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Comment Ban violent games? Good luck with that... (Score 1) 54

Not being much of a gamer I haven't followed this story (at all!) so the headline and initiative name "Stop Killing Games" made me think it was 1.3 million signatures from people who want to ban games in which people are killed. "No way that's going to pass," I thought. People love virtual murder.

Then I figured out that it's the killing of the games people want to stop, not the games that include killing.

Vaguely related, I had a serious EverQuest addiction ~20 years ago (the reason I gave up on any but the most casual of gaming), and I noticed a few weeks back that it's still available on Steam, and free to play, so I downloaded it and logged on, and even found my old character still there (though with zero gear because I gave it all away when I quit playing). The UI is dramatically different, but the general content seems the same. It's no longer very interesting to me, though.

Comment Re:Polls don't vote (Score 1) 224

The Brexit referendum in 2016 did NOT permit all British registered voters to vote. This was taken to court multiple times.

The number of people who were entitled to vote was very tightly restricted. Access to a polling station was limited. There were many factors that could result in you being excluded. Postal ballots were largely not permitted, even though they were officially allowed. If you were overseas at that precise moment, you couldn't vote. You had to specially register to vote for it, but the website (which not everyone could access, strangely enough) was only up erratically. Those in the Isle of Man, although full British citizens, were not permitted to vote, for example.

Comment Re: You know it kind of bugs me (Score 1) 95

Moto phones bought direct have no unremovable crapware.

The pre-installed apps are just as unremovable on Moto as any other (unless you unlock the bootloader; some Motos have unlockable bootloaders). It may be that you define their pre-installed apps as not crapware, but that's a judgement call, not a statement of technical fact.

Comment Re: You know it kind of bugs me (Score 1) 95

Phones that run stock Android are usually pretty good at letting you uninstall/disable anything you don't want.

Disable, yes. Uninstall, no. If it's pre-installed it's part of the system image, which is mounted read-only and protected with fs-crypt. Actually modifying that would require root access to remount it rw and to disable fs-crypt.

That would also, of course, completely destroy the Android security architecture, leaving you wide open to all sorts of attacks. If you want to do that, get an Android device that has an unlockable bootloader (e.g. Google Pixel), unlock it, then do whatever you like. And be sure not to hire any evil maids.

Comment Re:For what? (Score 1) 61

Interesting, that explains a lot. Until now, I thought I might want to try Cursor, but I already have VS Code with Claude and GitHub Copilot, so why bother!

The integration is a little better in Cursor; the main difference being the in-line edit diffs. But I bounce back and forth between Claude Code and cursor, so I end up just using the git diff view to look at changes about 80% of the time, so it's not much better.

Honestly, my reason for using it is that I have separate Claude and Cursor token budgets -- though I set Cursor to use Claude so I'm using the same model both ways.

Comment Re:Well, let's face it (Score 1) 53

You don't need it on consumer hardware

Except for, you know, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, naturalized Americans and even American born, and all the other people targeted by their governments.

If your government breaking into your house and applying hardware-level attacks to scrape your secrets out of the RAM of your running computer is seriously part of your threat model, it's almost certainly very, very far from your biggest concern.

Also, you should probably consider turning your computer off.

Comment Re:Satellites (Score 2) 89

The law under international treaties says the US government is responsible for all satellites launched from US territory or by US companies. That is why SpaceX have to get permission from the US government to launch.

Other than that, space is like the oceans where you can travel at will wherever you want. Currently you can't claim territory in space, but that will change soon as it becomes possible for people to live there rather than just take a vacation.

Comment Re:redundancy (Score 3, Interesting) 89

Even this article says that most parts will reenter in a few months. Anything small and low-density will come down rapidly due to drag at that altitude and the rest will follow.

SpaceX chose it in part so a dead satellite wouldn't stay around for long causing trouble for other Starlink satellites or other users of that region of space.

Comment Re:Antropic literally asked for this (Score 3, Interesting) 39

Whether Anthropic was trying to hype about Mythos / Fable or not (and FYI, it is a pretty big leap forward), they absolutely did not want to get public access shut down. The US government very much seems to want to have exclusive access to it for now.

Also, to clarify the "jailbreak": They took open source projects that had known vulnerabilities, as well as deliberately introducing vulnerabilities into some other projects, then asked Fable to fix them, and then asked for test scripts to demonstrate that the exploits could no longer be exploited - the implication being that they could then use those exploits against unpatched systems. But what's the logic here? The challenge isn't "how to write exploits against known bugs", any model can do that. The challenge is finding the bugs - something Mythos / Fable has proven better than previous models at. Even if Fable refused to write said test scripts, it would automatically downgrade to Opus 4.8, and then *Opus* would have written those test scripts. Or any other model out there could do it, including free open source ones that can be safety-abliterated at will.

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