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Comment Control of Secure Boot via the Windows copyright (Score 1) 86

Microsoft has no control over secure boot. You can even load your own custom keys for the Windows boot process

Microsoft has control over distribution of the copyrighted Windows operating system. It has used this control to dictate whether or not makers of devices that include Windows are allowed to let users load their own custom keys. For example, Microsoft required makers of devices that come with Windows RT (the port of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 to ARM architecture) to block end users from turning off Secure Boot and block end users from loading their own custom keys, as conditions for a license under copyright to distribute Windows RT on those devices.

Submission + - Why AI Babysitter Is the Hottest New Profession

theodp writes: "AI may allow anyone to generate code, but only a computer scientist can maintain a system," explained Google.org Global Head Maggie Johnson in a LinkedIn post, Computer Science Education in the AI Era. Johnson was formerly Director of Education at Google and a founding Board member of the Google.org-funded nonprofit Code.org, which last year launched a campaign to make CS and AI a high school graduation requirement.

Johnson continued: "As AI-generated code becomes more accurate and ubiquitous, the role of the computer scientist shifts from author to technical auditor or expert. While large language models can generate functional code in milliseconds, they lack the contextual judgment and specialized knowledge to ensure that the output is safe, efficient, and integrates correctly within a larger system without a person’s oversight. [...] The human-in-the-loop must possess the technical depth to recognize when a piece of code is sub-optimal or dangerous in a production environment. [...] "We need computer scientists to perform forensics, tracing the logic of an AI-generated module to identify logical fallacies or security loopholes. Modern CS education should prepare students to verify and secure these black-box outputs."

The NY Times reports that companies are already struggling to find engineers to review the explosion of AI-written code. Any thoughts on what AI Babysitting might/should pay?

Comment Re:And yet no more app for my TV (Score 1) 24

My gaming PC is on the opposite end of the house, so not only would I have to run a 50' HDMI cable, I'd need a 50' USB cable for my controller, since it can't pair over BT through the multiple walls between the couch and the PC. Believe me, I've tried :)

Ever thought about moving the gaming PC? :-)

But seriously, there are cheap wireless KVM solutions for 1080p, and slightly less cheap 4K HDMI wireless extenders. I haven't seen any 4K + USB, but they probably exist. But I'd imagine anything wireless is going to be artifacty.

If you can run a single Ethernet cable in a crawlspace or attic, you can get a KVM extender for $153, and that presumably would be a clean, near-zero-latency HDMI and USB repeater (because it's probably just a bunch of level shifters).

Comment Re:And yet no more app for my TV (Score 1) 24

They got rid of Steam Link for my Samsung TV, but release it for a device so few people own. WTF Valve?

Why would you use Steam Link for a TV and waste precious network bandwidth and suffer compression artifacts and lag just to avoid running an HDMI cable? Even if it is in different rooms, $90 plus a point-to-point Cat5 cable will solve the problem permanently without all the hassles associated with using software workarounds.

Steam Link makes perfect sense when you're talking about headsets that are mobile, but streaming to a fixed device like a TV set sounds like a niche use case that would be better served with dedicated hardware.

Comment Regulated gambling now possibly illegal (Score 1) 83

One very interesting point by the dissenting judge is that if you accept the majority's broad interpretation of swaps, then not only are prediction markets swaps, but normal gambling is as well. Therefore all currently legal and regulated gambling is actually illegal because the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction, not the states, and none of these gambling operations are following CFTC rules.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 188

How does any of what you said matter? Even if you think making $140K isn't upper middle class, the research still shows more people are going from $90k to $140k than those who are going from $90k to $40k. It still shows that more people in the middle class, however you define it, are going up in income than are going down.

These categories are just arbitrary lines used to make it easier for people to identify and understand the insights analysts are able to pull from the data. And however you slice it, the data shows a story of improvement. Not as much improvement as I'd like to say, but improvement overall. We have been seeing the same trend for 30+ years.

What this story doesn't show is the dark side of an otherwise good development. Most people don't really notice day-to-day how much better off the 1% are because there are so few of them (by definition). But when a growing number of people see 30%+ of people around them living much better lives, they begin to notice.

Submission + - Stanford Daily Ponders Fate of Bill Gates Namesake Building on April Fools' Day

theodp writes: Gates Computer Science Building renamed Peter Thiel Center for Panoptic Computing reads the headline of an April Fools' Day story that ran in the Humor section of The Stanford Daily (with the further disclaimer that "This article is purely satirical and fictitious"). The story begins: "Following revelations that the billionaire founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, had a longstanding relationship with convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Stanford has announced it will strip Gates’ name from the William H. Gates Computer Science Building and instead honor alumnus Peter Thiel B.A. ‘89, JD ‘92. Gates, who is not a Stanford alumnus, gave an initial gift of $6 million toward the building’s construction in 1992."

