The 20 mile range makes this mostly an expensive toy.

Precisely my thoughts. This is a toy for hopping across San Francisco bay.

Total payload is 220lbs. One guy. You will not be going shopping in this.

It's not a car; it's an aircraft (seriously, just look at it -- there's no way this will be rolling down Hwy 101), so takeoff and landing need to be, at best, on a helipad -- which you will have to clear immediately for the next guy coming in whose battery is going flat.

I doubt you could get from Santa Cruz to San Jose in 20 minutes even by air. Atherton and Saratoga will ban these outright because of the noise. Maybe Los Altos Hills or Portola Valley will grudgingly allow a handful of them -- right up to the point a crashing one starts a fire.

Let me see if I've got the basis of this "shortage" right.

Sam Altman, using money he doesn't have, bought up almost 50% of DRAM wafers that don't exist, to turn into DRAM chips that don't exist (or maybe not; maybe he's just playing keep-away from his competitors), to put alongside GPU chips that don't exist, to stuff into server farms that don't exist, which will consume vast quantities of electricity that doesn't exist -- all to create "artificial intelligence" ....which doesn't exist.

How is this not a colossal scam?

Hedge funds and private equity firms demurred on investing in NTP, reportedly claiming that the foundation didn't have a credible plan for improving engagement.

...This is my embarrassed face.

I had previously assumed you were speaking of allocating $1M across all projects used by Google. In fact, you were speaking of giving $1M to each such project.

One would wonder what sorts of strings would be attached to such largesse. Still, that would indeed be game-changing and amazing.

Google could create a new corporate policy to provide a minimum of $1M/year to any open source project it uses.

That would be real innovation.

While acknowledging your noble intentions, no, it wouldn't be innovation. It would be cheaping out.

In the San Francisco bay area, $1.0E+06/year gets you maybe five skilled engineers. Set against the quantity of Open Source projects used by such organizations -- FFmpeg, GStreamer, OpenSSL, ssh, rsync, gcc, gdb, coreutils, nanopb, Samba, Lua, Python, Perl, Git, Vim/Neovim, Yocto, ImageMagick, Blender, the Pipewire framework, the Linux kernel, the Debian packaging system, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc... -- five engineers is miserly.

Google appears to have understaken the expense of spinning up an ocean-boiling slop machine to automagically generate plausible bug reports, and then casually fire off an email to the maintainers.

Note that Google has not undertaken the expense of assigning an engineer to also write a fix.

That they are not doing that is a conscious, management-approved choice.

...Y'know how Google relishes in closing bug reports with "WONTFIX - Working as designed?" I think FFmpeg should close slop reports from Google with, "WONTFIX - Unfunded."

"Hey, everyone! Don't pay any attention to those Japanese translators who'd been volunteering their time and expertise for the last 20 years that we just insensitively and comprehensively shit on... Look! New mascot logo! Giz cash..."

(Narrator: New revenues did not materialize.)

The FDA lied about it, got sued, and had to retract their statement. I have that linked somewhere around here too. Ah, https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

Your summary completely -- and I would further suggest deliberately and maliciously -- mischaracterizes the case. The article you cite states that the Fifth Circuit found that the FDA overstepped its authority by providing medical advice. Nowhere did the court find the FDA's statements were materially false or misleading -- it is and remains a fact that ivermectin is ineffective and inappropriate for treating COVID. Therefore, claiming the FDA "lied" willfully misrepresents the case.

The article then goes on to support my point and the Democratic Administration's efforts -- that misinformation concerning COVID-19 was and remains rampant, and that it needs to be combatted for the sake of public health.

Speech is not violence. Speech is not a threat to public health. Speech is necessary to find truth in society.

Look up the term, "fighting words." Then go visit a venue with a principally African American clientele, and explain how you should be free to use the N-word without consequence, because it's merely "speech."

It sounds to me like your sanctimonious polemics would be better received on X. They have a prettier UI as well. Off you go, sonny...

...there was extensive documentation on how Biden pressured social media companies to silence everyday American citizens. [ ... ]

Couple 'o things:

1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,
2. Assertions made without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.

Not even ordinary evidence was provided. So we can set that nonsensical statement aside.

The Truth: The Biden Administration was seeking to remove maliciously posted lies and falsehoods concerning COVID-19's risks and how to mitigate them, so that people without mad Google sk1llz searching for information on staying healthy would be less likely to encounter false, life-threatening information.

Example: Back in 2020, there was this slob who suggested on national television that the best way to avoid COVID was to inject disinfectant , and that the disease could by treated by ivermectin -- which is a horse de-wormer (i.e. an anti-parasitic, not an anti-viral). Both claims were absolute bullshit , but nevertheless got repeated millions of times on social media by "everyday Americans." It was this kind of LIFE-THREATENING GARBAGE that the Democratic Administration was seeking to mitigate. So that people wouldn't, y'know... die.

Well. It seems that Google has been cowed by -- or now is under the complete control of -- fascist filth.

Post links to viable substitutes for Google's various services here.

ve never seen a software distribution mechanism as careless and sloppy as NPM. Bazillions of dependencies and no signing of packages. [ ... ]

Rust's cargo packaging system is almost exactly the same way. And the last time I looked, Go's packaging was very similar. And package signing won't help if the maintainer's key/cert has been exfiltrated and cracked.

This is what you get when you embrace DLL Hell -- the idea that you should pin your program to a single specific revision of a library, rather than, y'know, doing the engineering work to ensure that, as an app author, you're relying only on documented behavior; and, as a library author, to be responsible for creating backward compatibility for old apps linking to old entry points. Sticking to that principle lets you update shared system libraries with the latest enhancements and bug fixes, while remaining relatively sure none of the old clients will break.

"Sometimes you have to break backward compatibility." Agreed, but the interval between those breaks should be measured in years, not days.

Previous comments have been drawing analogies to Black Mirror, but this "idea" goes back much further...

...This is an episode of Max Headroom (US version).

Specifically, S02E02: "Deities." A company claims to be able to bring past loved ones back to "life" as an AI, for a modest recurring fee. But Bryce (the creator of Max Headroom) opines they can't possibly have the compute power to do it, as it requires a large mainframe just to run Max's highly flawed, glitching bust.

Wouldn't surprise me if the "visionaries" behind this saw that episode, and saw an opportunity to fleece gullible rubes.

Thankfully, he was mostly wrong...

Um, when was the last time you stayed at a hotel?

There's a microprocessor in every doorknob.