From the summary:
Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold
The entire camera weighs less than 3 pounds and contains a few grams of copper and less than a milligram of gold.
EOM
Well, technically, per international treaty, nobody can "have the best spots." Legally speaking, there is no real estate that can be owned on the Moon.
'Nuff said?
In direct response to your mostly off-topic joke, I think it just shows again what a lousy businessman the YOB is, even when he's breaking new ground in corruption. To actually make it relevant to this story, we'd have to figure out how to get the YOB to run the scam over on Bluesky, and that can't happen. Or at least it's beyond the bounds of my imagination. However here's my "criminal mindset" scheme to maximize the loot from your joke:
Sell off early access to EVERY official government announcement. The first one-minute auction would bid for the "most important" word from the coming announcement. Then there would be an auction for the top two words, then three words, then four, and all the way up to 100. Then the announcement is released to the public peasants like us.
But of course it needs AI to be a modern FinTech scam! So they use an AI to pick the words with the training objective of maximizing the loot. And of course the bidders are all using their AI agents to try to figure out what the coming announcement is about as each word is revealed. But their training objective is mostly to decide when "the story" is about to break because the big activity in the FinTech game market will happen at the point where the meaning is revealed. Hmm... That seems to increase the urge to bid big for early words, because that lets your AI study the pattern of released words to predict exactly when the break will happen.
Now I am worried about my criminal mindset. I've thought of how to adapt this business model to funding Bluesky. Considering the biddable value of messages on Bluesky it would be more of a micropayment auction, but millions of micropayments might wind up with some real money?
Digital games themselves did not lower prices, despite them being marketed as doing so without the cost of materials/packaging/handling/shipping
From the summary: "Current prices are tied to retail. Without physical discs holding digital hostage we'll see a larger spectrum of pricing." As I understand this, paid downloads did not lower prices of AAA games because of retail price parity contracts. Paid downloads did, however, make the $5 to $20 tier for indie game pricing viable.
One thing not mentioned in the summary is that publishers of games distributed in physical copies owe a royalty to the age rating agency of each region in which a game is published. Publishers of downloadable games do not, instead relying on self-certification through the IARC form. The age rating agencies allow this because it's a lot more practical to update a game once it is found to have been misclassified.
Deservedly Funny, and I think a good opening joke is always a fun FP, but I already want to get serious. I think "Why?" is the question.
Personal anecdote needed? I'm still using Bluesky, but never used it much. It would be amusing if there was a tool to track my personal Bluesky usage stats over time--but I don't think I care enough to click on such a link even if it already exists. I think the federated approach is a good idea, and Bluesky is nicer than Mastodon, but the Bluesky trend has been towards feeping creaturitis, and I'm not interested in fancy and time-consuming toys. Rather too similar to what went wrong with Firefox... And some more besides.
I think Bluesky is mostly a charity, but whenever I hear about new features in a charity-based nonprofit project, I start by asking myself "Would I donate money for that feature?" But the answer is almost always "No", and the implication is that my donation would be used to create more features I would say "No" about, except then it would be too late and I'd also be out the money.
What if features were ONLY added when enough people agreed in advance that the feature was worth paying for? And if they had to put their money where their mouths are before the implementation would start? What if you could easily see how much measurable cost you are creating by your usage of a website and consider that in terms of a possible donation?
So I think I have devised a mechanism to implement positive answers to such questions, but I'm not going to do an entire CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) spiel again. I'm just going to ask for your better ideas. Oh wait, I seem to have stumbled back into joke territory. The idea of constructive solutions on today's Slashdot is quite hilarious.
Easy for me to find lots of interesting things on Mastodon. I think, despite what people say, they love the rage bait on the bigger networks. Mastodon is just normal people discussing normal topics.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who ever posts in the tag for a particular toy line. Either I guessed the wrong tag, or I'm the only person on fedi interested in that topic. Which is more likely?
The perfect soldier uses and means available to follow the instruction and if their officer didn't want that, they need to add this to their objective.
That depends on what they were trained for. Was it to uphold the law or... not? If the latter then yeah, sure. If the former, then no. The LLMs are trained on a fat core dump. The training corpus was produced without a thought even for accuracy, let alone honesty or fair play.
One problem is that AI agents do reward hacking, Anthropic notes,
So they programmed it to do something, and it did it? Works as expected.
Ideally we get rid of MS in a cleaner way.
(To continue the discussion... Naturally they are different from IBM and cloud services are different from IBM's consulting services, but still services, if in no way other than in the sense of "being serviced".)
Portables are trash. Mini-splits don't cover a window, the connection between the inside and outside units goes through a fairly small hole, and they are much more efficient. Window units exist for stupid reasons to begin with, the solution is mini-splits.
An AC posted above about waiting for this inevitable type of comment posted by idiots and here it is!
I paid $99 for a fully legit copy of Windows 7 Pro, system builder's edition. That's simply intended to be sold alongside parts for a new PC, which in fact is what I was doing. Therefore I'm confident that an OEM license for Windows 7 Home was less than that.
Their idea of an offer you can't refuse is an offer... and you'd better not refuse.