While fictional, the story does make one wonder what may become of the academic and institutional buildings worldwide named after Bill Gates in the blowback over his past ties to Epstein, which have already played a factor in the breakdown of his marriage to Melinda French Gates and friendship with Warren Buffet. In addition to The Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford, this includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex at the University of Texas at Austin, Bill and Melinda Gates Hall at Cornell, The Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and The William H. Gates Building at MIT's Stata Center. Buildings named after Gates' parents include Mary Gates Hall and William H. Gates Hall at the University of Washington, and The William Gates Building at the University of Cambridge (UK).

Aside from the Thiel angle, The Stanford Daily's April Fools' Day story may not be as far-fetched as it may seem — many universities' naming policies include provisions allowing donors' names to be removed from buildings, programs, or other facilities under extraordinary circumstances. For example, the University of Washington's Regent Policy No. 50 states, "The University reserves the right to revoke and terminate any naming on reasonable grounds not limited to the revelation of corporate or individual acts detracting from the University’s mission, integrity, or reputation." Then again, UW notes that Bill's parents and siblings served as UW Regents for decades, so one expects Bill will be granted some leeway here for what he has characterized as 'foolish' choices on his part.

Comment Tap or click to view article (Score 1) 43

No video (or animated image) should ever load/autoplay unless the user interacts with that element, indicating he/she wants to play it.

How granular would the permission be? If web browsers start blocking all animation and post-load layout shifting by default, including CSS transitions and animations, this would encourage website operators to structure the page to coerce permission to animate in each document. For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."

Comment Re:Please sir (Score 1) 193

Do you think the new supreme leader is going to somehow be more rational than the last one?

That's the simplicity of the system I already outlined for you up above. Just repeat until one is. Iran will run out of irrational ayatollahs long before America runs out of bombs.

If by simple, you mean simplistic, then yeah. What you're forgetting is that every time a bomb kills someone's mother, father, brother, sister, wife, son, or daughter, another America hater is born. So there's likely to be an endless supply of irrational leaders, so long as they are put into power by someone bombing the previous leader along with random military targets.

The only regime changes that are ever really positive long-term are regime changes led by the people of a country against their leaders. All other regime changes are statistically more likely to make things worse than better.

Comment Re:Maybe stick to the speed limit? (Score 1) 196

"Most of what makes neighborhood streets dangerous is pedestrians" - not in the UK.

Let me restate that. Most of what makes neighborhood streets dangerous is vehicles and pedestrians using the same space at similar times.

Pedestrians have priority over all forms of transport on the road.

Who has priority is largely uninteresting, because ultimately if a car hits you, you're still probably dead whether you had the right of way or not.

Vehicles make the roads dangerous

Ostensibly, sure, if you got rid of all the cars, streets would be safer for pedestrians, but they would also be a huge waste of space, because pedestrians don't need huge roads to walk. Roads exist principally for cars. The fact that pedestrians have to cross them is just an unfortunate design constraint that's hard to avoid cheaply, and giving pedestrians priority is mostly just feel-good policymaking that doesn't solve any of the fundamental problems.

The only truly safe way to share the space is to ensure that pedestrians aren't in the road when cars are. The best approach, at least in cities, is second-floor walkways, so that pedestrians and cars are never vertically at the same traffic layer. A slightly less optimal, but still reasonable approach is to give pedestrians a separate walk cycle in which the entire intersection is theirs. Pedestrians have priority during that cycle, and cars have priority the rest of the time, and as long as everyone follows the rules, nobody gets hurt.

But none of those solutions work for neighborhood streets, which is why the presence of pedestrians on neighborhood streets without sidewalks and proper traffic control for pedestrians results in the roads being inherently more dangerous than other streets.

Comment Re:Local LMs worth it? (Score 1) 46

The smallest (and only) open weight model that gets Opus or Sonnet level coding performance is MiniMax M2.5, and you need about 512GB of VRAM for that model (with enough room for input tokens). At 128GB you are looking at Opus 4.0 / Haiku 4.5 level models like Qwen 3.5 122B-A1 at Q4 or Qwen3-Coder-Next 80B-A3B at Q8.

I think it's likely we will have small language models that specifically target coding that are at Opus 4.6 quality on 128-256GB of VRAM in the next couple years, I don't think we are there yet.

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