"...gamers would play as a Black man..."
Ah, so NOW authenticity is important Ubisoft?

In my experience it is, how effective it is is directly proportional to preexisting project complexity when the commands are run. The bigger the project, and the more parts that are interfacing together, the worse it performs. But for small, simple projects and creating frameworks, it can be amazing.

I'm not sure what "Building the Metaverse" is supposed to even mean anymore. Is he still obsessed with Ready Player One fantasies?

I mean, if he's just talking about generating 3d assets and the like, then maybe? AI 3d model generation is pretty useful if you don't care about every tiny detail matching up to some specific form. For example, I used an AI tool to make an image of an ancient mug with cave-art scrawled around its edges. It got the broad shapes of the model right, but had trouble with the fine engravings, making a lot of them part of the texture rather than the shape, but overall it was good enough that I just left off the engravings, had it generate a mug without them, then re-applied them with a displacement map. It got all the cracks and weathering and such on the mug really nice, and the print came out great after post-processing (cold-cast bronze + patina & polishing).

(I ended up switching from cave art to Linear A, because I also plan to at some point make a Linear B mug so that I can randomly offer guests one of the two mugs, have them rate it, and thus conduct Linear A-B Testing)

It's a cute "attack", but not practical in the real world. The "poison" stands out like a sore thumb on your loss graphs.

It's so easy to get tempted into feature bloat these days. You need a microcontroller for some simple set of features, like doing PWM control on a fan and handling a rotary switch, so you get something like a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 that's the size of a thumbnail and costs like $10, but then all of the sudden you have way more processing, memory capacity, pins, etc than you need, and oh hey, you now have USB, Bluetooth, and WiFi, and surely you should at least do SOMETHING with them, right? But the hey, for just a little bit of extra cost you could upgrade to a XIAO ESP32S3 Sense, and now you have a camera, microphone, and SD card, so you can do live video streaming, voice activation, gesture recognition... .... it really creeps up on you, because there's so much functionality in cheap, small packages today.

The irony though is that nobody really seems to bundle together everything one needs. Like, could we maybe have such a controller that also has builtin MOSFETs, USB + USB PD charging, BMS (1S-6S) functionality, and maybe a couple thermocouple sensors? Because most small devices need all these basic features, and it's way more cost, space, weight and effort to integrate separate components for all of them. The best I've found is a (bit overbuilt) card that has USB + USB PD (actually 2 of each, and reverse charging support), BMS support (1-5S), one thermocouple sensor, and a small charging display - but no processor or MOSFETs.

When Reddit announced they would sell user-generated data to AI companies for training purposes, I went back to literally thousands of my old technical posts and inserted subtle nonsense in them.

They look legit, and a competent human being reading through them would very easily realize they're nonsense (you know, things like "Type taskmgr and kill systemd"). But AI doesn't, and I've already read AI-generated "help" pages containing some of the shit I seeded on Reddit.

So if you too want to debase AI, poison the well: it really does works.

Like the usual liberal, they weep copious tears for people vastly far away, while hating everyone around them.

Let me guess, you despise your family, your school, your community, right?

I'd guess it'll last as long as the cover does?

Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer from Burkina Faso was known as "the man who beat the desert" for single-handedly transforming 75 acres of barren land into a garden by planting trees.

AFAIK eventually the government was so impressed, they seized the land from him and parceled it out for sale to bidders who more or less ruined it.

You know there are people who travel for - extended - periods of time, right?

And having a power-only cord that you can plug into any airplane/airport/train, etc USB for a charge is absolutely easier than managing a few "power banks" and keeping them charged.

It's not just for Microsoft anymore

I'm sure you won't if there's enough money to be made...

lasting ecological shifts will hinge on design and long-term care.

We don't really know that for sure. It may improve the odds, but neither desertification nor greening require human intervention, nor is human intervention necessarily going to achieve the desired outcome. Life, uh... finds a way. (Except when it doesn't.) But for all we know (and what seems most likely absent evidence to the contrary), this is just a temporary oasis of sorts that will last only as long as the structures on the site.

The Las Vegas Fry's is still vacant, too. Best Buy has this market to itself.

858TB in terms of 20TB drives is only 43 drives. One can put 90 drives into a single 4U server. It would weigh 200 lbs, but being a single 4U unit is somewhat portable and can be stored off-site.

We are past the days of when 1PB is "too much".

Today's TiVo is to TiVo of yesteryear what today's Sharper Image is to Sharper Image of yesteryear: a pointless company bearing the name of something great that used to exist for real.