She sounds much more like Elizabeth Holmes than anyone else.

âoeWe need to have European politicians who are ambitious,â she said. âoeEntrepreneurs cannot do this alone. We need to be backed by the politicians and by the European Space Agency. But we have to start by achieving the crazy targets that weâ(TM)ve set up for ourselves. That will give trust to others to believe in what weâ(TM)re doing.â

eg
"I don't have a plan, but I have ambition, and with piles of your money I can work toward what even I recognize is basically unachievable. If YOU believe in me, then others will also believe in me and I'll be rich, I mean, we'll be successful!"

I think op's point was that they don't know of anyone who has one or knows someone who has one.
Neither do I.
So yes 30m units purportedly sold sounds like a lot (is it? In a planet of 8bn?) but who is the demographic that this is aimed at?

How delightful that the celebratory article was written by ai.

I've been digging into the issue, and apparently FF (uniquely) allows extremely large cookies, compared to everyone else.

Not sure it's salient, not sure it's the cause, but it's an exceptional behavior.

"With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him."

Hm. Some might opine that we should have worked a little harder to limit the power of the US federal government early and hard.

Ofc, we wouldn't have become a superpower, and might not have been able to significantly turn the tide of WW2.

I mainly use ff but lately - esp on phones - their memory use has been constructively huge, throwing errors and causing pages to hang while loading (slashdot, 9gag, others}.
So I have been toying with brave & Zen.

You imply this is a Republican issue? O rly? Personally I think it's both parties, but I expect I'm going to get modded troll for suggesting it's not just Republicans.

Clear recent examples with significant Democratic sponsorship, majorities, or leadership: (I only asked for a half dozen obvious examples)
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021)
Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
CHIPS and Science Act (2022)
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009 stimulus)
Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (2021)
All-American Flag Act (2024)

It is ENTIRELY true that China's manufacturing is rooted in "unfair trade, subsidies, intellectual property theft and surveillance".

It is ALSO entirely true that the US auto industry is likewise rooted in ""unfair trade, subsidies, intellectual property theft and surveillance" AS WELL AS anticompetitive trade practices, monopolistic behavior, market manipulation, mendacity, and grossly deliberately unsafe choices.

The Chinese are awful, but at least they deliver shitty cars that are cheap. The US companies are likewise awful, but they deliver shitty cars that are overpriced as well.

I'm not sure I see any winners here.

It's a good idea.
I just was renewing my dl with the state of MN and to avoid really stupid amounts of time in registration (going from a normal to "enhanced" id they have you upload not just the front and back of your dl but also your passport. So I instead accepted that I'm going to spend my whole fucking day in their office.

I look forward to you refuting a single stated fact?

"It's immune to EMP."

Not quite. Well yes, obviously the COPPER doesn't give a shit about emp but as I understand, emp induces current in wires/circuits, generating voltage that fries things. Anything connected to those wires will absolutely fry to EMP unless hardened.

I believe something about the unstated part of their name being "Not Elon".

Let's remember that Trump was always a east coast Democrat who opportunistically jumped into the 2016 election as a Republican because it was an opportunity for self promotion and free press. Nobody - including him, I believe - thought he'd win.
When he did, his liberal friends turned on him with their typical viciousness, which hurt his all important ego. They spent 4 years in (essentially) permanent impeachment hearings, based on information provided by Russia, which in his simplistic view, entrenched his victim complex and obsession with revenge.

Couple this, then, with the triumphalist left who felt when they defeated the wicked witch, they could do no wrong, and so decided to spend 4 years taking a Victory Shit on everything they could, from inviting 30 million illegals into the country to having trannies flop their frankentits out at the White House on Easter.

Trump is an exponential narcissist, childish, crude, and frankly rather dumb.
Think how odious and repellent the Left have to be to lose to him TWICE?

