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Comment Re:Blessing in disguise? (Score 1) 40

I got one around 2008. They were the best of the non-premium 1080p HDMI screens at the time.

The one I got had slightly better test review scores on display quality than the LG that year. The Sony was 20% better for 3x the price.

It lasted about twelve years and by then a bigger 4K with much brighter colors was half the cost in nominal dollars, so probably 1/4 the cost in real terms.

And by then cheap flashable streaming sticks were available as was pihole and fairly easy outbound NAT rewriting rules to keep the beasts contained.

Comment Pay up or wallow in the dump (Score 1) 69

Bots and other bad actors thrive in free (as in beer) environments, for reasons that should be obvious. If we want to do anything meaningful about them, sites will need a nominal but real fee to use.

It's not what anyone wanted, but "free" was always inevitably going to lead to the Internet becoming a dump. The free ride is over.

Comment "Critical Infrastructure" (Score 1) 175

Well nothing we think of as "critical infrastructure" is using consumer routers - and if it were that could and should be remedied quickly without a ban on consumer routers.

So ... this leaves us with an open question for this to make legal sense.

The best fit is probably an Internet Drivers License and mandatory packet signing for a surveillance control grid and CBDC coming down the pike rapidly.

When in the course of Human Events....

Comment Re:Rust could be awesome. (Score 2) 31

Yeah, not sure if you remember the Vegan Crossfit Pythonistas.

Instead of saying, "we could write a program to..." they would dogmatically intone, "we could write a Python script to..." in almost every situation.

Not sure who taught them the NLP but their dedication was a fervor.

A whole lot of rewriting of fast, debugged, working code got rewritten by them just because Perl, Ruby, and Bash felt like heresy.. For a while python stacktraces were the error message of common use on Fedora.

Comment "Stop making people hate you." (Score 1) 48

Now that we know that Meta lobbied for all of these simultaneous "age verification" laws he's losing what little support he still had.

Have you seen that interview where he just has a bottle of barbecue sauce on his bookshelf?

To make him "relatable" they say?

There's a decades old cartoon that asks, "how would you like your tyranny wrapped, in 'stopping terrorism' or 'protecting the children'?

2025 edit: 'stopping antisemitism' as that's all DoJCRD seems to know about.

Comment Re:I love it! (Score 1) 159

I love this idea because I know the second a company using this crap gets bitten it's going to be an extremely expensive problem the fix

That's my gut reaction too -- this will result in software with obscure bugs that are near-impossible for a human to find or fix because no human even understands how the software works.

OTOH, maybe no human will need to find or fix the bugs, because they can task an AI to find and fix them instead. I'd say that strains credibility, but last year I would have said it strains credibility that an AI can understand (or, at least, "understand") human-written code as well as a human programmer, and yet here we are.

Comment Re:You're Absolutely Right! (Score 2) 116

This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.

In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machines and email; universal low-barrier delivery meets large scale programmatic swill. AI allows complexity that earlier spambots couldn't dream of, when the most sophisticated way of defeating filters was spelling "porn" as "pr0n" and a bit of header fuckery. In the end there is only two ways to go; either do what filtering you can and accept some degree of false positives, or go to identification systems that will, one way or the other, compromise anonymity, because make no mistake, once you start storing any kind of data linking an account to an actual human being; biometric, picture ID, phone number, mailing address or whatever, it won't take long for the court order to show up demanding you hand over all the de-anonymized account data to find the person distributing child porn, drugs, or calling their local political representative dirty names.

Comment Re:So much for state's rights. (Score 1) 75

States have no rights in the American system. They have powers, insofar as they exercise them.

Humans have rights, granted by God, as the default religious basis for the Natural Rights Republic.

You'll notice that Regulating AI appears nowhere in Article I , and Federalist 10 explains why these powers were strictly limited.

Yet the Political/Parasite class is happy to abrogate their power for power and money and ensure a government school child never hears about The Federalist Papers in thirteen years of compulsory schooling.

So we're left with too few Americans who even know they should be livid.

Perhaps letting Robert Maxwell and Howard Zinn be in charge of the textbooks was a massive and fatal mistake.

Comment Re:Will believe it when it happens (Score 2) 166

Neo and Android-based Chromebooks, and "good-enough" Office alternatives like Google Docs and I would argue even LibreOffice (I use it almost exclusively these days), mean Microsoft is suffering a differentiation crisis. They'll likely have the corporate lock for some time to come, though they've managed to fuck up Outlook so badly that I have to be wondering if the only thing really keeping the big guys locked in as Teams at this point.

MS's ability to leverage Windows as the platform is decaying, and the "bells and whistles" approach has managed to alienate a lot of users. People are at the point where they use Windows because they have to, but there's enough platform-agnostic functionality out there that the old lock-ins they relied on to keep Windows dominant are becoming more like prisons for their own development teams.

Comment Re:Will believe it when it happens (Score 1) 166

I know MacOS has its critics, and in its own way it has its UI lock in, but after using it now for four years, and my use of Windows now being reduced to an RDP session at work, I have to say the experience overall has been pretty pleasant and productive. The lack of update nagging, the sheer horsepower of Apple Silicon, an actual *nix prompt instead of WSL, printing that isn't an absolute shitshow (and this is saying something because Windows used to be the reigning heavyweight champion of plug and play printer handling).

Windows 11 is its own type of hell, and every time I'm forced to use it I find it a slow, bloated, unintuitive mess. It feels like Windows 7 if you had let your 12 year old kid download a whole bunch of dubious software and now the desktop and taskbar do strange things while spam spontaneously appears. If someone had shown me Windows 11 fifteen years ago I would have gone "Holy shit man, your Windows 7 machine has been rootkitted!"

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