> Meta doesn't really know how to do anything else with any skill.
They don't know how to do Facebook very well either: it's been pretty much stagnant and enshittified to death for the past 22 years, and it feels like a forum for greying people whose greying friends haven't bothered to move on either, or to get the date of the next annual meeting of the bridge club.
one of those companies whose sole purpose seems to be annoying you by slapping their name as a watermark on a generic image you'd like to use in a meme, and force to spend 10 seconds finding somewhere else because you were never going to pay a stupid company to remove their mark on a bad picture you can find everywhere.
I wonder how those companies still exist, let alone make any money.
Anyway, the modern way to use copyrighted photos for free is to ask stable diffusion to regenerate it, because the AI companies have done all the data stealing for you and repackaged the stolen data into "models" you can use for free.
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.
"The use of wood as an energy source is a relic of the past, one that should not be relived if given a choice.
Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...
Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...
CloudFlare was an aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation. Now it's an AI-powered aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation.
Why don't I feel excited about it?
Crypto grift, AI bubble and psychopathic billionaire CEO.
Yes, that's because there have been a lot more stupid humans doing stupid things to databases for a lot longer than AI agents.
So tell me: if AI is no safer than people, what's the point of replacing humans with AI?
and animate it eating your face when the AI agent wastes your entire database.
The people in charge of IT.
Everyone wants roads near their house. If you don't have a road going to your house then your house is worthless. Once the government has a right of way for a road, expanding the road might be expensive, but it doesn't get the whole community involved in a series of lawsuits.
The only people that want to live near the train tracks, on the other hand, are the people out in the middle of the California desert that would love to have a way to easily get to the parts of California that aren't a wasteland. In the nice parts of California, every home owner within visual distance of the proposed route has hired a lawyer and vowed to fight the tracks to the death.
This means that California has built a tiny bit of tracks out in the middle of nowhere (near Bakersfield but not in Bakersfield). It also means that every single foot from this point on is likely to get even more astronomically expensive. The homeowners involved know that houses that are far enough away from the tracks so that their home value doesn't plummet are going to get a windfall as their prime real estate will become even more valuable with decent public transit. The rail system is going to be a serious amenity eventually. The homeowners near the tracks, on the other hand, are going to see a serious drop to their net worth. Everyone in California wants more light rail, but only if it doesn't go through their neighborhood.
It could easily be that California real estate is simply too expensive in this day and age for something like this to be built.
That fits...
if they had known he'd turn into a raging Nazi.
Then again, they probably would've. It's not like billionaires have any principles...
Side mirrors almost always leave a large blind spot directly behind and close to the vehicle. There's a reason that when firefighters are reversing their appliances they always have at least one of the crew physically get out and watch the area behind the vehicle.
Even a rear window and rear view mirror almost always leave a significant blind spot low and close behind the vehicle, which is why reversing cameras became a thing. When they're done well, they really are significantly safer, as well as sometimes making it a lot more reliable for most people to park the vehicle in difficult spaces.
One of the modern innovations I really would like to have is full AR on my windscreen. I want unexpected hazards highlighted in real time, particularly those that are more easily detectable by non-visual sensors, like big potholes or animals obscured by vegetation near the side of a country road. I want the actual driving line I need to take to follow my planned route through complex junctions overlaid slightly on my view of the road ahead. I want light amplification for night driving, ideally combined with some other technology that can reduce the glare from oncoming headlights to prevent dazzle.
Although I only want all of this if (a) it's implemented well and (b) any additional data it uses is reliably up-to-date and (c) there's an emergency shut-off that instantly clears everything off the windscreen in case anything goes wrong.
Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
