We found the switch from M$ Office to LibreOffice extremely easy.

The biggest burden was migrating some VBA Macros - which turned out to be a high value project anyway. We eliminated a heap of unprofessionally written code, removed dozens of bugs and standardised future macro development.

Overall, the switch was a positive budget project - which is pretty rare for something that is done for regulatory reasons.

Agreed.

A lot of people don't understand why I support Trump. His existence strengthens every other country and weakens the American stranglehold on the global economy.

And there's nothing mundane about acknowledging the legal reality that doing business with the US is a privacy and security risk.

So... we're now crossing over between denial and anger?

I am sad for the artists who are now rapidly losing their jobs to AI. I'm sorry for the code monkeys. I expect to lose my job (systems engineer) in the next 2-5 years.

This is a freight train that no one is going to stop. If you regulate it in the US, they'll just lose more ground to China.

The real question is how you're going to change the world's economic model so that the benefits from AI are not being distilled into the hands of the top 1%.

There doesn't seem to be any indication whether the server infrastructure will be maintained to ensure continued operation of units already in the field.

This challenge is a healthy example of 'making' laws vs 'implementing' laws. The lawmakers don't iron out all the nitty gritty of who's in and who's out. They define policy and rely heavily on the court system to weed out the sheep from the goats.

Every policy should have a robust administrative appeals process, and pushing that responsibility over to the high court is often better than creating some government department to do it.

Any website that registers users and lets them chat with each other, and label each other as friends or enemies could be defined as social media. If there is capacity for people to bully each other, groom each other, or otherwise manipulate each other, then it is a risk to minors. There is a strong argument that /. is a social media service - and Australia is doing the right thing by allowing its peak legal body establish the answer.

Arguably Reddit is falling for the trap by accelerating the process and opening the door for a swathe of 'maybe websites' to be included in the list. I will watch this process with great anticipation - whichever way it goes.

There's your problem, right there.

There is no such thing as complete delegation. The word for that is abdication.

Slaughterbots

OK. There are malicious crawlers out there (for AI or other things) that ignore robots.txt, but the big four don't ignore it.

If your website is being murdered by crawlers, stop them.

Too obvious? What am I missing?

For some of it, yes. We compete in the SaaS space, and we switch customers back and forth with our competitors all the time. We drop 'unique data' into their databases when we're custodians so we have a chance to spot misconduct if/when the customer switches to a different SaaS provider.
We see a fair number of them surfacing in the wild, and quite often in major brand providers. These are either undeclared breaches, or something worse.
We're not about to start blowing whistles on specific cases. We're not really geared up to go to war with companies that have billion dollar legal departments.
Suffice to say, anyone who thinks their data is safe in the Cloud is optimistic at best. Their data _should_ be safe, but it is far from it.

You started out well, but you're condescending in your first point. Not likely to get a good reaction from anyone there.
Then, insulting in your second point. You're starting to look like a troll here.
More insults in your third point. Getting a real troll vibe from you now.
And then we get into the ad hominem. Definite troll.
Shame really. You might have had some good points, but your tone trashed it. Next time, get ChatGPT to sanitise your responses before posting.

Its easy to answer when you realise that the Cloud is just someone else's computer. When you stop paying them, they'll do whatever they like with your data.

In Oz, there are privacy laws that are intended to protect the data, but most of our competitors openly ignore them.

In the EU, the GDPR is intended to protect the data, but once again, no one is policing it.

I don't know what the situation is in the US, but given the conduct of the 4 majors in AI development, I expect that its pretty much nothing.

Possession is nine tenths of the law, and once you give up possession of your data to someone else, you get what you get.

The OS isn't the problem. The problem is all the CIOs who think that ChatGPT can replace all their SysAdmins.

They're too busy renegotiating their parking space, or choosing a colour for their business cards to think about security or redundancy or risk management.

The sales rep with the shiny new Beemer told them that everything would be fine, so they just signed a cheque and went back to the board with a glowing quarter report.

Anyone who uses Sharepoint is getting exactly what they deserve. And the buck should stop on the CIO's desk... but we know it won't. Some poor ass middle manager will be hung out to dry for it... again.

Thre are links on the AtCoder website for the challenge that take you to the exact problem to be solved. Its an interesting puzzle to read. At first, I was like 'there's no UI involved, of course that's why the AI did well', but then I read some more and realized that this was exactly the same kind of real world problem I worked on in the 90s to do with hard drive optimisation.

The problem they offered was not a common problem, but it was definitely mappable to some real world problems.

It demonstrates that AI can outperform the majority of humans at extremely rigidly defined tasks.

Now, apply Moore's law (or perhaps, more accurately, the modern bastardisation of it), and ask what the AI will be doing in 18 months.

I, for one, welcome our new bubble-sort algorithm optimisation overlords... mostly so that I don't ever have to code that kind of crap again.

Our websites take more Ddos style hits from anti-virus scans than anything else on some days.

Capitalism doesn't work that way.