That made sense if you saw the Apple product line which had dozens of computers at many different price points all with subtle variations all meant to satisfy some niche.

Jobs knew Apple could not sustain such a product line. Restaurants in trouble often have sprawling menus for the same reason - some small percentage of the customer base likes one menu item, and now the menu bloats to dozen pages with dozens of dishes on each.

The call to simplify was required because Apple had no business with dozens of variants of a computer to the point a customer didn't know what they want. Many were also superfluous - you had a model with X and Y, and one with Y and Z, and a customer didn't know which to choose. (In reality, a model with X, Y and Z might be easier, and cheaper).

Jobs understood the illusion of choice - having dozens of choices is often worse than having a very limited set of choices.

By cutting choice down, it meant Apple had a simpler product matrix they could handle with dwindling resources, and customers no longer had to go to a department store to look at one line of computers, a computer store for another line, and an electronics store for a third line, all of which are subtly different and with confusing price points. Jobs simplified the menu at a time so Apple could concentrate on making a small range of products that fills the widest possible market - even if it meant the one configuration perfect could not be fulfilled. This simplified menu turned away customers, but it meant scarce resources could be used to maximum returns. Once Apple was on more solid footing, they then expanded their catalog of products, but also observing to avoid needless overlap which only adds confusion.

When struggling restaurants get overhauled, their menu is often simplified from the huge book to a single page listing at most a half dozen dishes they can concentrate on doing really really well that causes customers to come back for more. Once the restaurant is back on solid footing, they can start to expand the menu - by adding a dish, and being ruthless about cutting out underperformers.

There are two ways to do this. First is to feed AI slop into AI - this ruins the training models and is actually one of the biggest problems in AI right now - everyone is using it and posting slop all over the internet. But it also means when you crawl for data, you're ingesting that slop as well and it's corrupting your models

The other thing to do is to poison the well by posting non-slop that's deliberately wrong. If you give a command or code example, hide in ways that are destructive or don't get the job done. Things like today's equivalent of "rm -rf /" (which doesn't work since "rm" actually requires a couple more parameters to do it - but make it appear it's a normal argument to rm). Non-slop that's wrong is just as harmful - people are using it without thinking so if they're blindly following AI commands to do a task and it wipes their machine, well, that's a goal as well.

If you run a mailing list, have a hidden archive of AI slop generated archives that look a lot like the real thing and make it harder to sort the real from the fake

Your post is about encountering municipal bureaucracy when you had it in mind to do it yourself in the first place.

I'm no fan of bureaucracy for its own sake. But there's a reason you need to jump through some hoops when you want to change something on your property. Those trees you want to cut down might be crucial for flood mitigation. That room you want to turn into a spare bedroom might be a fire-trap if it lacks a window or quick access to an exit route. Digging on your property might disrupt buried pipes or cables.

Like it or not, we do need rules, even though sometimes they may seem silly to you.

Oddly, I don't think that's ever been an issue because DIY is happening all the time, and that's why those regulations are there because someone dies and people find out it's because an unauthorized renovation happened that created a firetrap.

So no, it's not a deterrent because it's happening all the time. It's made worse by house flippers because those people are cutting corners to save money (i.e., make more profit), who you know aren't taking time to get permits, do inspections, or even bring things to code. By the time the flawed renovations are discovered, it's too late and the buyer is basically left with their house falling to pieces.

So I don't get get the claptrap that DIY is illegal - because if it was illegal, substandard construction and renovation work wouldn't be happening. There's probably a small fraction of the unpermitted work done properly to code (or better - remember code is just a minimum) and you'll never know until decades down the line when someone tries to renovate and discovers no permit was ever taken out. It's just it was well constructed, well built that no one needed to do anything. But that is far from the norm, and DIYers are basically the reason for the regulatory hell.

Also why "house flipping" should be an immediate rejection of a house - it looks pretty but the pain is likely concealing a load of issues you won't find out until later.

For Africa, the situation is different. The government led projects aren't happening not because of regulations, but because corruption and other things are basically draining the resources. Building an electric grid even without regulations we have (basically it's the wild west outside of Western nations) still costs money and effort, and enough palms get greased that no money makes it down to do the work. That's why it's not happening. And having electricity is better than not, so even the shadiest and lousiest of DIY gear you can get off Temu makes your life way better than trying to get it done the right way. Electrification rates in Africa are disputed because if you have a house with a single LED light that provides light for a few hours after dark, you're considered to have electricity.

