Given how crappy a lot of "official' upsampling and other AI slop is and other batch-processing errors, aspect ratio changes ruining editing, and IP licensing making the music vanish, pirated media is frequently simply better quality.

But their big problem is reinventing all the cable shenanigans people hate without the natural monopoly to enforce it. When you run a wire to someone's house, there's lock-in. Streaming removes that "loyalty'. Now add in all the constant media swapping that means you can't count on things staying in the catalog, and there's no reason to want to use any of them, other than convenience.

And my storage server is a lot more convenient than any offer I've seen from the streamers.

Tech leadership of large firms has been pretty quick to lick the orange anus.

Musk, Cook, Zuckerborg, Altman, Brin, Ellison, Catz, Brockman, Pichai, Nadella, and more that I'm forgetting all have Trump-ass on their breath.

There are a few who seem to prefer democracy, but if you can name a technology company leader of a non-trivial firm that publicly supports the goals of OWS types, please name them - I can't.

DVRs were the starting point. The namesake for what you're talking about, tivoization, is Tivo, the DVR that existed way back when TV was still analog and being displayed on CRTs.

It's why the GPLv3 was made: to add clauses to forbid tivoization. Instead, a lot of the open source community moved in the opposite direction, moving to licenses that allowed companies even more freedom to lock up their code.

Good luck. This is not a new fight by any means. You could argue that the FSF has been fighting it for almost half a century. People by and large do not care.

I'd be amazed if this wasn't already the case. We've already been through this with Tivo, it was one of the reasons behind the creation of the GPLv3. Tivo based their DVRs on Linux, and provided downloads of the Linux code. But their DVRs used hardware DRM to ensure that only code signed by Tivo would run, making it so that even with the open source code, you couldn't run changes on the hardware.

From what I can tell, Vizio is doing the same thing, but isn't providing downloads to the kernel code they're using. It's possible that there's some proprietary hardware drivers that they don't want to release code to, but Nvidia has already show how to work around that.

I expect the end result to be like Tivo: a bunch of archives of the open source software used in the TV, but none of the code required to make it useful and no signing key necessary to allow any changes to run on the TV itself.

You can't count on voting records to mean anything, thanks to the "designated villains:" the politicians whose job it is to tank a law that a party wants to be on record as having voted for, but don't want to pass. We're watching this happen right now with votes on the Iran war. Democrats don't want them to pass. What they want is to be on the record as being against it and want Republicans to be on the record as supporting it, even though there is no chance they'll do anything to stop it if they get the power to do so.

Both sides play games like this, with the end result being that only laws that have the support of large donors having any real chance of passing. Who votes for and who votes against is always carefully calculated to let vulnerable politicians give the appearance of supporting things constituents support, while never needing to support those things in actual fact.

I've seen hints of this sort of belief before, and I want to understand it, but it seems so incredibly sheltered and naive that I have trouble believing a large number of people actually hold it.

For starters, your implicit assumption seems to be that "MAGA" == downwardly mobile white folks. That's part of the coalition, yes - but the dominant caste is wealthy suburbanites - we used to call them "white flight" voters. Think car dealership owners and dentists. The kind of people who can afford to fuck up boats at "Trump Yacht Rallies".

The second is that somehow condescension and ridicule somehow uniquely attaches to this segment. Hate to break it to you, but that is most people's normal. It is privileged white folks who are learning what it is like to be treated like everyone else, and are reacting to that.

The third weird thing is an utter failure to notice that these condescending "captains of industry" are all MAGA supporters. Trumpistas who think this way are literally cheering their own subjugation. MAGAts are being led around by the fucking nose. It would be hilarious if they weren't taking the rest of us with them.

Wow, Apple, screwing over a partner? Who ever could have seen this coming?

I don't understand why anyone would ever partner on Apple on anything. They are notorious for screwing over their partners at this point. There's even a term for it, "Sherlocking." People seem to have forgotten that Apple's "privacy" stance originated as Steve Jobs not wanting to share any of the data "Apple owned" with anyone else.

It's $10 for one person, but take 1 million people, and it's $10 million

Right, that's why this makes sense for Gmail. The spreadsheet says make the free tier extraction percentage number go up, and they value noncomplying users' time at zero. The math should is different for company-internal email.

The operative question should be, how much do you want to spend on employees sorting email instead of writing code or whatever you hired them to do? Because that's how you're buying your disk storage savings.

Different places have different considerations - as I mentioned above, my employer now clearly values reducing litigation risk over my productivity. In the past at startups, my decision was to give folks huge quotas and treat it like any other capacity management problem for scaling/budgeting.

There has to be some limit, and if someone somehow bounces off of it nobody thinks it unreasonable to tell them to fix it. And anyway there's usually a reason like a misconfigured something that infinitely-spams about whatever it is upset about. Otherwise they can worry about work instead of email management make-work.

Should be a knock-off for $500 soon enough.

Of course it'll be a little rough around the edges, and the solar panel won't work, and instead of growls it makes Bart Simpson jokes, but I'm sure it'll be fine.

When I was directly admining systems, I didn't have time to argue with people over a couple dollars worth of storage.

