Russian sites like Yandex, Rutube, VKvideo... are great to find porn. But if they go down, I'll take the minor inconvenience for the sake of Ukraine.

More seriously, Yandex has been throttling queries rather aggressively lately, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with their compute going up in smoke due to Ukrainian drones.

Bioware may well be a shadow of its former self, but at the end of the day, love or hate what they produced in their latter days, it's all people that worked every day to do their best to bring about what management and the employed script writers specified.
There are many posts about graphics being superb, but gameplay lacking. That's a decision by game designers, rather than all the team, many of who are lumbered with knowing it could be better but constrained to produce what the spec and story said.

I feel for the team, each of who would be trying to make a living, and hope that some of the other studios may be able to wrangle increasing head count to absorb some of the EA fallout. Or that some kickstarter will be set up by the now unemployed members to rebuild some of what the old Bioware (and others) were once known for.

Good luck out there, ex EA employees. We'll be cheering you on for a path back to stability!

War department is Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth doing their fascist circle-jerk.

The DOD/DOW have been working on this for a while. They discovered, early on, that the device had a propensity to cause permanent nerve damage.

It's very unlikely the US have fixed that, as they'd largely sidelined the work as a failure. However, at 36%, Trump needs something he can call a win, no matter what the long-term consequences.

Has it though? In the West, certainly. It's what the MBAs all parrot: focus on your core strengths, divest everything else. Or at least split it off under different names. But there are still Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean conglomerates that make everything from oil tankers, appliances, musical instruments to motorcycles. All under the same name. Somehow they are not too concerned about brand name dilution or core strengths. Like the MCP guy says in Robocop: "Good business is where you find it".

The stock argument is a good point... I'd love to invest in SpaceX the aerospace company, not so much in SpaceX the AI company with a satcom division and its own rocket department. Certainly not if they add an automotive department that seems to have lost its way. Though I don't know if this is about Musk's wants, it smells a lot more like the acquisition of X and xAI by Spacex: a trick to artificially pad the company's valuation, or something like that.

Capitalism just means that the means of production are privately owned, by investors with a profit motive. That's all. You mention the post WW2 era as an example when life was still good for even the lower incomes, and that was also a capitalist era. Capitalism has brought a standard of living unheard of in most of human history, not to the rich but to the working class.

It took more than capitalism to make that happen, capitalism does not provide equal opportunity to everyone nor does it necessarily distribute wealth fairly. And it seems that capitalism tends to concentrate money and with it power into ever-smaller groups. It takes unions, governments, laws and watchdogs to ensure that businesses keep their proper place, play fair and do right by everyone. And they used to do that fairly well for over a century. It's those entities failing us now, not capitalism. GP is right about that.

What can go wrong?

I wonder if the control room technicians will be allowed bathroom breaks...

Yes and No.
MBAs are taught to look at the wrong things. But that "wrong thing" is not the profit motive. Profit is the purpose of a business, in its essence. A founder or enlightened CEO might give it purpose beyond that, but at its core, profit is the goal.

The real question is: what agencies and regulations exist to ensure that this profit motive - useful as it is - serves society's higher goals?

Bingo. NOTHING will be made here except maybe the cardboard boxes, but even that is doubtful. How is snapping a motherboard into a plastic case and slapping a sticker on it going to benefit us or make the device more trusted or secure in any way?

None of that matters. That is not why people are not installing Firefox. It is because Google tries to force Chrome on all their devices and sites, and Microsoft tries to force Edge on all their devices and sites.

Most users don't even realize they have a choice for browsers or what the choices are and why. And in corporate settings, users have no choice. "Power users", as you mention, are the way less than 1%. And most Firefox users are not passionate about the theme (and yes, I do care, and use css hacks) or that occasionally the icons or tab design changes (LIKE IT DOES IN ALL OTHER BROWSERS TOO).

Firefox has been and will probably remain better than Edge and Chrome in many aspects. But users don't care about open standards, privacy, ecosystem security, best ad blocking options, most configurability, etc. They use what the machine came with, or what some site said "works best in" or some idiot tech support place says "we support only."

>"Firefox losing to Edge has more to do with the long-term enshitification of Firefox than any anti-competive behavior by Microsoft."

WRONG. 100% wrong. And how you were modded up is astonishing. Absolutely nobody has switched from using Firefox to Edge because of Firefox and you know it. The people using Edge are precisely because it is the default browser and/or due to Microsoft's aggressive efforts to promote/force Edge, and/or rarely, because there is something specific in Edge the user might want.

Firefox is orders of magnitude more respectful of privacy and control than Edge. It has continuously improved and can, overall, stand toe-to-toe with any other major browser. There might have been some features that were added some people didn't want (and could turn off), or style changes, but that occurs with ALL browsers. So what exact "enshitification" do you think has occurred ONLY IN FIREFOX that would lead a user to switch to Edge? Waiting...

>"I am seeing countless, mostly elderly, folks using Edge because they dont know how to convince windows to let them use chrome by default."

But using Chrome is no better for our ecosystem. They are both Chromium and ultimately Google-controlled. They both harm web-standards, freedom, security, and privacy. So that would still be a lose for everyone.

The mass events (global ones) are not so common, we've had like 4 in the past 80 years or so. But there are some regions (Great Barrier Reef for instance) where it is more or less a yearly affair. It doesn't seem feasible to manually re-seed these areas by hand every year.

Why? You don't need anything exotic to run reasonably-sized models locally. I'm using Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on a machine with two 32 Gb VRAM AMD GPUs and 128 Gb regular RAM at 100 tokens per second. It just finished debugging a bug in the iSCSI bridge for a tape drive.

Doesn't matter. Open models can do the same already, if with a bit more hand-holding.