This is pretty standard when someone leaves Microsoft.

The management above the person leaving sends a nice message about them and their work and NEVER tells the truth about _why_ they are leaving.

At the upper levels I don't think there's really any sincerity about anything said, one way or another. This is just how corporate America operates.

Nextcloud has done great work in terms of EU-Soverignty and offering credible replacements for all the pieces of the the Microsoft stack.

Nextcloud Talk works well for video conference meetings.

MS Teams is a pretty terrible piece of software. The design of it is bad, and the implementation is bad.

Any software that tries to copy it will also be bad.

If you haven't spun up a nextcloud AIO instance yet for your organization(s), you should try it out.

I hope you've all read the Aschenbrenner paper from 2024.

https://situational-awareness....

Never mind Trump's rambling speaking style. He's aware of it and he likes it.

We know that people in the Trump admin have, at minimum, been briefed on the Aschenbrenner paper. I assume some of them have read the whole thing.

The point he's making - that we're on the cusp of ASI, and the USA MUST not get there wildly behind, for example, China, is correct. And that the USA should not be shackled by an international framework that rival nations are going to ignore anyway.

He's directionally correct, even if you think he's too stupid to know what he's agreeing with.

No. I think hollywood has always been subversive and run by foreign pedophiles. For example, look for the interview with Shirley Temple about what they tried doing to her as a _child_,

I think it has produced enough pro-American-MIC films every now and then to stay out of more government trouble.

You usually don't realize (at the time) that the media you watched as a child was subverting you (and your parents desires). And unless you revisit those films a generation later with a critical eye, you may not realize it ever.

But that's how the ratchet effect works. The newer media that is now visibly odious to me is only visibly odious to me because it is targeting the edge of an overton window that has continued moving since my own youth. The leading edge of socially allowable media subversion continues to advance until a historical reset event sets it back somewhat. Or, sometimes, when there is sufficient market rejection.

In the case of hollyweird, the concentration of power has significant drawbacks; destroying that concentration of power will probably be a net benefit. (to be clear, I think It will amplify other problems instead).

In general, I think evil seems to be more effective when it is centralized and powerful, with captured institutions, while maintaining the ability to operate openly, and has de-facto monopoly control over the domain in which it operates, and when most people do not understand what is being done to them.

If Trump had promised to destroy hollywood, I would have voted for him 10x harder.

(And i expect I would be disappointed because he wouldn't actually follow through with it)

Anyway, hopefully, AI gets the job done and finally kills that wretched industry. I look forward to further democratization of movie making.

(fwiw, my knee jerk reaction is to oppose the merger.)

The current generation of these smartglasses devices will fail and disappear.

Let me show my work:

1. women cannot use these smart glasses to take selfies.
2. therefore, women will not wear them.
3. therefore, the only people who wear them will be men
4. anything that men do but which women do not do is probably criminal, but certainly creepy, a red flag, or a cause of the ick
5. therefore, men will be shamed (or arrested) into not wearing them either

QED.

I don't think training a model with copyrighted data is any kind of gray zone at all.

Running inference against such a model _might_ be infringing.

But I don't see the legal argument that model training would be.

Think of model training as lossy data compression. You provide an input, it produces a compressed artifact, and it can no longer reproduce the original when you uncompress it. It can produce _something_. It cannot reproduce the original.

On slashdot, we all agree that format shifting copyrighted works should be allowed and unrestricted, right?

If there is applicable case law here about how lossy a "reproduction" can be before copyright has something to say about it, that would be relevant. Do you know of any?

I think you're repeating something that feels emotionally valid but in my experience, isn't factually (or legally) accurate.

I have found AI models to be frustratingly _obedient_ of copyright.

I'll be in a situation where I ask a specific question about what a document says, and the AI repeatedly says the work is copyrighted and it can't just tell me what it says _verbatim_, but it can answer specific questions for me in its own words (while telling me to check the original).

Two examples from my life are procedural questions about what Roberts Rules of Order would require in a given situation, and, what ASD STE-100 says about how to name/word things.

The applicable US law would appear to be USC 17 Sec 106 and 107, which on one hand limits derivative works, but on the other, allows fair use for purposes of teaching, scholarship, or research.

(USC references provided by AI, btw. Which I haven't read)

I used to agree with you, and then oddly enough, about 25-30 years ago, I came across this signature on another regular slashdot posters postings:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

(AI tells me the attribution is "The Red Lily", Anatole France, 1894)

I think the only Premium TVs left are the business TVs that give you meaningful mechanisms to not have intrusive "Smart" features.

Is there a meaningful difference between a Sony TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features, and a Wal-mart TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features?

I guess I am blessed to not be an audiophile and not have flawless supervision :)

FWIW, I have:
- a 20 yo 720p dumb 42" plasma
- a 20 yo 1080P dumb 50" plasma
- a 1yo 4k Samsung 65" TheFrame TV

That last one was a splurge I wanted because the "Art Mode" is just too beautiful, and at the time, Samsung really had the only coherent offering. (I guess there are now "off brand" ArtTV attempts from HiSense and others.. i have no experience with them.)

On the ArtTV, we watch youtube or DVDs or XBox on it a little of the time, and all that stuff looks fine to me on the 65" Samsung. But the TV is otherwise displaying pretty artwork almost all of the time, and whatever Samsung has done with the screen, dimming control, bezel, etc, really does work and really is lovely. And you don't need a service or an app to get the experience - just stick a USB full of public domain masterpieces into the TV.