I also didn't want people wasting time worrying about quotas or other artificial limits unless they were abusive. (The dude who wrote something that was authing against LDAP 10s of millions of times a day got a talking-to.)

A lot of people confuse "I can't imagine doing or needing X" with "there is a good reason to deny the ability to do X." Honestly, I think most people are Doing It Wrong, most of the time. So? If they're getting shit done, none of my business until they are making unreasonable demands that impact operations. And 100G of mail is peanuts.

My current complaint is the opposite - I can't keep mail longer than a year now, lest it be discoverable in some potential future lawsuit. I've gotten better at predicting what I'll need to know later, but still miss things I should have saved somewhere, and that absolutely damages my productivity.

What I'm hearing is "But, I'm a highly-compensated professional! Not like all the plebes we spy on constantly to compensate me."

I do agree that they should stand up for themselves, and they have my support, once I'm done supporting causes I consider more important, like toe lint eradication.

Facebook headhunters used to bug me constantly. I put up an autoresponder telling them what I thought of their business model, leadership and general behavior, and that I would wash dishes for a living before working for a degrading, anti-human shithole like FB. Eventually they got the message.

I ended up in a fairly heated argument with some FB employees several years back when I mentioned that. It was obvious they felt stung by someone rejecting the choices they made and kept leaning in to, "but I make more money than you". Which was I was happy to concede, it was true. Suggesting that my self-esteem costs more than theirs didn't seem to be what they wanted to hear..

I wonder if those folks are still there, protesting about their workplace privacy.

The headline may as well be "Rose maintains transactional relationships with tech media after all these years".

At this point I think if a good idea walked up and smacked him on the head, the name alone might doom it. It has been an also-ran in a confusing number of categories, so depending on your age you may remember it as a very different kind of failure than I do. Sort of the converse of trademark dilution - it is clear what the name is and who owns it, what's muddy is what the service is supposed to be.

My home storage setup is currently is two 8 20TB drive arrays - one live, one a remote backup.

I was buying drives to add another stripe when the pricing started to ramp up - I try to buy them over time to get different drives from different lots. Now I wish I'd just bought a bunch.

This time last year they were $369, sometimes cheaper. The most recent one I bought was $500. The cheapest I see them right now is $769.

I think I'll be waiting on that new stripe, but at least I have four spares to keep the existing system running.

Can anyone name under what authority this would operate?

I'll wait.

(Executive orders are orders to the executive branch. If you aren't an executive branch employee, they have as much authority over you as a postcard from me does.)

Also a good time to remember that a big part of the anti-Biden case from the techbro money types was how stifling and onerous the "please don't make dangerous robots" guidance was. Bill Ackman upside down in clownshoes on a unicycle, with a kazoo up his ass.

I disagree.

1. Backups were stored on the same volume as live data, and were destroyed by the same command. I agree that is a bad design on the vendor's part, but dude's responsibility was to read and understand the system he was using, and he tacitly admits he didn't understand that:

This is the part that should be a red alert for every Railway customer reading this. Railway markets volume backups as a data-resiliency feature. But per their own docs: "wiping a volume deletes all backups."

2. No, I think you misread - he says he didn't understand the token's scope:

We had no idea — and Railway's token-creation flow gave us no warning — that the same token had blanket authority across the entire Railway GraphQL API, including destructive operations like volumeDelete. Had we known a CLI token created for routine domain operations could also delete production volumes, we would never have stored it.

3. DR !=backups. Disaster recovery is is ensuring you have a path back to operational health from disasters. It is a set of plans, procedures and assets that has to be rehearsed. We test our ours once a year; if you are not exercising your procedures, you don't have a DR plan.

Further, the "agent obtained the key itself" - from stuff it was allowed to dig through. It found the credential hardcoded in a script it has access to. This required three different fuckups to happen:

(1) They didn't understand the scope of the token - see above.
(2) They hardcoded the token (which they didn't understand to be 'root' scoped) in a script. This turns any disclosure into a full compromise.
(3) They obviously let the robot root around lots of stuff it shouldn't have access to. Even aside from the disaster that happened, that's an invitation for adversarial disclosure - if this didn't get them, something else would have at some point.

Replace the word "AI agent" with "rogue employee". Would you blame yourself for them going postal and burning your business down?

To start with the utterly obvious, an LLM is not a human, and if you attempt to substitute one for the other, you are necessarily taking responsibility for the robot's actions. This is the same logic as not leaving weapons laying around where kids can find them, except some do kids have the capacity to know better than to use them.

That aside, I do agree that in early-stage companies you're not going to have the safeguards you need to survive a rogue employee or carelessly deployed robot, except probably around the bank account. Which is all the more reason to to be careful and understand your tools, or pay someone to do that for you.

The industry is shoehorning this shit into every product and service out there despite multiple documented examples of safeguards not working.

Oh my god. Tech companies are exaggerating their capabilities. This is a never-before seen crisis - how can other companies possibly be expected to understand that advertised claims may not be accurate or products might even be dangerous? My faith in capitalism is crushed. Please pass me my High Noon beverage so I can drink it while driving my Ford Pinto as my kid uses their Samsung Galaxy in the back seat.