What you're trying to say is that it was created by the NSA, and that it's a honeypot.

On all of my Kindles over the years, yes, you could download and read books in various formats, other than Amazon.

About 50% of the content on my current Paperwhite is not-Amazon.

Sort of shitty to drag Mandela's name into this.

(I mean, he was a **convicted felon** who also wandered around free for years before he died, right?)

One very interesting point by the dissenting judge is that if you accept the majority's broad interpretation of swaps, then not only are prediction markets swaps, but normal gambling is as well. Therefore all currently legal and regulated gambling is actually illegal because the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction, not the states, and none of these gambling operations are following CFTC rules.

As someone who's been using Samsung phones for about 15 years, I had no idea there was a thing called "Samsung Messages". I tend to tune out all the shovelware that phones come with (and take steps to remove or disable them).

I really like Samsung phones, but their software ecosystem is abysmal. Everything they provide is inferior to other options.

They define 133-400k "family of 3" as "upper middle class".

Which is just patent bullshit.

All it is, is they keep the same old income brackets for "middle class" while inflation pushes wages and COL higher. There are actually far fewer people able to maintain a 1990s "middle class" lifestyle, and I'd argue most of these "upper middle class" people are living month to month. "Middle class" used to mean you were financially secure and had investments and retirement. That's a joke for most people under 50.

They're defining upper middle class as " family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 per year". So that's 2 middle aged adults + an adult child as the upper barrier.

What's that mean for your typical "family of 2"? Do they normalize on 3 incomes and play funny with the figures, using extrapolation for the third?

Because the cost of living has increased. $133k is going to just barely buy you a house in most of the country. Is starter home ownership "upper middle class"?

Absolutely not.

This is just inflation, and a disingenuous bullshit article in the NYT (as you can expect, at best). The middle class is markedly smaller, not larger, and they're just using old income brackets to define "upper middle class".

I just got the encl nastygram from our corporate IT
"We have recently noticed your use of unapproved AI tools, which creates a risk of data leakage. You must not use any AI tools that have not been officially approved when working with business-related information. This includes data such as profits, order quantities, and similar metrics, as well as MS Office files, emails, or any other content containing business information.
We want you to use MS 365 Copilot. ....Microsoft Copilot MS 365 protects our intellectual property."

(I'd asked grok for some lunar orbital data and calculations for fun...so not business-related in any case...)

What are the odds that pointing out in writing to my corporate IT that MS's own terms say "for entertainment purposes only" to say nothing of "We donâ(TM)t own Your Content, but we may use Your Content to operate Copilot and improve it. By using Copilot, you grant us permission to use Your Content, which means we can copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, edit, translate, and reformat it, and we can give those same rights to others who work on our behalf." is just going to get me more nastygrams and probably on someone's shitlist?

I would guess 100%, and didn't even need Copilot or grok or gemini to figure it out!

Half the world runs on VBA for Office applications (or used to, it's probably less now), and VBA for Office has never been officially supported by Microsoft. You're on your own if you choose to use it.

Pretty much exactly my point.

The fact that every dev seems to just install the latest whatever from npm doesn't help. There's really no "staging", "stable", or "security" branches, and effectively zero vetting outside what the package developer did. That's a lot of trust.

I never said they were new. I, instead, inferred that they're the kind of problems which shouldn't exist, because it's a mindset out of the 90s when the Internet was still comparably high-trust. They're inexcusably negligent.

You can experience over 40 years of UI design differences in Windows still, today: UI dialog panels from 3.1 days still exist in the latest Windows builds, and everything in between.

I don't think you can honestly say Windows has more polish. It has more bloat - yes. But that's not the same thing.

Meanwhile, Windows games (newer titles!) run better on Linux and Mac, emulated and passed through additional translation libraries, than on Windows.

You also grossly misunderstand how prefetch/caching works, both on Linux and on Windows. It does not change the baseline experience, or that the start bar can quickly eat up 10GB+ of memory due to memory leaks and perform worse than a Windows 95 machine deep into swap.

"Overall experience" is also nonsense - most people don't have the capability or wherewithal to switch. They use what is given to them, and have only mild preference in that they want it to work for what they're doing. Nowadays, that means "a web browser" for well over 50% of all users being the primary requirement, if not the exclusive one.

The baseline computers on the shelves have always been under spec'd for whatever Windows requires, and the experience will be poor. This is why so many people are buying Macs.

This is likely a paid advertisement, brought to you by the same people who are trying to avoid the continued fracturing and disillusionment of the remaining non-professional Windows users who aren't hardcore gamers. It's right in line with the "make Windows better again" agenda (I'd argue, propaganda campaign - there's zero chance of it happening) out of Redmond.

Windows hasn't been usable on less than 16GB of RAM since the tail end of the hard drive era (around Windows 7 SP2/3). Windows Vista was never usable with less than 8GB. Since the tail end of W7 around 2010, after W10 was released, things have only gotten worse: slower, more bloated, and more faulty. There are bugs in Explorer which will balloon memory use to 10s of GB just sitting idle for just that process (and many others).

npm is a problem. It's this massive, unvetted self-publishing repository without any easy way to verify the origin of packages, and the packages largely get installed directly to production on billions of sites every day without any vetting or review.

It's crazy, like something out of the 90s.

Yes, supply attacks like those carried out against npm are pretty common in general, at the state actor level. There've been a couple fun ones in recent years. But the openness and lack of basic precautions surrounding npm in conjunctions with common development practice just makes it a recipe for disaster.

As I recall, Ohio toll highways did this years ago; if your time stamp at the booth was less than a certain number of minutes since the previous, you got a ticket for speeding.
Infallible, and took away the point really.

Sure, I guess you could speed and then pull over waiting before you cross the next gate but... Why bother?