San Francisco has a strong Waymo presence (I think we were the first market to get public access to them). But we also believe in public transit; in fact, the Bay Area just voted for two important transit measures that will increase costs to taxpayers and property owners, but are designed to make up for badly needed funding from the state and federal governments that just isn't forthcoming anymore. The alternative, we were told, was massive cuts to buses, light rail, and passenger rail across multiple cities and jurisdictions. I guess we decided that wasn't what we really wanted. But there's still room for Waymo, just like there used to be room for taxis.

Some banks allow it. They give you a one-time code to take to an ATM.

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.

Thanks, I think we all knew this.

Not quite a manual, but I bought a Packt book that's supposed to help me learn Azure. Specifically, it claimed to have a number of sample projects to help me better understand Azure and use it more effectively.

In its chapter regarding configuring a site-to-site VPN, it glosses over the part where one is supposed to configure the local side, and its sole metric of success is whether either side has a connectivity indicator. In its chapter regarding storage options and tiers, there's no project at all. In its hybrid EntraID section, it says to just download Entra Connect to my domain controller - y'know, the one I just have lying around.

Claude was able to hold my hand through creating different resources, and took its time explaining the concept of a "resource group" multiple times until I understood the concept. Stack Overflow doesn't have that sort of instant gratification, but it does have enough of a group of people who can usually answer a question well-enough.

Written documentation has its place, but it requires a VERY good writer to express an idea in a way that will make sense to readers who, almost by definition, don't understand what the author is trying to convey. It's a skill that isn't at all easy to do, so quality of manuals vary greatly.

Quite. Scientists and researchers have been using the term AI to describe this collection of technologies and algorithms since the 1950s. The field has (arguably) made great strides recently. Most of the current scientists and researchers have been perfectly content to continue to call it AI. But no! Now we're going to let somebody who was born stupid, dedicated his life to staying stupid, and now is seemingly in advanced stages of dementia tell us what we should call this field? What a bunch of bootlickers these tech execs are. I hope Trump has the good sense to walk through a cattle field before he asks these losers to get their tongues out.

No thanks on the light-up Apple logo for me. I think it started with the Powerbook G3 (I had one, it was a great computer) and it was sort of obnoxious even then. I'm not paid to be a light-up billboard everywhere I go.

No thanks on the laptop touchscreen, either. I understand it on something like a Surface tablet -- almost -- but most of the time I used my Surface with a keyboard, like a regular laptop, and never touched the screen. I think ramming touchscreens down everybody's throats was just a gimmick Microsoft came up with, both to A.) convince everybody that Windows 8 worked equally well on laptops and tablets (it sure did); and B.) once again, everybody needed to go out and buy a new laptop, even though their current one worked and served their needs just fine.

Wow, BIND, though? Do a quick search on "history of BIND vulnerabilities." Sure, people run all these tests on it now, and in the past, and the history has been there's been a lot of causes of concern.

Yeah, that's pretty old-fashioned. In my experience, it's barely done now. Kinda like how nobody writes JavaScript like it's Pascal anymore.

"Important for our species" ... how? Trust me, our species ain't going anywhere. There's nowhere to go.

Yes, this is understood...however, that's an indictment against the category. Games are optional entertainment products, so the problem is that *any* legislation of entertainment products can come under the guise of "it's optional, you can just not-buy it". Agreed; it's not food or medicine, so the industry benefits from a lower level of necessity in that respect.

However, "it's optional" doesn't mean it's not worth regulating. Gambling is "optional", yet slot machines have such strict regulatory compliance requirements to meet, that they commonly exceed the level of scrutiny given to voting machines and MRI hardware. The gun-to-head argument would stipulate that since casinos are way easier to avoid than hospitals or banks, slot machines don't need regulation.

When video games started running into areas that consumer protection laws typically cover, we started needing to assess the appropriate level of regulation. For decades, games were one-time, permanent purchases - people with Nintendo cartridges and Playstation games on disc can play them today, 20-40 years after release, and neither Nintendo nor Sony have a practical means of saying "...you can't play that anymore". Over time, games got tied to accounts, and there were some consumer benefits - no more scratched discs or lost media or shelf space issues, plus additional content and bug fixes after release.

These were great, until they weren't. Those accused of cheating saw account bans, which meant they couldn't play *other, paid-for games* anymore, irrespective of whether the accusations were true. Companies would take money for games, but then shut down the servers needed to play them saying "it costs us too much", but then would sue fans who said, "...we'll take it from here, then". Of course, there was the whole "surprise mechanics" thing, where games were literally-gambling and they tried to argue that it wasn't.

So yes, there's no gun-to-head requirement for people to sign up for these services. Stadia proved that. However, the problem is when such systems are implemented as a requirement, for artificial means. If GTA6 was "Stadia Exclusive", it's not like GTA6 can't run on consoles or PCs, it's purely a predatory business model for a game that inherently doesn't require it. It's "pay us the same amount as before, but we can claw your access to the game back, but you can't claw your money back, because this benefits us". Now sure, purely rational human beings would refuse to buy it until they released it with traditional distribution mechanisms, but 'vote with your wallet' is exceedingly difficult to make work at scale.

Even if you want to argue this is acceptable for video games, it's a short hop to business software, where such a model has harmed many small businesses with things like Quickbooks pulling this crap and forcing businesses to go from $300 every few years to $2500 annually. "It's optional!! they can print out 20 years of financial data and use paper and a pencil!!11" - how far does that argument go, exactly? that's the problem with the gun-to-head argument - if *only* unavoidable needs receive regulation, then everything that is "optional" becomes a potential means of exploitation. There needs to be a balance, of course, but somehow I don't think that video game publishers are unreasonably impacted because the government tells them "you have to remove DRM from your products if you're not selling them anymore, and you can't sue your customers for fixing things in your products if they paid for it, either".

So while everyone seems to agree that building server-side applications with things like Node and Python is wrong, foolish, and that "there are much better options" ... does anyone care to tell me what those options are?

I mean ... aren't a lot of server-side apps basically just playing catch ("I'm tossing you a ball, now you toss me a ball back") and in between there, it interacts with a database? You really don't think you can do that with Node or Python? Does e.g. Java really give you so much more reliability, maintainability, performance, etc?

Well, it wasn't Unix. But it was inspired by Minix, a widely-taught teaching operating system that Torvalds decided to make into a thing you could use every day.

...if I need to connect it to an account, and/or it needs internet access to function, then it's a guarantee that 1.) the conversations will be stored in Amazon's meat grinder, 2.) the user won't be able to delete them (just make them invisible for themselves), and 3.) it's going to turn into a subscription fee. ...if, however, I can download the transcripts over a USB cable into software that installs on my computer and works despite an application firewall that block outbound internet connectivity, then maybe it might be interesting. However, *nobody* makes hardware/software like that anymore, especially Amazon.

We use both in production here; but, let's be VERY CLEAR: there is absolutely NO FAIR COMPARISON between a locally hosted model on above-average hardware and what Anthropic (and I assume others) is offering with their, currently, subsidized plans.