Careful. If you make hardware too inaccessible, then I won't be able to load ads.

I understood everything you wrote until the end: the super rich caused aging? It sounds like I would be 35, instead of in my 50s, if it weren't for assholes like Bezos.

If you're right, I really do have something to be extremely angry about, but could you maybe show your work here? I wanna look at everywhere you use the t variable in your equations, just in case you might have made a mistake.

My understanding is that the entirety of Wikipedia is only about 60 GB and is conveniently downloadable. Anyone ought to be able to download a local mirror to use, instead of hammering wikipedia's servers, and doing so might be faster for the consumer, anyway.

And in a world where hundreds of millions of mainstream users stream video, I'm not sure bandwidth really is expensive anymore. To us old-timers, the numbers today are just astonishing. I almost can't believe I used to worry so much about efficiency .. of .. anything.

Why waste taxpayer money on manual fabrication, when a machine can do it much more cheaply? Your crooked cops belong on the dustbin of history, alongside all the buggy whips.

BTW, wait until you see the next Robocop movie! People liked his use of firepower in the first 3 movies, but his real talent will be in filling out dozens of plausible-sounding arrest reports per second.

Copilot hallucinated the game

No, Copilot correctly figured out a reasonably-believable completion of its auto-completion prompt. This is a success story.

That some people thought Copilot was stating a fact, is evidence in favor of Copilot having done exactly the right thing -- but also shows that those people don't know what LLMs do and what they are for.

The big question is: why are the police putting the output of these super-cool toys into intelligence reports? Intelligence reports should be based on real things, not interpolations of whatever random internet text some LLM happened to be trained on.

In other words: cops, you're holding it wrong. You shouldn't be having Copilot write or modify your reports, unless you're writing those reports for the novel, video game, etc that you're releasing once you retire from the police force. That is how to use this tech.

The year is YYYY and some dork has invented the antimagnetophasing encabulator, causing all those clunky old turboencabulators to become obsolete. At hundreds of companies across America, turboencabulator operators are being layed off, as the new antimagnetophasing ones can already project their protoneutrinos into Yuzna space with a tighter focus than any human operator can ever hope to achieve. And it's all automatic!

I worked at Company A, as turboencabulator operator. Yeah, I lost my job. Fortunately, Bill Gates' lets-tax-robot-workers idea has been enacted, so upon my layoff; no wait, actually, upon Company A's deployment of antimagnetophasing encabulators, they had to pay an extra $n tax every year, for replacing my job with a machine.

The fact that they're having to pay some extra tax is gratifying to me, but it's not putting food on my family. Well, I mean, I'm sure the $n goes into the social safety net somehow, so maybe I'll see a little piece of my $n if I go on foodstamps or something like that. But I don't want that. I want money.

Ya know, thanks to my old job, I happen to know a lot about encabulators. Even the new antimagnetophasing encabulator, which took my job, is no technical mystery to me. I understand them and I understand why they didn't need me anymore. I get why the company did that. I would do the same thing, if I were in their posi-- hey. What if I were in their position? What if I started my own encabulating company?

I'll just fucking copy the company I worked at! We'll have the same number of CEOs, the same number of salespeople, the same number of miscellaneous office workers supporting everything, but no turboencabulator operators, of course, because my company will use antimagnetophasing encabulators from its very genesis.

I form Company B.

Company B is just as productive as Company A in every way. We're vicious competitors, cutting margins down to the line, as low as we can go. Our customers are ecstatic as encabulation service prices plummet. But here at Company B, we have an edge.

We don't pay Bill Gates' tax because we never had turboencabulator operators. But company A is still paying $n every year for laying me off! HA! HA HA!! Thank you, Bill Gates, for throwing an arbitrary, unfair money-wrench into my competitor's business!

Thanks for the link. This does make it clear that it's about the OS, not the hardware as Politico implied. So it's Debian, not Dell, needs to be worrying about this.

Why is "everyone gets a free pony" such a terrible idea? Doesn't everyone like ponies? And these ponies are even better: they're free!

Now quit your leftist whining and tell me what address to write on this pony box. We spent a fuckton of tax money (double the market value) on this and I want to get your pony shipped out ASAP because feeding these things is costing a fortune.

I haven't yet seen any activities by President Trump, which are to the right of LBJ. Another example, right here. Every fucking news item, if it isn't about his personal dishonesty and corruption, then it's about his far-left politics, which for some reason, are called far-right. WTF.

I am starting to disapprove of the Soviet Union's Communist Party renaming themselves as America's Republican Party. Why didn't the existing trademark holders object?! They should have fought back against the hostile takeover.

Once the terrorists start killing the hostages, you no longer have any incentive to obey their demands.

While I'm still pretty pessimistic about getting 1201-like laws repealed everywhere, Trump's overall hostility and pro-war attitude should help.

If Politico's article is accurate (*) then the California law is the most absurdly evil of all, making Texas legislators look like Free Software-friendly angels by comparison. California legislators and governor think this is a hardware problem!

They've put the burden on hardware manufacturers. Somehow Dell, System 76, etc is supposed to be in charge of making sure that their laptops can communicate the user's age to websites, regardless of whatever OS and applications the owner wants to run on their own laptop.

I fear this is an attempt to force hardware manufacturers to remove owners' ability to choose what OS and applications they run. If System 76 sells you a Pop OS laptop (or Dell sells you a Windows laptop), they need to make sure their fork of Linux (or Windows) and all applications which can access the network, can access the laptop hardware's (?!?) age-by-user database, and that part of Pop OS can't be open/maintainable (same for Dell's version of MS Windows), nor can the owner replace the unmaintainable OS or unmaintainable browser/apps or else the hardware manufacturer is liable.

So if they don't want to suddenly be destroyed by the government, they need to make sure their hardware has a locked bootloader and a very owner-hostile OS.

That's fucking evil and I hope horrific misfortune [angry details omitted] befalls ever legislator who voted in favor of it, and the governor who signed it.

(*) I can't stress how important that disclaimer is. I haven't read the actual bill yet; I'm just going by TFA's description of it.

If he uses a PC running Free Software, then he's his own spy.

Yeah, the prices are initially surprising. I guess all the spying, ads, and preloaded crapware/shovelware have massively increased the margins on Smart TVs, so that competitive pressures brought the price to way below benevolent TVs. That should give us all an idea how many dollars worth of fuckery a Smart TV inflicts.

This is not a product endorsement; I have no familiarity with the product and all I did was search Amazon and pick the first result (which was also sponsored). That said: Amazon claims to sell this.

(This is not a store endorsement, either, but it looks like Amazon will let you put it in your shopping cart (and presumably buy it) without asking who is going to use it for what. I only mention this because someone else posted that some vendor refuses to sell monitors to individuals.)

What we call "Dumb TVs," the industry calls "monitors." Use that search term and you'll find plenty.