I think you significantly overstate the gravity of their announcement. You can entirely bot the process of finding a flight to suit and handing you a link; open it, pay with stored credit card, and you'll still be entirely within what they explicitly allow.

In practice they don't necessarily have much incentive to do anything about bookings they have some sloppy-implementation reason to suspect are fully botted(in their ideal world comparison searching would presumably be harder; but cat is obviously out of the bag on that one an concealing that almost all of the work was automated will be relatively simple so there's a high false positive risk); but since you were specifically directed to not do that they are better placed to deal with cases where someone's openclaw fiasco buys them a nonsense route and they want to try to make it the airline's problem.

Alleged professionals checking secrets into github and shipping them in retail binaries is at least as old as 'devops' being a thing people say with a straight face; and standards in 'AI' and for amateurs are even lower than in software development generally. There's some diversity in terms of the ignorant vs. the negligent; but in practice egregious mishandling of secrets is to be expected.

Is anyone else surprised that the DoJ ended up asking; rather than Satya just giving Dear Leader the access as part of a lobbying effort?

I don't think linkedin has, or has ever claimed to offer, any sort of protection of user data against administrator access, and the broligarchy has been nothing but eagerly cooperative.

On one hand, I fondly remember using those forums myself. And people are absolutely right; it was a place where users could share common issues with the hardware and get an idea of whether or not something had a defect. Meanwhile, Apple would try its best to keep those rumors silent and just quietly do warranty repairs as the broken hardware came back to them for service. So I feel like shutting them down is "the end of an era" in a way.

On the flip side? I'm not so sure any manufacturer is wise to create these "customer forums" that they don't officially support. It wastes a lot of people's time going to one with a problem, when the maker of the product never even sees their complaints or can be bothered to assist with them. If you're going to spend the money and time putting up a support forum, I think you should commit employee resources to reading it regularly and offering official support.

Fans of the products often create unofficial support forums themselves, anyway -- and those tend to be better in the long-run. People know the manufacturer isn't going to ban them for saying something negative, and the expectations are set from the start that it's not a place for official support.

as I do a lot of 3D printing and some designing, I've dabbled in Blender a few times. My wife knows it better than I do, since she spent a lot of time working with a friend to learn to use it to create 2D animations. Now, it's her "go to" tool to help edit our existing .STL files when we need to modify one. (Personally, I still get by with TinkerCAD for the basic things I need to do.)

The one downside I've observed with her trying to co-author/edit work with her friend online is the way Blender seems to require all of the project contents in a specific folder path? Maybe someone here with more knowledge can correct me if this is wrong/user error? But her laptop she used for the animation projects has a mess of folders on the Windows desktop that apparently can't easily be moved without breaking Blender's ability to open them properly?

It seems like her friend would send her a zip file of a project and then she was stuck putting it back in the same path he used. I remember that being the workflow of old desktop publishing packages like Quark Express on the Mac, many years ago. But I thought it was almost extinct in modern software.

That's honestly the weird aspect, to me. Infidelity is pretty common and unsurprising, even among people who don't dress like the midlife crisis is hitting pretty hard; but if you've got options why pick the almost comically politically compromising one?

Even if it has to be a workplace thing, and wouldn't be the same with some sort of heavy-mutual-NDA escort, there have to be more than a few AI lunatics who want him to be their accelerationist daddy sprinkled across areas Nvidia can actually export to.

This sounds awfully like a cynical rebadge of the same process termination and endpoint isolation features EDR packages all already have. Yup, 'agentic' is software too; so if you think a process tree looks dodgy you can terminate it or isolate the endpoint; assuming none of the (relatively common) 'EDR-killer' malware flavors are in use; in which case hopefully you have a more network-level isolation plan in mind.

It beats having literally nothing short of calling whoever is closest to the power cable and telling them to pull it; but it's only modestly helpful if determining whether the unpredictable-by-design software is doing wicked unpredictability or virtuous unpredictability to the authorized administrator; especially if it's anything time-sensitive.

I've never used the consumer version; but historically there was a significant amount in common between that and the "user state migration tool" they made available for command line operations or SCCM integration. If 'roaming profiles' had ever found a way to suck less I suspect it would have been a nonissue; but roaming profiles always found a way to suck; so that one was a pretty common IT toolkit item.

