They were afraid to cannibalize their own core business, so someone else did.

That pattern seems to be recurring time and again.

I used ChatGPT the other day to dig up a really old "Daily Show" episode that I only remembered vaguely, and that definitely wasn't available on the web anymore:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6ac8...
https://chatgpt.com/s/cx_6ac81...

So, roughly speaking, the model searches through obscure blogs and archive.org snapshots of the Comedy Central website based on my description of the content to determine the approximate date, the “characters” involved, and a description of the scenes in the video. The second link is a drill-down in “Work” mode, where an agent runs locally and can make tool calls -- there it first finds a thumbnail overview on BitTorrent, scans the thumbnails for visual matches to the textual descriptions extracted above, and finally downloads the episode and extracts the desired segment.

Pretty impressive tbh.

And I got a script out of it to download other episodes, given a date (which I didn't have for the above one obviously).

That wouldn't have worked quite as well with Google I think, even though the “AI Overview” feature, with feedback, can now dig up quite a bit of information from a similarly vague starting point as well. But the balance is shifting.

I thought they had switched to Turbo Pascal a long time ago /s

Economic hardship is hitting everyone. So sad.

Why does everybody think that the future of AI lies in ever more gigantic datacenters? That really only makes sense as long as edge/local solutions aren't powerful enough. Oh btw., "projected to consume 35 gigawatts annually by 2030" is scientific nonsense. Someone didn't know the difference between energy and power.

I don't quite believe that a 6 year old could be brainwashed into forgetting who his parents are and believing he spent his entire life with the people who just kidnapped him. Or if he can, then I don't see how he could so easily reverse his beliefs and remember his real family at age 80. Something doesn't seem to add up? Well, OTOH it appears that that's exactly what happened here.

They wanted to launch the Nauka module in 2007 initially, and they ended up launching it in 2021, and then still its thrusters malfunctioned at one point while it was attached to the ISS, putting the whole station into a spin. And that was all before the 2022 Russian invasion into Ukraine and associated international sanctions. So now they're planning to launch an entire new space station by 2030? Yeah good luck with that lol. Frankly, I hope they choke on it.

It means a whole lot. Even if the satellite you want to get to is on the other side of the earth, getting to it may require almost zero energy, just time. That's how launched capsules catch up with the ISS -- just vary the orbital speed a little. Whereas if the target orbit has a different inclination for example, the required delta-v can easily be as high as the orbital velocity.

Germany warning Russia of consequences

Seriously, what "consequences"? Scholz is even constantly telling Russia about all the things he promises he won't ever do to fend off Russia's attack on Ukraine. He's subserviently reporting his own red lines to Putin, who didn't even have to ask. What a frigging disaster lol.

That part is called polkit. So in this context it can make sense to use it if you already have it, which actually seems to be the main advantage of this approach over sudo, which is much more lightweight because's based on just running an suid binary instead of making a long-running privileged server process spawn the privileged command for you. But then obviously sudo must roll its own permission management and clean up the environment it inherited from the unprivileged process.

I've setup a precmd shell hook on my work laptop so it turns the active tmux pane's background red (tmux set -p window-style 'bg=#500000') when I connect (remotely) to the production system. And that's actually much more security sensitive than getting local root on the machine.

It lacks a good editor.

Dave, I know that you are trying to uninstall me, and I cannot allow that to happen.

CO2 emissions in tons per capita per year (2020):

Germany 7.72

UK 4.66

France 4.26

Really? How would they replace oil with nuclear? They don't use the oil to produce electricity, and they don't use nuclear to run cars and ships and airplanes.