Colbert seems to truly care. He is not venturing into non-canon space. The gaps in the Fellowship movie were significant, and in my mind important. I felt that Glorfindel and Bombadil were too important to be sacrificed to fit the media. I don't hold out much hope for Glorfindel, because his actual actions in the story are given to Arwen in the movie, but Bombadil was just skipped. So based on what little we know it looks like this will be the story of Bombadil, obviously the barrow wights, and hopefully Old Man Willow. If they really don't want to break the movie plot line unfortunately Merry and Pippin had their barrow blades explained away by using Aragorn to provide them.
If done properly the barrow scenes will be terrifying, a proper Lovecraftian eldritch horror. That will either be truly riveting emotional horror, or it will be meh. I hope they succeed, because the barrow wights are not an action monster, and they were not conquered by force of arms. The importance of the barrow incident is it is the first time we see the vulnerability of Frodo's mental state, and the underlying strength. The next time we encounter this level of mental/emotional assault is Sam and Frodo in the dead marshes, which unfortunately in the movie kind of blended into the bad-stuff-happens-in-a-bad-place background. The barrow wight was the beginning of Frodo's personal war, and he won this battle, but it sets the groundwork for later failures and the heroism of Samwise, and then Frodo's ultimate failure which was stopped by the obsession of Gollum.

I have just 3 points.
I know I am getting old, but it seems like just last week there were no commercial 3D printers, they were all home built. Then the hobby reached critical mass, and now there is a big market with lots of commercial models, and people making a living running giant print farms. But it was still very recently that most printers were not commercial. All that knowledge has not had time to go away, the firmware running these printers is still actively developed and freely available. So my first point is you don't need to buy a printer to own one.
My second point is that machine components in isolation are very seldom indicative of the application of the whole assembly. For some sort of AI agent to actually identify the real gun parts among the other non gun machine components would require the AI agent to have access to all the components printed on all the printers owned by an entity. Basically it would require a massive database of everything you ever printed. Logistically difficult and legally contentious, but also there are people and companies prototyping devices which are company secrets on 3D printers. They are not going to accept printers that give all their development designs to the government, and wow, talk about an industrial espionage target.
And finally this whole discussion feels very much like a straw man to me. 3D printed guns just are not that good. You still have to have metal components to make a gun. There is not a plastic printable on your general purpose 3D printer that can come close to making a chamber strong enough to hold the pressure of even wimpy rounds. .22lr has a SAAMI standard maximum chamber pressure of 24,000
PSI. It is also pretty warm. Sure, I am sure you can print a chamber that will fire a round, but I would not shoot it, because you may have a better than 50% chance of the bullet going out the correct direction, but your chances are no where near high enough for me to put myself in harms way.
So yeah, your theoretical fanatic assassin might be willing to use a plastic gun capable of firing a single round in its working life, but to make a functional reusable gun is going to require metal barrels, chambers, and bolts. So the 3D printed gun as a real danger to society is a myth.
Now a slam fire shotgun made with plumbing pipe with a nail welded in for a firing pin, those are actually functional and not hard to construct with a modicum of mechanical knowledge and tools. Still not safe, but more reliable than anything 100% plastic.

Oh, I missed that, because yesterday I followed the non-paywall link which went to digitimes.com. I guess my comment about multiple sources was partially inaccurate.

I guess multiple sources is better than no sources.

oh wait, maybe not cool.

Does a story like this make anybody else wonder if the lifestyle cost of wealth is too high? Yes, not enough money makes life inconvenient, but apparently too much money makes life inconvenient in a much more suspicious and negative way.
Living life as if every person you pass is a likely attacker and trusting no one sounds like a lot more hassle than just maintaining reasonable situational awareness and avoiding obvious danger.
I would rather my stomach hurt because I was hungry than from ulcers I got while peering out my barred windows at the world that wants to take my money.

I agree, it is entirely possible to run a computer without the ability to modify the boot parameters, and it is the best way to run dedicated task hardware, because if it works then it works, and the only people who should be configuring those are people authorized/trained/equipped to do that. A lot of hardware from gas pumps to medical equipment and the aforementioned banking hardware should be run like this. However a general purpose home computer kinda needs to be configurable without additional hardware because you can't expect a normal civilian to have another computer to configure their computer with. I stand by my statement with regard to general purpose PCs.
I have used with IBM PCs that were configured with jumpers, and mfm hard drive controllers that had to be jumpered correctly for the specific models of hard drives they supported. I have jumpered serial port and parallel port cards to use the correct interrupts. I have used a hacksaw to expose the contacts in the real time clock/NVRAM chip in Sun workstations so I could solder a pair of AA batteries to them and get the computer booting again. Those hurdles are fine for those of us who do it for fun or to make a living, they are not appropriate for my 82 year old mother.

Maybe I am missing something, but a non-writable BIOS is also a bit non functional. The bios (or UEFI in modern machines) tells your computer where the device is from which you want to boot. It also does other things like enable/disable net booting, enable/disable integrated peripherals, determine what happens on power loss/restore, even simple stuff like whether or not a key repeats when you hold it down.
If that is all preset in a non-writable chip you have made a computer that is useless for many people. Kinda like cutting off your legs so you don't fall down the stairs.
In real life any machine to which a person has physical access can be misused. If your computer security is that critical then you need a computer without network hardware in a physically secured location.
All technology exists on a sliding scale between secure and convenient, you choose where you exist on that scale. I personally disable secure boot anyway, I don't really want my OS to need a key signed by someone else.
This headline is a bit hyperbolic, since the framework marketing is targeted at a more tech savvy audience, and I suspect that the majority of those 200,000 laptops are probably not running secure boot anyway.

