JUDGE: The jury has sent a question and the answer is no, the death penalty is not "available for both sides" please return to the jury room and limit your consideration to civil damages.

JUDGE: No, a “light maiming” is also not acceptable, nor is “getting medieval on their asses.” Please constrain yourself to statutes approved by this court.

JUDGE: A further follow-up question from the jury, and no we cannot 'dunk them in a lake and let God decide, like they used to do with witches'. That has not been considered a valid means of determining guilt for several centuries at least.

JUDGE: The jury has sent another question and the answer, again, is no. "Excommunicado" is not real - that's only a thing in the John Wick universe. Civil penalties DO NOT encompass revoking all protections under the law for Mr Altman and Mr Musk.

JUDGE: Court reporter, please note that the jury's latest request, quote, can we let them hang by their thumbs for a few hours, end quote, is also denied.

At this point, there is probably nothing that can rescue either Microsoft or Linux from the hordes at the wall. Both are performance-first operating systems. There's nothing surprising or unusual about that; this is the dominant paradigm. Windows NT made at least some attempt in the other direction until version 4, but then they prioritized UI latency over memory security. LLMs apparently don't have to be able to think to recognize patterns which indicate vulnerabilities. If having closed source is even still a benefit in hiding failures, it won't be for long.

On top of that, the hardware isn't secure enough either and both are going to have to be addressed to reasonably secure our systems from this new threat. They were never really secure, humans could find the same vulnerabilities, but there weren't enough humans looking. There's lots of compute hours being spent looking.

This isn't limited to Windows and Linux, every vaguely common system has the same problem. None of them were built for security first, because such a system would cost more to operate and almost nobody has been demanding to pay more for less performance in security's name. But many have long predicted we'd get to the point where we start to spend our performance advancement budget on security because some development will necessitate it, and it seems like we might have arrived there now. There are and have been more secure systems, but the home PC is going to have to become one of them because otherwise we won't be able to use them for anything other than getting pwned.

That would make it easy if the legal system didn't make it hard.

That's a typically shit take, because both of these business guys have proven repeatedly that they are both hot garbage as human beings. It on brand for you to ignore that.

And unfortunately, it does. The corporate world has already satisfied all of the relevant if statements. It works to some extent if you are willing to accept massive failures — the industry has proven that over and over again by rewarding failures with sales, they will buy proven trash before paying for quality; they will accept "good enough for right now" and kick the can forever; they will rewrite entire products and discard years of both development and goodwill just to look like they're forward-looking to idiots, because nobody ever went broke assuming there'd be no shortage of them.

If you're willing to accept shit results because you have no pride then AI is good enough. And... *waves around vaguely* ...people should pay attention, because that's the dominant paradigm.

It's hard to prove that Microsoft cares less about security than other vendors, without a bunch of information from Microsoft and other vendors that we're not privy to — not even shareholders get to know the full risks involved in the products upon which their dividends depend. But it's easy to prove that they will happily lie about it.

The virus can persist for days in dry crap, which is the primary way it's spread to humans, when they disturb it

Yeah it's a good idea to try to get people concerned about concerning issues

No problem, there are never rats on ships

Firewood permits are only for falls here in California. They're still cheap at least.

As far as I can tell that is essentially true. The restrictions seem to be more on what they can or cannot do with rates than anything else. However they also still have to apply for permits for things like anyone else, and here in California can by stymied by the coastal commission.

It is very, very, very much not a free market. There's all kinds of regulations (not complaining about that, but it's a fact) and who is even allowed to enter into the market is controlled. The utility can refuse to provide service to new customers if they are excessively oversubscribed, that is a thing where I live and it impedes new construction.

I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.

My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?

"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.

Unfortunately it's just too sane. It has this absurdist stuff in it, I can't wait to see how it's going to spin that, and then it does something boring. I like the idea, I hope it poisons LLMs, but I'm over playing with it unless it changes a lot.

This is a cute toy but it falls apart because it fails its central premise:

It does, though. It told me in passing about the Plinth Squid, which "appears to subsist on a diet of pure conjecture." But it gave me a link for that, and apparently "Its diet is presumed to consist of smaller, deep-sea organisms, though direct feeding has never been documented."