I'm glad to see that we have moved past the era of 'bugs' or 'defects' and are now anthropomorphizing undesired behavior as 'honest mistakes'. Truly progress is glorious.

I stream a lot of what I watch and listen to, but I never got rid of my physical media or the players. I'm old and a lot of what I like to watch isn't on streaming. I have three full 400 disk DVD players in my living room and a Blu Ray player. I still buy movies on blu ray. My media room has a blu ray player and a couple 400 disk changers as well. There are 12 DVD or Blu ray drives or recorders in the computers in the room I'm sitting in currently. I haven't used them much in some time, but they work and I don't see any good reason to remove them. Plus I don't feel like looking for the block off plates for the cases. The computers in my living room as well as media room also still have Blu ray drives.

Streaming is convenient and works well on a phone. But to my old my eyes and ears streaming looks and sounds a lot worse than just a standard Blu Ray. As the old adage goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

It depends on a lot of factors. pressed CD's put physical pits in the metal layer of the disk. Burned CD's use a laser to alter the dye in the data layer.

Cheaply made or defective pressed disks can allow air into the metal layer and cause oxidization of the aluminum. Apparently there's also an issue with some cardboard packaging as it can contain sulfur. Pressed disks should last you a lifetime if stored properly.

Burned CD's have a huge range. I've seen cheap generic ones go bad in less than 2 years. There are archive grade disks that are rated for 100 to 300 years. They use a reflective layer that is less prone to oxidation as well as more stable dyes that don't discolor as easily as cheaper disks.

Obviously billing errors are bad; but it seems like ones that off by an egregious number of powers of ten should concern us much less than ones that are small enough to be within the realm of plausible; those are the ones that you'll need to fight over and quite possibly not even win if you are an edge case or dealing with one of the services/configurations where you don't necessarily have any independent measure of usage. You can probably tell that you didn't use a VM more than 720 hours in the last 30 days; but are you actually counting GET requests in some way that is both authoritative and cheaper than just paying the $0.0004/thousand rather than hoping that Amazon will charge you correctly? For some very buttoned up buckets that only your other stuff accesses, quite possibly you can infer from those systems; but if it's something public facing and it might be a billing error or maybe you just got crawled hard last month?

Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level.

The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."

I'm not surprised surprised or anything; but it seems like a serious problem that it's the 'maker of high-end sex toys' part; rather than the 'attempting to replace education and human interaction with chatbots' part that has the company embroiled in controversy. Real Dolls are certainly pretty niche; a lot of additional inconvenience and cost for modest gains vs. vastly cheaper and more accessible local stimulation tools; but using tools as stimulation tools seems considerably less weird than using them as friends or fobbing children off on them.

I'd honestly be a little surprised if there's much protective effect.

It's possible that having to go through the setup process yourself is a little too much seeing how the sausage is made vs. interacting with a pleasant frontend cynically put together by someone who knows how 'engagement' works; but it's not like the nerd reputation for skewing socially awkward or the AI bro reputation for reaching a bit too quickly for slightly mystical anthropomorphisms are entirely unearned(the 'soul.md' is a frankly somewhat depressing genre).

At least for now; there might be some confounding demographic effects if you are talking one of the chunkier local models; in a country with a per-capita GDP of ~$14k being able to comfortably afford, or willing to uncomfortably afford, the necessary hardware would make you either at least modestly wealthier than average or significantly more interested than average; but as you slouch toward stuff that runs on more typical hardware the demographic differences presumably decrease.

Some industries do it. Most run on standard schedules year-round, at least in the US.

Business drive personal schedules. Bigger businesses won't shift because it complicates internal work. That means smaller, local businesses largely won't shift because they often need to match their customers' hours. The end result is that people who are expected to show up at 8:00 for work now will still have to show up for 8:00 then, even if it's two hours before sunrise.

Thats a aloe and you know it.

You are the one that said: “There are bigger points.” Why do you lie so much?

I don't want to diminish the accomplishment; that seems like a very cool dataset and probably one that was really fiddly to pull together; but, if you are talking single-neuron resolution; I am curious about whether you can still call an individual sample "the human brainstem" rather than "a human brainstem" and what comparative purposes you can use it for without running into trouble with cases where there are multiple ways for a brainstem to be adequately healthy, so long as certain requirements are met, so you'll need considerably more samples to draw useful inferences about exactly what the problem abnormality is.

Same sort of thing as when "sequencing the human genome" was a big project. Obviously a major exercise in gene sequencing and a basis for situating subsequent sequencing operations; but once you start talking detail there isn't 'the human genome'; literally everyone has one; and it turns out that different differences matter or don't at radically different levels.

Presumably the methods used to do it once will be helpful in doing it more often in the future; but I'll be curious what we discover about the balance of 'normalcy' vs. some relatively subtle and confusing combination of surprisingly variable ways to have a brainstem that seems to work just fine along with surprisingly subtle, no ghastly big lesions, ways to have one that ends up being totally dodgy.

I find "NOTE: Experiences vary by region." to be a bad sign for something that would be so trivial for MS to alter the behavior of; and where they are obviously not earnestly making improvements that were previously impossible but grudgingly rolling back bullshit they thought they could get away with.

Probably means good news for users in the EU; same way they get left out of some of the most egregiously bullshit 'AI' stuff; may help EDU and enterprise; but I'm guessing that it's no promises for less favored users.

None of these points have anything to do with what he said. You are introducing strawman arguments.

How does jobs in China or Vietnam create jobs in the US again? You seem to missed the whole part that where I said: " Not much difference when it comes to US jobs assembling those phones."

Maybe not as painful Intel x86 on TSMC silicon which happened last year.

But poster's point is still valid. Making the chips here only to ship them overseas for the device to be assembled. The only difference is assembled in Vietnam or India instead of China. Not much difference when it comes to US jobs assembling those phones.

I'm not expecting that from domestic opponents; both because the penalties are high and because people are, historically, shockingly bad at shooting for targets that actually matter. I'm thinking more internationally.

If 'AI' is half so interesting as its proponents claim one would expect being a machine learning researcher worth offering a fat signing bonus to be about as dangerous as being an Iranian nuclear physicist or a Russian oligarch who has fallen off Putin's friends list. If Zuck thinks that you are worth $100 million it seems like someone who takes the idea that 'AI' is the next frontier in state power would consider it worth the trouble to hire some local criminal to kill you in a botched robbery or have their clandestine services attempt to throw you a little tea party. So far no reports of even foiled attempts.