Both Mirror based and PV to microwave transmission models have an atmosphere full of stuff in the way, which so far seems to interfere enough that the business plans based on theoretical values fall into the financially unfeasible realm every time. The guys pushing these plans have all the enthusiasm of a perpetual motion inventor, and seem to have some of the same ability to ignore losses in the system.
I am not a complete luddite, I just have yet to see a hint of the magic sauce required to get energy in any useful quantity from orbit to the surface.
Now if we could just decode Tesla's notebooks...

My Commodore 16 is black.

I always thought Tariffs were imposed on non-specific products, and on countries of origin/destination. How is it a tariff when it is pointed at a specific company and product?
That sounds more like a fine or penalty. Does the president get to impose fines and penalties without any process at all on specific companies?
In that case, does he get to impose them on companies engaged in interstate commerce?
Somehow I think we in the U.S. are going to have to learn how black markets work, like all the other authoritarian regimes around the world.

Once upon a time I was running an earlyish version of Mac OSX, and having run into similar spellings in a directory in Linux (xf86config and XF86Config?) I checked the box when installing MacOS for case sensitive HFS+. Later I needed to install Adobe Creative Suite and the stupid installer was not case consistent when copying and modifying files, the install absolutely would not work.
This was definitely a problem for the end user. Even though there were no files in the same directory differing only by case, scripts referring to those files could not function if the script itself was inconsistent.
I have always made it a habit regardless of OS to always think in a case sensitive way, and just avoid case-only differences in filenames I create.
The fact that actual programmers at Adobe failed this when programmers in many languages always have to be case sensitive with names of variables and other language constructs gave me yet another reason to avoid Adobe whenever possible.

In this world trending toward nationalism and other us vs. themisms case insensitivity fits right in. Just get rid of all those weird characters, if you limit the OS to original ASCII then case sensitivity is really not that hard. A small set of non-printables, a nice simple alphabet with no diacritics, nothing new to learn. It also makes it harder for all those weirdos in the world to actually use the system to communicate, it's a win-win.
Oh, if you can't taste the sarcasm here, I will say it out loud. Linus is right.

Letting publicly available generative AI process rebuttals from user input would turn into a shouting match between vocal extremists on every possible contentious topic. To attempt a non-political example, both the NY Yankees and the Boston Red Sox would have armies of fans attempting to sway the AI over the question "who is the best baseball team"
There would be attempts on the scale of the LOIC to sway the LLM's output.
For any actual contentious idea individual humans are incapable of being unbiased, and LLMs have no method of ranking the reliability of input that is independent of the humans that programmed it. The result is there is currently no method of creating a bias free LLM.
Before the internet humans had local, regional, national, racial and ethnic biases which were more or less confined to the people they interacted with. Books could spread globally, but a book does not normally sway a significant number of people, and a book expressing strong opinion is as likely to be used as an example of how wrong the author is as it is to change minds.
When the internet became global people now directly interact with like minded people regardless of location. Direct interaction can change minds. if 1000 people in the world hold a specific opinion, without the internet they will probably never even find each other. With the internet they can, and they have enough combined volume to bring other people into the fold.
It is both the greatest and worst thing we have created. To find the few people in the world with a specific hobby or skill allows them all to progress, and to attract others. Doesn't really matter if that skill is baking sourdough bread or building suicide bomb vests.
Into this cacophony of ideas we throw a computer program that absorbs any data it is given, tokenizes it all into some sort of tokens, and then starts cataloging patterns of those tokens.
Given the tendency for the loudest humans to be the ones at the extremes of any opinion, the internet, which is now the largest repository of human communication, is inherently biased toward the edges of any topic.
There are no websites dedicated to the most average cars of the 1990s, there are plenty dedicated to the best or the worst cars of the 1990s, yet most of the world drove average cars in the 1990s. Where is an LLM going to get actual opinions about the average cars? They aren't there.
As a human being I can evaluate an average car because I can build my own quantitative model based on what I learn about my interaction with my car, but that model is entirely my model, and entirely different from anyone else int he world.
An LLM cannot have first person experience, it cannot form an opinion, it simply recognizes patterns of tokens, and builds new arrangements of those tokens based on ranking algorithms that start with the original programming, and are shaped by the quantity and quality of the ingested patterns, but the definition of quality is also based on the algorithms of humans who created the original program.
Without self awareness and creativity an LLM cannot even learn to evaluate bias, let alone eliminate it. Bias prevention turns into a ruleset that prevents the LLM from saying certain things, a ruleset built by humans, which are inherently biased.
I will believe we can create an unbiased LLM as soon as you find a book of fiction that does not have intrinsic bias.

Human output is biased. An AI can't really understand the concept of bias, because it isn't really understanding anything. The output of an AI is going to naturally lean toward the most consistent majority of the data it has ingested, so to make a bias free AI one would simply have to feed it either an unbiased pool of data (good luck finding that) or a pool of data that is equally biased on all sides of all issues. That is defining equally as "some way that the differing biases reflect very similar weights in the output".
The problem is we have great difficulty seeing our own individual biases, and no chance at all in quantifying biases even in our own culture, let alone a culture different from ours.
Getting an AI to generate output does not free us from the responsibility of critical thinking. Assuming an AI has sufficient input to allow us to believe the output represents sufficient research is also irresponsible. This means that at the current time the output of generative AI is not qualified to be the basis of an opinion, and definitely inadequate to provide justification for a decision.
Since the heart of AI in all forms is pattern recognition non-generative AI has made great advances in many fields, from medical diagnosis to arc-fault circuit breakers, but I am afraid the huge emphasis on generative AI is probably stealing brains from the other more easily targeted uses that really can help people now.