Even so, the Samsung ecosystem is pretty annoying. I can have it show my images in ArtMode, but i cannot have the "real" experience you'd get with a subscription - with Art XML metadata and stuff (artist, date, etc). We don't always remember what a piece is or who painted it when it comes up..

Anyway, AFAIK, the only way to get TVs that aren't enshittified spyware is a business SKU, right?

In my house, we use Steam to play "windows-only" games on:
- Devuan with XFCE
- Devuan with Cinnamon
- Arch with hyprland
- bone stock Ubuntu 24
- ubuntu 25 laptop w/ second GPU

From my POV, there's not much need to port games to Linux. With the heroic efforts of Valve, most Windows games now just work. Win32, DX, D3D, and whatever else windows game devs have been using seems to have become the defacto reference gaming API on Linux.

Steam makes it work on every linux distro we've tried.

In writing this, it occurs to me: The F/OSS ecosystem does a very good job of re-implementing someone else's API/products (WINE, Proton, LibreOffice, etc)

The F/OSS ecosystem does a comparatively poor job at independently developing its own technology and then standardizing/universalizing those choices. E.g. the transition from X11 to Wayland; the systemd "situation(s)", desktop environments... gui greeters, audio muxers...

I think Valve has done the right thing. They made existing games work on Steam; they made Steam work on most linux distros.

Making everyone use a reference linux platform seems to be a total non-starter.

We already have a reference gaming platform: Windows 7 thru 10. And what we learned in 2025 is that Steam on nearly _any_ Linux often implements that windows reference gaming platform better than Windows 11 does.

Both these things can be true. The investors are off the hook if a major crisis ensues, but they pay for insurance to cover up to the cap established by price-anderson
My objection to nuclear is that I don't want to bear the liability as a taxpayer. That and it is expensive and a terrorist target. I don't see the upside,

not exactly numbers but it speaks to the issue. I for one, as a taxpayer, do not want to be on the hook for anymore foolish nuclear adventures.
https://thebulletin.org/2023/0...

There is nothing illogical about opposing nuclear power. Quite the contrary. It is not logical to pay more for something that involves the possibility of catastrophic failure. Plenty of people are happy to put others at risk in the service of their pursuit of profits. That is called corruption. The insurance industry does not make ideological decisions. They base their calculations on data. The possibility of a multi BILLION dollar accident is enough of a reason to seek the many practical alternatives. It is not surprising that most republicans and some Democrats support it. They all supported slavery at one point too. That does not mean these things are correct.

So why would you want to pay more for your energy and put your whole community at risk? That is the question. It does not seem like a very good deal to me. Nuclear power is low carbon, but it is not renewable. The total cost of ownership clearly favors renewables. Every building can be a net energy producer. The power company becomes a power broker where they buy and sell power depending on local conditions. We already have a program where the grid can rent a portion of your home battery so they can use them to shave peaks instead of firing up the gas plants. Alphabet has a plant that can ramp its geothermal power up and down to complement solar, eliminating the need for peaker plants.

It is hard to put a dollar value on resilience, but the distributed model of solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal along with home batteries is much more resilient. During a storm or natural disaster, there is no single point of failure. A typical electric car could power the average home for days, Since cars spend 90% of the time parked on average, the vast pool of storage available through bidirectional charging will provide us with plenty of storage to eliminate the peaks in power demand. A study showed that only 5 to 10% of electric car owners would need to participate to eliminate all peaker plants. Given the financial incentives, it is not hard to imagine much higher participation. 50% participation could run the grid for days.

Another myth that needs to dispelled is the idea that renewable power is weak and fragile, that we would need to curtail our energy rich lifestyle. We already have periods of time in many places where the power regularly rates go negative in the middle of the day because of excess power. We are adding renewable power at a tremendous rate. Power in the future will be cheap and plentiful. My house already powers itself for most of the year. (power, hot water, central air) It was a big investment, but in another couple of years, it will have paid for itself in full, so after that it is just maintenance. We have looked at a couple battery proposals, but still holding off as prices fall. With the batteries and a few more panels, we will be self sustaining.

Advocating for nuclear power will not age well. The difference in cost will only increase. So they want to take a nuclear plant that has already been built and stand it up? I oppose it, but the people who already paid taxes to fund its construction might feel differently. I get that. But it is not a trend, or a wholesale change of policy.

Have a nice day

"If solar power solved all of our problems then no elected Democrat would agree to fund a nuclear power plant."

You put a lot of faith in government and you make it seem like it is some monolithic entity that acts in logical ways. Truth is the government of the people, by the people is a hot mess. Nothing shocking there. When it comes to energy, the MAJORITY of non petroleum investments have been in wind and solar. The fact that a couple of nuclear projects have been revived is interesting, but still the MAJORITY of the funding is going toward solar wind and storage. We still spend too much on fossil fuels, but the change is coming.

There is more than enough solar wind and geothermal to power our future of abundance. There are some very persuasive propagandist that convince people this is not true, but anyone who actually looks at the numbers will see the truth. I live in a fairly northern latitude and yet the 38 panels that don't even cover the whole roof provide everything we need for most of the year. In this country All we need to cover is the parking lot and warehouses and we would be good. It is less than 1% of the area. Solar power is the cheapest form of power and the price is still dropping. You don't need any security. no one is going to make dirty bombs from the solar panels. Yes the sources are intermittent, but that is a much easier problem to solve than dealing with toxic radioactive time bombs that need to be secured and fussed over a lot.

Nuclear is good to study. It might make sense for spacecraft or above the arctic circle, but it make zero sense anywhere near population centers.