - (corporate_income_tax_rate * $Payment)) + ($Roku - $Payment = $Fox + $Roku - (corporate_income_tax_rate * $Payment).

So depending on what state the income is earned in, Anywhere from about 21% to about 30% of that could be going to taxes. So they could easily save $400M in taxes if that payment happens to be at least $1.3 billion or so. I doubt that's the case, of course.

The most critical skill is knowing when you're going into an AI rathole, shutting it down, and coding the relevant bits from scratch. There's nothing like wasting more time on iterative refinement than it would take to write the code by hand to sour an engineer on the use of AI.

The top 1% of the U.S. have $55 trillion dollars. The total U.S. national debt is only $38 trillion. That costs the government $1.4 trillion every year in interest alone. Leveling the playing field by capping everyone's total savings at 8 million per person would wipe out the national debt completely.

Mind you, wiping the national debt out still won't help as long as the Republicans keep overspending and undertaxing to the tune of two trillion a year, but even that should be easily fixable by more sound tax policy, coupled with laws mandating that the federal budget be revenue neutral or positive going forwards.

We've done the math. Have you?