Even the most basic DIY solar projects in Africa provide that, but also power to charge cellphones and provide Internet connectivity (during the day - there are batteries but they provide the lighting) - when the sun is out the battery charges and runs an inverter so you can run a computer to get Internet (usually via cellular network). This is often enough for farmers to access trading networks and get weather forecasts which is why it exists and is considered an important resource. And while the sun is out, cellphone charging is done.

She won $150K and donated it all.

She still has to pay income tax on $150K, given that the tax deduction on donations isn't 100%.

I'm guessing she does not have the free cash available to pay those taxes either.

She could've "donated it all" which also means "minus taxes". So she donated all her winnings net taxes owed. I think most of these lotteries already withhold 40% of the money and remit as taxes anyways so she probably just gave to charity what she got left.

The IRS takes their cut immediately, even if you're a foreigner. You then have to submit tons of paperwork showing whether or not your country has a tax treaty with the US, at which point they just withhold 25% for taxes. Then you have to submit even more paperwork if you want the last bit (because lottery winnings may be tax free in some countries, like Canada).

I would also guess that perhaps the lottery has the ability to donate a portion of your winnings to a charity of your choice to help bypass some of the paperwork regarding taxes, because it's not unusual for winners to donate a portion of their winnings.

This just seemed like an obvious swing-and-miss on the part of the manufacturers. TVs are passive consumption devices, and that's exactly what people want them to be.

Yeah, but the heart was in the right place - because videoconferencing is a thing after all (and was a thing pre-pandemic). So instead of everyone in a family gathering around a phone to say hi to grandma, they could do it from the living room sofa.

Conference bars are expensive - even if you go for the non-smart ones they're still pretty pricey, add on a Barco or other unit to do your conferencing stuff, and it's fairly expensive and you still have to supply the TV. Meanwhile, you can get a camera for the LG for $100 and it does Teams and Zoom and everything else.

So the idea was sound, you can still buy conference bars today or even smart conference bars even.

It was an idea, with bad to worse execution (the horrendous privacy policies notwithstanding). If they planned it out better with a real privacy focus, they might have done a lot better than simply being a way to monetize their customers in the end.

It's likely one where had they tried not to be greedy in the beginning it might have had some modicum of success. Instead they decided to be full on greed and untrustworthy from the get go.

It's actually a terrible idea.

As someone with an SCCA license used to driving racing cars that have much higher performance than nearly everything on the road (including your Tesla), I can tell you that no mass-market road car is hard to drive. The problem is never the car, it's the driver, or more accurately their lack of ability.

To properly solve a problem you need to attack the root cause, not one of it's symptoms.
If there are people out there that can't truly can't handle jthe acceleration of a car or type of car then they shouldn't have been legally allowed to drive it in the first place.

Except for the first time in basically automobile history, cars have broken acceleration records to the point it's physics limiting acceleration and not the vehicle.

ICE are slow and laggy - they take a while to get up to speed, which generally has limited acceleration for normal vehicles.

These days production EVs are easily able to get beyond those limits way too easily, and getting 0-60 times in 3 seconds isn't unusual. (a 0-60 in 3 seconds used to be the holy grail, and now production EVs are beating it on a regular basis).

I'm guessing China probably saw a bunch of rear-enders where some EV driver ran into the rear of the car ahead of them because the EV out-accelerated the car in front. And chances are everyone is close to everyone else so if you're a bit too enthusiastic with the pedal you might not be able to hit the brakes in time.

It needs to be inconvenient and convoluted enough that clueless users can't be tricked into doing it via phishing.

False. It's the Dancing Pigs problem.

As long as there's a method, someone will write instructions that people will follow. And malware actors will hijack whatever method to install ransomware. You can bet one step will have people running command line commands and there was that ransomware installed via the command line.

The urge to get pirated apps will drive people to whatever the method is. There will be dozens of easy to follow tutorials, videos, and other things. The only saving grace might be the chance for AI assistants to screw it up completely and wipe people's computers when they try.

Well, better than Hyundai did, where the whole MAGA "oh noes immigrants" overrodw the whole "Made in America" and handcuffed, detained and locked up a bunch of South Koreans in those miserable ICE facilities to the point every one of them filed human rights violations. It took South Korean diplomats a week to get them back.

I'm guessing by the time Trump took over Toyota had sent back all its workers and it's up to the locals to operate the plant, so they got lucky. Chances are though the Japanese engineers that were providing supervision likely left out of caution.

So the plant is there, it's able to make batteries, but it's likely not running at full capacity because the expertise needed to do so doesn't dare enter the US. (Especially after what happened to South Korea).

Though, it's not likely to be an issue, since EV sales have tanked, so it might be too late.

