Pity us Americans. Apparently two telescope rescue missions have failed just during the past few days.

This is woke nonsense. These people should be happy with the lungs they've got. What's next, outlawing cars and mandating bicycles? Free healthcare for all?

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

It's only local to China in the sense that they choose what {packages/CCP poison} go in there.

For all values of u, Linux is local to u in the sense that u chooses what packages go in there.

Since obviously at least a few people have bought into that retcon, it's obvious Apple's PR team is doing an effective job!

Our local Winco - where we buy the majority of our groceries - recently (finally!) installed new POS terminals that allow tap to pay, Apple Pay, etc. It's still debit-only, but that's fine.

NFC payments, like Apple Pay and Google Pay, have been available in many US stores for well over a decade as well. The reported issue was indeed due to a specific decision made by Walmart.

Your subject line, "American issue, not Walmart specific", is completely wrong.

I've been able to use Apple Pay / NFC payments here in America for a long time at a lot of stores - my local hardware store, my pharmacy, both of my local grocery stores. But some specific stores - Walmart and Home Depot come to mind - made a deliberate choice (in the U.S. at least) to try and push their own payment "app" rather than adopt the standard NFC payment system. The main driver for this appears to have been they did not like how they couldn't collect as much monetisable personal data from customers using Apple Pay (or Google or Samsung).

The fact that, with Walmart at least, this appears to be an America-only issue makes me wonder if it's due to the different regulatory environment in Canada - perhaps they legally couldn't do it there.

Yeah, I still totally don't grok why so many of the tech elite, who knew about Ginger long before it was publicly announced, were absolutely convinced it was going to revolutionize cities and/or society. Perhaps that should've been an early warning on just how disconnected that group is from the reality we common people face.

One of the few times I actually wanted to submit a report on an issue, I basically threw away Claude's long prose and wrote the text myself... except I did lift a table of data from Claude's report and included it more or less verbatim.

Data tables are another thing Claude seems to like to generate.

"I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it," wrote Torvalds on the commit.

I've been using Claude a bit lately, and I have noticed sometimes, if you're hashing through a task and having to iterate, it can get into a mode where it more or less tells you it's probably not worth spending more time on it. Also it does seem to love volunteering to write reports for some reason (without my having asked for one).

Ha ha, Linux already has..

# top -o gpu
top: unrecognized field name 'gpu'

.. d'oh! Never mind.

And is asking an AI to proofread something that much different than MS Word flagging spelling and grammar errors?

Great question, and I think there isn't any significant difference.

But LLMs use a type of math that apparently has the evil bit set. Meanwhile, up here in VirtueVille, the computer code we write to create things, uses different math that doesn't have the evil bit set. Conclusion: we can look down on those AI companies and their stupid users. ;-)

Now, I wouldn't expect an AI service to be better at copyediting than an average human, but I haven't kept up so I'm ignorant of their performance. (All my "AI" experience is that I used Claude twice to, it turned out, fix some typos in some RoR config initializers.) But whether an AI service is as good at copyediting as a human or not, it's that user's choice and, as long as they sign off on the work and really take responsibility for it (declare the words to be their opinion), then I've got no problem with them doing that, whether it uses LLMs or Markov chains or human slaves or Searle's Chinese Room.

The words will be judged by their quality, not provenance.

That said...

Here's a similar story where I'd probably come to the opposite conclusion(!), despite the clown in it pretty much doing what I preach above, though he was using the AI service to do a lot more than copyedit. Behold this 3M expert witness cross-examination (134 page PDF) in the Watson Grinding case. It's slow going at first, but eventually you'll be laughing and cringing like in a good episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Fuck. I don't know.

Yup, in other words... just another day with the Trump administration, using terms that mean the exact opposite or what they're actually doing (see also "radical transparency").

And if you were in a position to point this out to them, they wouldn't provide a counter-argument - they'd pivot to personal attacks on you and/or your family.

... or would be, under any other presidential administration.

Still, the rest of the world can certainly benefit from it.

The main reason I use my own equipment is the cost - purchasing my own cable modem paid for itself in only about 6 months.

Admittedly, the security benefits are a nice serendipity too.