It has nothing to do with being cowards, they are robots. It's a case of saving a little money at the expense of being excluded from a lot of money.

Piracy laws are very effective... for curbing intentional piracy in businesses because they have too much to lose to break laws like these and they are basically robots with instructions to follow the law.

But they won't outlaw these, what they'd do is prohibit companies that use them from government work/contracts and the government gives away WAY too much of our money to give that up.

... but I'm not hopeful. In a way I hope Google still turns the screws on installing apps, including the proposed 24-hr delay on 3rd-party apps. Linux smartphones are coming, and the more they squeeze us, the more incentive to finish truly open phone platforms.

I'm old enough to remember this.

Though it looks kinda funky, will keep an eye out for one on the surplus junk market after the bubble pops, could be a fun control surface for other things.

No no, Paypal will freeze the payment, citing it as 'suspicious'. They hold onto the cash, and the acquisition can't go through :)

Good.

.. and suddenly Altman has the chance to suck on the teat of the Military-Industrial Complex in order to secure never-ending funding for his unprofitable sham, so of course he's taking it.

For me it does -- I hope they can keep it going. The popup and background play features are killer.

.. Google Home has been nerfed in so many ways over the past few years, it's almost useless now save for turning my lights on and off.

- They killed the Apps SDK, and all games and custom stuff
- They killed Google Music, and 'play X from my Library", only Youtube Premium Music now or ads in between every damn track
- They killed all podcast feeds other than Youtube Music (many podcasts aren't on Youtube).
- They have borked most radio stations (used to be able to play almost any station via TuneIn)

The Enshittification has been wide, deep and purposeful. No way in hell will I *ever* pay for Youtube Premium.

Not much else needs to be said. A $1T company, yet a drain on the nation.

...source code for the version his local university had, their listings were often discarded in the back bins of the labs. Oh, and he wasn't enrolled in classes there so he stole computer lab time to work on his version.

No I don't have the references handy, but they're out there.

Bah, stupid title length limits...

Meant to say "..plenty of other pre-existing reasons why Bill Gates is a trash human being."

One more or less won't matter.

I liked my ZenPhone 2 Laser back around 2018-2019, for a while.. but the camera was sluggish as all hell, and the ZenPhone 3 was, I'm told, even worse. ASUS did absolute dick all to improve the situation, despite the fact their forum was absolutely full of users complaining about camera issues.

And, idiot that I am, back in 2024 I bought an ASUS laptop (Duo Pro 2024) -- dual-screen beauty of engineering, but, you guessed it, ZERO support for issues and they pretend Linux doesn't even exist.

It's been about 2 years and keyboard, screen and audio support for Linux are still entirely absent save for some heroic independent devs who are trying to make things work (they're still not done reverse-engineering ASUS's bullshit).

Never buy ASUS, ever. They hate open hardware, and hate users.

I admit I'm sour on LLMs, esp. in math. It could be though, that by brute-force searching for related topics and data, it brought enough info together to propose something and this time, it happened to be right or nearly-right enough for the researcher to have a light-bulb go off, so to speak.

I fully admit I didn't RTFA (read the fine article) -- I'm supposed to be working right now. But given how often LLMs get things entirely, completely, but confidently wrong, I still must presume this was the rare exception, not proof of some new step in "AI".