whats to stop someone relacing the restaurant QR code with a sticker QR code for whatever hostile URL. QR codes are really not good for security... people seem to trust them, but they are just as bad as opening any URL that you are being spammed in your emails.

For me - Nethack was the origin of the RPG

Cadmium arsenic and chromium, all highly toxic. We put out one immediate ecological disaster, and in the process we create another, that is more hidden and potentially a longer term problem.

As a photographer (for most of my life) - I see a reflection of a rock next to a collapsed fence, and the reflection of a plane flying over. Reading the article the "Chefs" that were responsible for the shot - claimed to have taken it in an area where there were no flights of this aircraft and no bodies of water... so probably taken somewhere else then...

I find copilot (which I think runs on GPT4 Turbo) useful in generating UML diagrams (via plantuml), you can give it source code, or a natural language description of the diagram. I have got good results so far with this. It will be interesting to see if the latest version is any good, but 200 bucks a month means I wont be doing that anytime soon...

Previously (in 2020) you could download different scenaries - it took forever, but was an option. This new version seems to rely more on a fast constant connection, I think the main reason for the bad reviews so far is a combo of the server load for new users, and then the connection requirement.
I will definitely sit on the fence for this one and wait for things to stabilize and for people to actually clearly communicate exactly what speed of connection is needed to play it ok.

I have noticed fairly often that in the stats - I can see that there have been a lot of 1 star and 2 star reviews, but mysteriously I cannot navigate to a single one of them; that for me is always a red flag to avoid the product.

So Israel has introduced a new form of warfare. Exploding devices en-mass leading to mass casualties in an instant. Ask yourself this, how safe is the device that you use going into the future? What nation state with a grievance may have turned it into a bomb? What precautions are taken so that airlines are not transporting these devices?

There is a difference between looking at something with your eyes and so memorising a work of art, and instead taking countless numbers of high megapixel images as input feeding them into a large data model and training on all the pixels in all of those images. You can claim copyright infringement at the point where an artwork is accessed without permission and its data is essentially digitally read and then saved. It has been shown that models trained in this way can produce as output sections of the original images in their trained data. For instance one well known model was happily outputting images containing the text "Getty Images"... which is a bit of a giveaway that at least some copying is going on in the model (whether intentional or otherwise) see Getty vs Stability AI. As much as I may dislike Getty Images, they certainly appear to have a case for infringement. The above case seems in this article seems to be a similar case placed in the US courts.
I suspect the wildwest for AI is coming to an end. Soon you will need to ensure you have copyright permission to train your models.

So lets suppose the article is correct and that AI is "the great filter" - this instead means we should be awash with star systems that have planets controlled by AI. In which case this AI is likely to try to communicate (in at least some instances), so then the filter breaks.

Next up in the news Hackers issue false notifications to all iphone users...
On the one side we are told to treat all incoming messages as suspicious, and then on the other hand we are notifying of imminent threats with message notifications... what could possible go wrong?

The cameras I have are not 24x7 feeds, they only record and transmit when they detect an event, so its not so wasteful on wireless spectrum, from that perspective. I think this is fairly typical, as cameras have detection mechanisms, and then are active for short recording periods only, or if the user contacts them and wants a live stream.
I agree that a cable solution is the simplest, cheapest and best alternative, and pretty easy to setup.

Also thinking the AI is for beginners, so beginners with deep pockets (usually the 2 dont go together..) although Leica have proven they can in the camera world...

I agree with this, as I do a bit of birding myself, and long for a Swarovski, but I cannot really justify the expense. Their glass is bloody good, tends to be minimal issues in terms of aberations, and super sharp, lets in lots of light, very weather proof - built like a tank... but outside of my price range, I go a bit more middle ground (Nikon Monarch series) Nikon produce a nice middle ground of decent quality image, decent build quality, and money still left in the bank :). Leica is about the same in terms of price and quality to Swarovski.

Nope - or at least I've not seen that, as there are plenty of articles indicating it is effective and additionally that my quickish google search brings up zilch o it being ineffective, it would be interesting to see an article describing it as ineffective?