What kind of free market are we supposed to run with greater access to price signals and less asymmetry of information?

Brutal collectivists in Whitehall will be demanding low barriers to entry next!

Ah, ok. I follow that. The tariffs were pretty temporary though, so by the time people ran out of inventory of many things already in US warehouses? It was coming to an end by Supreme Court ruling.

I'm not sure I'd put a lot of stock in business leaders claiming they're essentially paralyzed due to unpredictable markets, over any of that?

Again, I'd blame AI for most of the current upheaval, with regard to memory and SSD prices going through the roof.

The tech field is clearly in a downward spiral in America, but honestly? I don't see how you can blame Trump directly for much of that? I mean, everyone seems to agree the rise of AI changed the whole playing field, but Trump didn't cause that to happen. He did a bit of bandwagon-jumping so he could talk about it and give it a new name. (Who cares?)

The general economic downturn due to rising diesel fuel costs and the like? Yeah, that's his to own but doesn't explain tech hurting proportionately more than other career paths?

This is what I expected, and I'm basically fine with it.
Trump created this whole mess so now he gets to deal with it.

There are still people viewed as more reasonable/moderate Republicans who got re-elected, such as our Illinois State Representative, Amy Elick.

But clearly, we're just watching that political pendulum swinging back, as it swung forth.... Same old, same old. I predict a whole lot of time wasted simply trying to undo Republican changes without regard to their merit, while older Democrat policies get brought back out. No thinking outside those boxes.

It's certainly more plausible than some cuts we've seen; but it's hard not to still see it as the usual "described as fat-trimming; inevitably ends up reaching bone" exercise just because of how software usually ships. Not everything ships in full abject brokenness; but at least for commercial-grade software (specialty formally verified stuff and projects that have been laser focused on solving a specific problem that bothered an academic computer scientist in 1980 since 1980 can be a different story) you don't generally see software that makes you think "Nope, it's finished, any additional resources allocated would be wasted or actively spoil the product. There are no edge cases that could have used a little more love, nothing interesting but currently too rough or subject-to-change to use".

Even if you go with a fairly optimistic view of productivity effects, 10%-ish gain and no serious side effects, just axing 10% of the employees so you can status-quo the product with lower payroll costs absolutely seems like a chop-shopping move when the status quo for software is so mediocre. As PE cuts go they don't seem to be speedrunning the hollowing-out and immediately going to a skeleton crew of junior vibe coders and a 'support' chatbot; but precious little software ships in a state where "efficiency is up 10%" means that you've already maxed out possible product quality and just need to start cutting people since you no longer have anything for them to do. If the optimistic projections pan out they might be able to approximately maintain their existing level of polish with fewer people; but that level was always a compromise.

It's good to know that this is purely a matter of technological change; no need to look at the classic "get picked up be PE chop shop"/"gradually get stripped for parts" hypothesis. Seems very credible.

We should could use another primary cellular carrier to compete with the "big 3". I'd prefer Musk tried to start his own, vs buying in to be yet another carrier relying on the other company's towers for service.

I recently discovered a real problem with cell service NOT being directly with AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. We have broadband bundled with a cellular plan through Spectrum. The price was good and it just seemed to make sense. Spectrum uses Verizon's towers for its cell service, and most people are happy with Verizon's coverage. BUT, we've had several Spectrum outages recently, including one that lasted throughout the day, where our cellphones suddenly went into SOS mode and could do nothing but dial 911.

At first, it made no sense to me. Why does my broadband going down have anything to do with my cellular connection??

That's when I started asking questions and found out the cellular data packets to and from my cellphone have to be essentially "tagged" as coming from a Spectrum customer, so Verizon's systems know it's ok to allow it through. When Spectrum goes down, it often breaks this tagging functionality so my phone becomes an unknown device trying to use Verizon's network without authorization.

Considering that even if I had VoIP phones at home, they'd also be down with a Spectrum broadband outage? This means I'm completely cut off from calls or texts.

This motivates me to bail on these bundled deals and to go with a separate plan with a major carrier. I just dislike only have the 3 options for them.