When they locked out anonymous access to old.reddit.com, I moved on.

Yes, I will miss the technical, humor, and local-events discussions. The rest, I won't.

A slight smile crosses my face at the ad views this will cost them - as one might presume with the current old.reddit.com redirect to a login page (which does not show ads), the only way one would be shown ads on the platform going forward is if one is logged in (and doesn't have an ad blocker). So all those ads being served to anonymous viewers goes bye-bye. I very slightly wonder if the bean-counters took this into account.

This move will create a vacuum. Some other thing, for better or worse, will come around to replace it. The internet, as has been long said, will interprit this as damage and route around it. I still have just enough faith in humanity left to believe this...

I would amend the title to: "Please let the way that most people use the internet die".

And that has to start with individuals.

Are you ready to give up social media and clutivate a local group of like-minded friends who will put in the time and effort to socialize in-person?

Are you ready to shop locally for everything you can, and not order online unless you have to?

Are you ready to walk or drive yourself to your favorite local restaurant to pick up your takeout, instead of using a gig delivery service?

Are you ready to eschew LLMs, even to the point of pushing back on your employer if they insist you incorporate LLM output in your work?

The punchline to my little ol' rant here is that I feel most people are too comfortable with, or too addicted to, or whatever to, the kind of things I mention above, and that for most people, if they think about it at all, might have a passing thought of "why should I bother, some other activist will start the fight and then I'll just like their posts".

With blackjack! And hookers! ... In fact, forget the internet!

I was just going to ask about that, because the article summary makes it seem like uninstalling OneDrive is simple/easy, when it's anything but.

I have my own NAS with a good sync client, I never use OneDrive, yet I gave up uninstalling on my family machines, it always finds a way to pop back like a bad infections disease. These days I'm just happy if it sits there w/o an authenticated user and don't nag to sign-in too often. Sigh!

Interesting, GRC (Steve Gibson, IIRC) used to have something like that for Windows way back when.

It was nice to be able to keep tabs on what apps were doing, but of course, it was a different era, one where you ran "programs" and they were mostly self-contained and offline.

Nowadays you run a stripped-down web browser and everything you do is backed by some remote API or another.

I saw an ad on FB that there are places in Indiana that will pay you to move there. It's happening in lots of cities. Do a search for "get paid to move to [state of your choice]" and see if there's anything that would work for you.

Best of luck!

> On TV, Copilot takes on a "friendly, animated presence" that resembles

So, this is "your plastic pal that's fun to be with", right?

Can't wait for the models with Genuine People Personality to come out :-D

Fellow Deutsch duo student here, on a 5y streak (paid plan)

While I do see the occasional AI slop in there and it's annoying, I think the product is still good. My own complain with it is that the course is too short, you'll finish it before getting to more advanced concepts or sentence structures, and then what?

Myself, I've restarted the course two times (using different "from" languages each time) in order to keep practicing, but when I finish this third round, there is no other language that I speak and can use to practice German. What's next then? What are you looking at?

Myself, I like to complement Duolingo with a daily listen to "Langsam Nachrichten", news bites read slowly and with simple vocab, from the Deutschewelle: https://learngerman.dw.com/de/... (I have it on my podcast app, new episode ready every day)

I also always liked Coffee Break German, but haven't tried their premium course yet, only the free podcast (which is really good) https://coffeebreaklanguages.c...

Bis bald!

Someone got paid to come-up with that, even if all they did was a half-assed prompt to generate it.

And a few people saw that at a meeting and concluded it was good enough.

Sad times, that monstrosity is all distorted and looks horrible.

Just... no. Do not want.

Not that I claim to understand any of the science here, but wanted to say that your claim about time "running faster in the middle of a void" brought to mind the notion of the "zones of thought" from the fantastic book series A" Fire Upon the Deep", by Vernor Vinge :)

Perhaps it would be better if that wasn't the case...

Well, to be fair, it is easier to fire than it is to hire (strictly from the standpoint of judging competence).

When you hire you go from a limited set of interviews and maybe some testing and dynamics. When you fire you (hopefully) are being supported by a track record which shows that for whatever reason, it did not work out (not always, there's also blanket firing for "reasons".)

That's a good option too! When I read the summary I was inclined to suggest that they bolt the experiments on the next iterations to the sides of the craft instead of the floor. Just in case, you know :-)

I view BO's (heh) New Shepard as roughly on par with the risk of everyday commercial air flight. Some factors increase risk, while others (like the fact that the entire spacecraft is thoroughly checked out between flights and telemetered to heck and back) reduce risk. So overall I think it's probably a wash.

It goes straight up and comes straight back down. Atmospheric re-entry heating is a fraction of that of an orbital re-entry.

The capsule is aerodynamically stable on re-entry. The part that should point forward, will always point forward.

The flight is so short that even if atmospheric conditioning failed, as long as the capsule maintains pressure, there should be plenty of breathable atmo for the duration. This is reinforced by the fact that the New Shepard crew are not required to wear pressure suits.

The LES is a simple solid rocket motor - ignite and it will burn, no valves or propellant pressurization to worry about, so it is as sure to work as about anything else in this world, to get you away from the going-boom rocket behind (plus it has already been demostrated both in tests and in a real-life booster failure).

So, I don't think it was that much of a step for JB to ride the first crewed bird, from a technical perspective. And of course there's other reasons why he might want to be on the first flight, but I'll leave it to others to expound on those aspects...