Maybe you use different OSes to me, but I expect whoami to be deterministic rather than stochastic.

I'm still impressed that the Teams web client can't edit a message with an emoji in it without messing up the keyboard controls and often corrupting the message and losing data. It's had this bug for years. It's literally a messaging app where you can't reliably send messages.

More generally, there's a strong negative correlation between reliable contraceptive methods being available and birth rate. There's also a strong positive correlation between infant mortality and birth rate. Comparing the situation today with Victorian Britain as though the only thing which had changed is the working time directive overlooks those two significant differences (and surely many other relevant ones).

Oh, you are 100% right There needs to be more mental health for police. The moment a person decides he or she wants to apply for a police job they need to be placed into a mental institution, they are a danger to people around them.

I am fully expecting him to propose renaming America into Trump Land at some point, so he did miss a trick. It should be T & A.

Well, there have to be correct incentives for someone to be in software, I got into it because I liked the idea of being able to control a machine, to be able to tell a computer what to do and it would do it.

Would I have the same interest in it 40 years ago if controlling the computer meant writing in human language that is imprecise and nuanced and receiving back code that I couldn't start to comprehend? Maybe, maybe not, I am not sure actually. If there was still a way for me to do this without the AI I probably would have gone that route but how many people today would do it? I mean people are telling Agents to write their letters for them, not code, just letters. People are telling agents to do all sorts of things, all of which probably saves some time, make some errors, creates some problems while solving others, it is just that none of it is actually understood by the user.

How many AI users understand how any of it works? But that was the point, to understand how the thing works to be able to control it.

It is similar to car mechanics, people who like to tinker with cars, how interesting is it to tinker with a car where you are not allowed to understand half of it and you cannot fix most of it, if something breaks you have to order an entire replacement part because it has a built in computer interface.

It's now the Department of Just ICE, but they haven't got round to updating the letterheads.

My Spanish bank this year forced me to install their app for verification because they discontinued the receipt of an SMS for the second factor. I am not amused: SMS works, but seemingly every other time I launch the app to verify an online credit card payment it insists on updating before it will let me do anything, and meanwhile there's a Verified By Visa timer ticking down.

Now they can do to Babylon 5 what they did to Star Trek.

Oh yeah. We are partying now.

I always figured that people who genuinely believed their employers were likely to kill literally everybody in the near future might burn down a bit more than that, but so far it's mostly been tweets

record ambient conversations illegally

Only illegal outside of single-party consent states.

"Ambient conversations" include (and some would argue consist exclusively of) conversations in which you're not a party.

There is a legitimate use for people with certain disabilities, but sadly there's no way to use them for legitimate purposes without Meta having the opportunity to piggy-back on the usage and abuse them for illegitimate purposes.

One word: Meta.

Having to poke through an about: page and find the thing to toggle to turn off this specific AI feature but not that one, and knowing they'd change it on you a couple of releases later, never filled me with confidence.

One switch in a readily discoverable location in the settings menu and it's all gone? Just the job, killed it now on the laptop and the mobile both.