I like to think the delay is justified by the fact that IF you think in terms of 1800s tech, America is huge and it can take a while for horses to pull a wagon from sea to shining sea.

It's November 1860 and you just won your election to be the new Senator from Oregon. You have two months to get to DC. Can you do it? (Yes, you can do it in a "mere" 3-4 weeks thanks to rail. But before rail? No way two months is enough.)

The first thing will probably be to do something think of the children bullshit to ban local AI instances.

Are you seeing a lot of support for the "people should be forced to use a data center to run AIs, instead of being allowed to do it at home using solar power" position?

What I saw last week, is that "think of the children" means that no one should ever fucking ever let a Republican anywhere within ten feet of a child, rather than it meaning we need to give data centers a monopoly on running AI.

The RAM crisis is it. This is the high-water mark on suppressing competition. It was a clever move, but the consumer market isn't going to tolerate electronic gizmos and video games being expensive forever. As soon as someone decides they want money and opens another RAM factory, the AI companies are in trouble. They have this brief pre-Personal-Computer-Revolution situation going on like 1960s IBM, and the 1970s are coming to fuck their shit up.

Yo dawg, I heard you like DMCA, so I sent you a DMCA notice (Title 17 Section 512) about DMCA-prohibited circumvention (Title 17 Section 1201).

The law doesn't explicitly define the term repeat infringer, nor does it say how many piracy accusations it takes before a subscriber can be cut off.

[emphasis mine] Surely they mean convictions, no?

Why would accusations be relevant? I accuse every single member of the Mexican government of having violated the copyright on my work, four times each. They all did it four times. No, I can't prove it, but the accusation stands.

It's important to keep using accurate language if you want to think clearly about things.

That sounds like a good idea, until someone says the word "hacker" and then you realize you lost the debate decades ago.

Words' meanings change, and nobody can ever do anything about it.

Excuse me, have you been alive for the last 2 years?

The last 2 years is over, and there's gonna be big changes. This is the month that the new Grand Theft Auto comes out.

I have been using ScreenFloat (and similar tooling) for decades; those are more useful than this because it works on every application and not just the browser.

It's quite possible I am missing something from their demo, but based on what they show: 1) it's just for Firefox; and, 2) it's really kind of a pain in the ass to use.

No, he's telling the truth: Internet Explorer is deeply integrated into Windows.

Oh shit, sorry! I thought you were talking about someone else. Never mind.

Why would a manufacturer's device need a trusted introducer to communicate with that same manufacturer? Vizio can be its own CA. There's no intermediary between themself and themself.

From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search

Have you thought about disabling AI Mode and returning customers to traditional search? It'll not only make you more money, but result in happier users too. Everyone-except-Nvidia wins.

Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.