This is all about leverage.

You don't wait until your one and only supplier of land decides you need to tithe 50% of your earnings for the privilege of setting up your business before you diversify.

Look at the Strait of Hormuz. The countries with the backup plan (rail built years ago) have an option other than dealing with Iran. The ones that don't suddenly have a problem - a big one.

Datacenters can indeed be built more cheaply on earth... for now. In the event that changes... you want to already have your alternatives tested and ready to be scaled up. Maybe this will all turn out to be just a waste of money that historians will later chalk up to ego.

To put it another way... if you wanted to test an untried technology and attempt to scale it up, would you rather do it while people are throwing buckets of money at you, or would you rather do it when your cash flow is under threat and investors are getting cold feet?

P1?!? Is that you?

The launch pads are not in outer space.

Seems kind of premature, the knuckleheads that are trying to do orbital datacenters have about as much chance of developing a feasible, economic orbital data center as I do in being crowned Miss America.

Is to set coursework and exams that are specifically crafted to exploit where AI is weak or prone to hallucinate.

You do not ban cheating, because those who cheat will inevitably find ways to circumvent the ban.

Rather, you exploit the properties of the mechanisms of cheating to ensure that those who actually understand the ideas are marked relatively highly (regardless of whether they reach the textbook conclusion) and whose who do not understand the ideas cannot do well even if they give what is in the textbook.

The interest should not be in precise answers, but in precise use of tools of reasoning and analysis, because this is what actually matters when it comes to understanding. Yes, it means you can't standardise so easily, and you have to devise things in ways that don't penalise intuitive thinkers over methodical thinkers, but you cannot teach a subject properly if you are only concerned about the surface.

I didn't see a 5.6 option on the Windows client last night.

Haa anyone else observed 5.6 in the wild?

Trump doesn't need to have power, he only needs to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Companies are risk-averse, which is why Anthropic pulled their AI model for a while.

You can get Veracrypt to work with the Mac, via FUSE, but I don't know how safe/robust that is. It's probably more secure than anything Apple has. It's certainly more secure than anything Microspot has.

But, yeah, it's getting extremely irritating that useful stuff is being taken out of commercial OS' and junk put in.

There's no known client, but there is a very good unknown client:
(For those familiar with Kenny Everett...)

https://dev.to/jfscoertzen/cha...
https://snapcraft.io/chatgpt-d...

Whether it has all the official features, I don't know. But that's your best bet.

The DoD is known for viruses transporting payloads across airgaps onto Internet-connected machines. One thing it isn't is "so secure".

But, to the extent that it IS secure, it uses pretty much what I outlined. They use Class 3 certs for all users and all machines, and have done since about 2001. The US Navy got to trial run thei system to shake down the defects in the design, before they rolled it out to everyone. Beyond that, they use segregated networks (in principle, physical separation rather than logical separation, but who knows?) and encrypted communications.

What I've done above is take what the US DoD uses today, threw in what the US DoD recommended but never actually implemented in the 70s to fill in some of the gaps, and also included what the US DoD implemented and actually used in the way of Trusted OS deisgns in the 70s and 80s. The NSA and IRS likely use some variants on the same techniques.

So, what I've got above is pretty much why the DoD is as secure as it is.

What I've done is augmented it to handle the fact that you need to verify the hardware and not just the endpoint, and that you need to verify the physical host independently of the logical host. But that's pretty much it.

If users create little interactive toys and shove them into their friends’ feeds, Meta gets more feed inventory, more engagement, more impressions, and more chances to drop sponsored units into the attention stream. You got that part right. But the ad does not have to be literally stapled to the gizmo. The gizmo just has to keep users’ eyeballs fixed in the feed for one more pass through the variable-reward slot machine. Same dopamine-tuned engagement model as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and the rest of the scroll-farm economy.

And I would not let the prompt/data angle off the hook, either. FB has already said it can use interactions with generative AI features to personalize content and ad recommendations. So FB’s business model becomes: users generate the bait -> users distribute the bait -> FB monetizes the attention around the bait -> the interaction telemetry improves the next round of bait. Wash, rinse, optimize, repeat. That is not copyright theft. It is much more boring, much more scalable, and much more on-brand for Zuckerberg.

That is true, but the archaeology shows that this won't work for all island-hopping or all river navigation.

For example, we have clear evidence of hominins not just living on islands across the Mediterranean when no ice was present (it was free-standing water) but commuting to and from shore. We also have evidence of technologies travelling upstream along river-based communities at speeds that cannot be accounted for by simply walking.

So we need a model in which they could actively navigate against the water flow AND across significant distances of open water.

“Effectively theft” is a great way to waste a useful point by stapling it to a strawman.

Meta does not need to own everything users create for this to be a bad deal. In fact, the Pocket terms point straight back to Meta’s standard deal: users retain their IP rights, while Meta gets the license, platform control, engagement data, and AI-improvement exhaust. That is not copyright theft. It is surveillance capitalism with a toy-box UI.

And that distinction matters, because Slashdot is full of pedants with calipers. Say “Meta steals your copyright,” and the thread immediately bogs down in ownership, licenses, assignment, fair use, AI authorship, and whether prompt output is even copyrightable in the first place. Meanwhile, the real criticism quietly escapes through the server-room vent.

The real criticism is simpler and nastier: Pocket turns user creativity into product telemetry. Prompts, revisions, remixes, plays, shares, camera/mic-adjacent interactions where users grant permission, abandonment points, and feed behavior. Meta does not have to pick your Pocket (nice analogy, btw, if a bit misguided) by taking title to your idea. It can just watch millions of people prototype tiny attention traps and then build a behavioral graph from the telemetry. That is the gold they are farming, not IP rights

So yes, distrust Meta. Absolutely. But do not replace threat modeling with pocket puns and call it analysis. Strawmen are bad arguments anywhere; on Slashdot they are worse, because they give the opposition a nice clean target while the actual monster keeps eating the village.