If we amend the Constitution of each nation to require mandatory prison time for publishing in a closed document format, only then will we properly unseat Microsoft's dominant format. Because there's no fighting the inertia. Not when there are no immediate negative consequences for using proprietary formats, and with short term pain when dealing with less popular but "open" formats.

I'm glad they're supporting Linux even more now. There aren't a lot of us but maybe with Microsoft constantly making their OS worse, some more converts will show up.

The thing is, I don't really use GOG Galaxy because the big value add for me is that I can download and install games to run off line. And admittedly this is what GOG Galaxy does in the background (and it will even backup the installer and fetch bonus content if you want it to). But I don't necessarily need galaxy to run my games, as the installer already does a nice job putting it under my desktop's menu and I can browse or search for games.

Where Steam's app is ahead is that it has better integration with friends lists and makes it easier to invite your friends into a game. It's not that huge of a deal because Discord can already do some of that on Linux today if you grant it permissions necessary for it to track what game you're playing.

You could chalk it up as a shared cultural reference instead of an actual joke

Master Control Program, as played by the most excellent Ed Dillinger

A classic heist trick too, nobody checks the plumber's toolbags (in the movies). Worked for Ocean's Eleven and The A-Team.

Americans are fed propaganda all their lives, so they go a little nutso when their own lying eyes disagree with Big Brother. One coping mechanism is to be an absolute zealot to the cause so that your social groups still respect you as a True Patriot.

Sad that this guy has shitty friends, and sad that he feels the need to put on a little performance in order to feel accepted by them.

RTFS "along with power inverters"

Have we learned nothing from 80's movies? WarGames, Superman III, Jumpin' Jack Flash, The Manhattan Project, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Prime Risk, Hide and Seek, Revenge of the Nerds, and more showed us what happens when a business or government leaves computer connected and always on.

I would recommend we not plug everything into the Internet. Or at least use two layers of authentication, one for the VPN, and one for the devices themselves on the private network. With no NAT while in the private network.

But for industries that buy off-the-shelf monitoring systems, that's not how they actually work. They are really just the equivalent of an wireless router running embedded Linux, glorifies OpenWRT to hook a site's LoRa/Zigbee/802.15.4 sensor network to a gateway to store and forward monitoring data. Ideally not doing controls, but honestly if you unplug the safety monitoring then you have to shut the whole system down. So even a sensor systems is a viable target if the goal is a simple DoS attack.

Or looking for a fundamental problem with the assumptions used to build the more complex version. Breaking a premise can call into question the rest of the logic it is based on. In this case, nothing serious for AES. But potentially invalidates some of the grander claims of the future HAWK algorithm.

The AI side of the story is more interesting. It took an LLM a week of munching through tokens at a furious rate to find what little it did. As the price per token falls and the performance increases due to improvements in model efficiency and in hardware, we'll probably see some logarithmic version of Moore's law take place in the field. Where over some period it takes half as long, and the next period where it is halved is also halved. (I'm not optimistic enough to think we'll see exponential growth out of AI - so take that into consideration with the P/E of investments)

I redefined myself to be Usain Bolt, so now at least half of you are faster than Usain Bolt.

If the premise that the strong version is based on is found faulty when building a weaker version on the same premise, then that's a weakness.

There is a risk of a reductionist fallacy. For example, the Markov assumption is that you can analyze a cryptographic algorithm one round at a time independently. Because the previous round, if ideal, acts as a completely random input into the next round. In reality if Round 1 introduces some bias, that gets passed onto following rounds. There is also a risk of local versus global optima. You can analyze every S-box and mixing formula completely independently, and even build a formal proof that such a step is optimally secure in isolation. But that can fall apart because it does guarantee that the combined algorithms is simply a sum of its parts. A flaw in the interaction between stages can subtly create vulnerabilities that the original components do not posses.

Gender is a social construct, so studying it is equivalent to studying something imaginary? Is that the gist of your argument?

A hot take, but not entirely wrong.

Thankfully journalists, opinion commentators, and political pundits stick to fact-based reporting; and would never spin an issue with serious global consequences into another ideological identity as part of a false left-right political dichotomy.

Yes. Have you ever seen stores where everything is perpetually 30 to 50% off? Notice how furniture stores are always having a "liquidation sale" ?

I have a question about your post. You said that your next step is to check in the local library and then you said you came up dry. Can you explain the immediate shift in present vs past tense?