A poem;-
-------------
I once loved a clanker.
And you might think I'm sick.
But I loved my robot lover.
And its hydraulic jackhammer dick.
It could clean the carpets
And it could heal my soul.
Now all thats left is metal shards
Embedded in my hole.

Not written by AI.

There have been a few musicians that have been trying to redirect the kids away from cassette tape nostalgia to CD nostalgia. The reason is simple, in 2026 its cheaper to burn a CD than it is to manufacture a cassette tape. And CDs are vastly superior (the relative virtues of Vinyl and CD are a little more complicated, though on pure technicalities, CD still wins).

The thing with CDs is a DIY home musician can do the whole manufacturing chain at home. You buy one of those cheap laser screen printer engravers for about $1K. You pick up a CD bulk duplicator second hand off ebay for maybe $200. $100 will buy you more blank CDs than you'll ever sell. You bulk duplicate your album using the CD burner. You screen print the art onto the CDs. Get those cardboard CD sleeves and screen print the art (If you want better detail, grab a colour laser printer from Brother for about $500.)

Oh and that laser engraver screen printer setup will also make you the band shirts, just remember to grab one of those cheap chinese flash dryers to properly cure the ink on the shirt. Too many DIY shirt makers dont realise this.

Then you set up your bandcamp store, and maybe set up a merch desk at your gigs. Last gig I played we sold over $1K of merch.

Buy CDs. Play CDs. CDs are good. Especially CDs from local pub bands. Tapes are trash and sound like trash. VInyl is great but too expensive for a small band to produce at anything resembling a profit.

Eh... theres still a sting in the tail. I suspect these sorts of fines are more about "We want you to fix this" rather than "We want you to bleed for doing this". The thing is, $14 mil aint a drop of piss in the oceans of HPs money supply, but what IS important is that its a court order, and disobeying the court order can turn this from "insignificant financial mosquito bite" to "Oh shit, theres an interpol arrest warrant out for the CEO on criminal contempt charges".

Rule number #1 and #2 of any interaction with the law;- Do not anger the Judge. The second rule is "See rule #1"

Apple's macOS. Apple contributes code and employs some FreeBSD developers.

Its a little more complex. Apple does derive some of FreeBSDs userland and some services. However its a myth that the kernel is a modified FreeBS. Its a modified Mach microkernel, XNU (technically actually a hybrid, like most real world microkernels, that has a small amount of non core kernel in ring zero for performance reasons, that has some services that have FreeBSD derived code in it, namely the network stack, process model and IOKit.

Chinas single timezone is bonkers. If your in Beijing its great, but in those back end industrial cities, you've got the sun rising at 10am and setting at midnight. That would *massively* fuck with your sleep cycle and I half suspect that western regions probably got some of the highest rates of melatonin prescription..... and sleep disorders.... on the planet.

Its space. When it comes to radiation, an X-Ray machine is by far the least of their worries. Astronauts come back from space missions utterly glowing with radiation.

Admittedly the cancer rate amongst astronauts isnt THAT much higher (just under 1/3 of astronaut deaths compared to just over 1/5th of the general population), but this is also a cohort that have mostly been non smoking tea-totaller health conscious non-junk-eating people so its definitely a thing.

Like yeah, over exposure to medical X-Rays is totally a risk factor, but astronauts go into space knowing that space is actively trying to radiate them, freeze them, burn them, pop their lungs, boil their blood and suffocate them. Its a soldiers gambit really.

Grandmas stupid baby photo collection create more positive utility for humans than a petabyte of stupid slop images of crayfish aranged into a jesus face ever will.

Im more wondering if we're gonna start seeing clankers ordering "Victorias secret vacuum cleaners" catalogues getting orders in the mail leading to claude-bots in raincoats atendending seedy industrial machinery video screenings at 2am in the bad part of town.

"grease me daddy."

Honestly, IBM would do well to just stick to their course. This AI thing is due for a pretty severe market adjustment to bring some rationality back into the tech decision makingl, We're already seeing a lot of companies shitting the bed over token costs and realiseing they laying off the entire tech staff would just cost them more. And this flows on.

Or this is wishful thinking on the part of myself, a 50yo whos been feeling a lot less secure about my future job prospects lately if I dont stop rejecting any and every offer to go into management..

Tbh I'm wondering if Trump purchased any intel stock beforehand.

They've had those demos for years , decades even, and they still dont release it. Its not hard to escape the verdict that he's not telling the whole truth on this one.

Meanwhile the chinese EV makers have entire cities where you can literally get in your EV and it'll just drive you there, complete with RF interaction with traffic lights, automated battery replacement systems, the whole kit, in far more insane traffic conditions than the americans will ever have, thanks to vast amounts civilians on bicycles and scooters.

FSD isn't impossible But for whatever reason Tesla just cant seem to get it to work to the level it needs to. While the competition is

My point was more that politicized interventions in universities tend to fail miserably, because they ignore the economics of the sector and create perverse incenstives instead.

The FS itself is likely not being removed because it is one with implementations outside of MacOS (For instance my camera can be hooked to an HFS drive) But HFS Encrypted was always a take-your-life-into-your-own-hands thing. If you got a sector corruption, thats an unrecoverable loss of the whole FS. Whereas unencrypted, it just took a rebuiold of the FAT and you could at least recover the majority. It *highly* unlikely anything other than MacOS supported the encryption.

While its a PITA to lose that support, theres really not a lot to lose by doing so, whilst losing unencrpyted HFS breaks a lot of third party device integrations.

Its insanely tone deaf too. Almost everyone I know (I hang in a circle with a lot of professional photographers and artists) either have, or are planning to, removed their instagram accounts.

Meta grossly misunderstands the level of sheer animosity the photography and arts community , the people that built it, has towards a technology that has laid waste to the economy of the creative industries and put so many photographers and artists out of work.

I still like RTMark's idea from back in the day about this stuff.

If the courts insist that corporations are people, then the court should be willing to sentence a corporation to death when it kills people.