...they find lots of conversations where people teach ChatGPT the lyrics of their favorite (copyrighted) songs. :-)

Chances are that's likely the real reason for fighting the order - they don't want to reveal the fact a lot of their users are using ChatGPT to violate copyright and it's something OpenAI doesn't want to admit to.

Pretty sure DRM is meant to drive people to warezzzz where the games are free and DRM-less.

Less DRM. More anti-cheat.

Most DRM is broken after a week - and the only reason it's kept on is usually because there are paid things that the game has (microtransactions).,

But the anti-cheat is the bigger one, and no one cares if you warez your game if you can't play it with everyone else and everyone you can play with cheats.

So how come games on Epic Games Store aren't cheaper? Game prices have only gone up despite EGS charging developers only 18% vs. Steam's 30%. Many games were exclusive to EGS, and they didn't launch at lower prices or spur a trend to lower prices.

They started at the same price point as other games.

Prices are just sticky - if you're paying $60 for a game, why release your new game at $55? People are used to $60 so you might as well pocket the extra $5 and selling it for the same $60 despite the store taking less money.

Many don't even know what a terminal is. We are now trained through 2-factor authorization techniques that it is OK to have to prove yourself through a second method outside the browser page. It's not a far leap from email or text messages to entering a code into an app window.

It doesn't matter. You can walk through someone to install the Terminal app on Windows if they're motivated enough for the outcome.

People search all the time for free stuff - perhaps you can set up a page to "get Photoshop for free!" that walks people into installing Terminal from the app store, and how to run the script etc. You can even offer video tutorials on how to do it.

A sufficiently motivated person is suddenly very adept at doing technical things, especially if you explain it in bite-sized chunks.

The desire to have "free apps" lead many iPhone users to jailbreak their iPhones which lead to several worms because they installed sshd and didn't change the default phone password.

Why the hell would someone go open a terminal window and paste random shit in from a web page?

Because it leads them to what they want?

You can advertise "free pr0n!" and have people copy and paste random text into a terminal window if they believe it'll get them to what they want. Your random script can even pop open a website to make it look legit.

It's the whole Dancing Pigs means of security. If you offer a user a video of dancing pigs, they'll do anything to see it.

It used to be 30 days. Apple and Microsoft complained because it didn't give enough time to analyze the problem, fix it, test it, and then do a proper rollout to ensure there weren't unexpected side effects in 30 days.

I think what happened was a kernel flaw, meaning a fix could severely impact other subsystems in the OS and thus a fix would need to be carefully done and a properly staged rollout.

The problem isn't the AI tools - Project Zero has real researchers doing real analysis and making sure those AI issues are real. It's likely they're filing issues FFMPEG feels aren't really issues at all.

You might think a bug in a codec used in a 1996 console isn't relevant for security, but if someone can code up an exploit using it, it's suddenly a big deal. I don't have to play back 1996 console video game to hit the bug, I just need to trick someone into getting FFMPEG to see the file as that format and exploit the security hole. (Think sites like YouTube and such that ingest video, for example)

The problem is, there is no right solution. Is it a real security issue? I don't care if it's only for a platform that only only one game released and no one's ever going to practically use it. If it's a way to break into the software and escape my software stack, it's a security issue because all you need is to have someone pretend to be that file. If not, then let the issue be published - even if you don't want to fix it, people who use it might simply be able to disable ingesting that format at all and eliminate the security hole by not having the feature available.

Why don't you move your application to a normal 64 bit server?

Linux may be getting rid of 32-bit support, but that's only a 32-bit kernel on 32-bit CPU support which outside of the Vortex86 SoC no one makes hardware for.

Linux is NOT getting rid of 32-bit on amd64 userspace support, so your program will run just fine in 32-bit mode. Several distributions have tried to get rid of 32-bit usermode support but that was generally met with resistance.

You don't have to port the code to 64 bit - but it also doesn't need to be stuck on a 32-bit machine either. Linux can run 32-bit usermode binaries just fine.

Indeed, you want fun you try WSL1 - the Windows kernel does NOT support 32-bit Linux binaries and that results in it being basically useless. It works for maybe 70-90% of the things but you'll run into odd errors when you hit a 32-bit program. It's why WSL2 exists and it's running Linux in a VM so you can run 32 bit Linux binaries.

Still tons of 32-bit user space code out there. Even Windows 11 dropped support for 32-bit CPUs, but not for running 32-bit applications because I don't think it'll be possible to drop that ever. Even the OSes that did - iOS and Android - it wasn't completely painless and lots of apps just stopped working. On the desktop where there are far more legacy applications, probably not at all likely.