The previous poster likes to frame it as a vast right wing conspiracy but the truth is never quite that convenient. Most organized churches & clergy in the US are now about gay priests & rainbow banners, actively spreading and refuting their remaining few hyper conservative rural congregations. Democrats have always been a majority in the US, since the Republicans were formed to get rid of slavery. The only reason any Republican ever wins is that enough Democrats get tired of their own party's bullshit and vote right. In the last election EVERY SINGLE DEMOGRAPHIC BLOCK SHIFTED RIGHT (aside from, predictably, white women). Think about that. Blacks & Hispanics - in particular black men - voted in unprecedented numbers for Trump. Or, more accurately, against a Democrat machine that has milked them for votes for 70 years. The election wasn't really (by modern margins) that close.

Don't let the ideologically captured slashdot fool you. The country, having seen Trump as president once, and offered another 4 years of Obama-Biden-Harris said "No, thanks, we'll take the nutball instead". Instead of swallowing the party line of your own European media, maybe ask yourself why. And unlike Democrats, don't just start with the assumption that anyone who disagrees with you must be stupid. That's an ideology for a child.

I don't even faintly dispute that Trump is a shitty, egotistical president. He is. And he makes some really walk decisions. But he is really what the left made him, and I suspect that only a colossal who like his would have been able to buck the malignant insider cabal of both parties. In this case the medicine is unfortunately nearly as bad as the disease.

"You think techologists have a right to torrent their work for free and profit off of it?"
To answer your specific question: Not at all. (reductio ad absurdam is one of the lazier fallacies, btw). I never even implied that. If they torrented an artists' actual work in the sense of sharing that exact work for free they absolutely should be punished to the same degree Pirate Bay or Anna's Archive is, absolutely.

Of course, that isn't what they're doing, is it?

I was merely commenting on your assertion that "The pinnacle of current technology rests on torrented media and unpaid creatives" like visual artists & musicians whinging that their art has been 'stolen' to feed AI programs ... are in fact hoisted by their own petard, which is built frankly of their own greed.

Put it this way:
- Mary draws a picture (or writes a song) that is genius. Everyone loves it.
- Mary puts that artwork online to either a) sell it or b) sell her competence so other people will buy her work. (I'd guess "a" applies more to musicians, "b" to visual artists but either way the principle is the same).
Now, as far as "stealing" in the context your post seemed to mean, two things can happen.
1) Sam sees/hears the piece, thinks, that's pretty cool and learns to copy it from 01-99% successfully. Now, he cannot copy it 100%, as would be him creating identical artwork and claiming "this was produced by Mary". I think we can agree either of those would be theft? But if he creates something similar, or something stylistically comparable - maybe even openly acknowledges 'like Mary's work' - as long as he actually did it himself, openly acknowledges the source, he's legally fine afaik. I don't even know if he HAS to acknowledge her as a source, but that's polite. As long as he clearly did it himself, I think he's probably ok.
2) an LLM comes along, does the exact same thing. Except this time, Mary insists her art is stolen and demands compensation.

The very concept of 2 is absurd. CERTAINLY she can demand attribution, but money? Are the LLMs ever claiming they are ACTUALLY reproducing Mary's work? I don't think so. Just because they can compress the learning process of decades into a few hours' churn doesn't change the principle.

The irony, to me, is that Mary bitches about the LLMs stealing her work when it never could have happened if she didn't initially digitize her product in search of audience/sales. THAT'S ultimately what provides me a chuckle. If Mary CHARGES people to look/listen at her work, and the LLMs sneak past it, it's theft. But if she's put it up to be enjoyed for free, it's ALSO there for anyone - human or algorithm - to learn from. You can't have it one way but not the other.

I know if I worked at Amazon "You don't need perfection to start." would absolutely come up in my next review.

I kid, I kid. Galley slaves never get to speak to the captain nor even the drummer for the deck you're on. Today they just get an email "Pull harder or we toss you to the sharks in an hour" - maybe that's what her 100k lines of code does?