My kid lost his Minecraft account due to 'suspicious account activity' that magically registered while converting his Mojang account to a Microsoft account as they were pressuring him to do.

'Customer service' was completely unhelpful and presumably the company knows you're not going to go to the bother of taking them to court over such a small amount of money.

So congratulations, Microsoft - I pirated the game because we owned it and you were denying access. You 'win'!

I also used to use HP printers because they were drama-free on Linux. I switched to a Brother printer, which has a neat "HP Emulation Mode" setting. I didn't even have to change drivers.

Reportedly, Nintendo's OS on the Switch and Switch 2 contains some FreeBSD components. I don't think they copied from it as completely as Apple did for the OSX kernel though.

Meanwhile here in LA, the power goes out on average about 90 times a year, but nobody seems to care because it rarely is out for more than a couple seconds at a time.

You can't stop the LLM if it's published... but you can sue the company that scraped data it was not legally entitled to scrape, and the legal sanctions should involve destruction of the collected archive of training data and all copies of the resulting LLM as well as a financial penalty that is sufficiently large to dissuade future repetitions of the offense.

"But that would harm our bottom line" is not an acceptable defense against this. Don't steal. It's easy.

Of course, stealing's easier if you're a megacorp who can buy politicians and pay settlements out of the corporate equivalent of pocket change.

When a significant portion of your labour is a near-slave class of recent immigrants doing jobs natural born citizens won't without more pay, and you start chasing immigrants out of your country... that's a cause with an effect.

Then you add on tariff wars with every nation on Earth (and an island of puffins for some reason).

Then you start some wars that cause oil supply disruptions.

And you threaten your allies so they increase military spending... but spend it somewhere else whenever they can.

If only the US had educated economists who could have warned the government this was the certain outcome ...

Actually, I'd kind of expect the loss of labour to have been balanced by a loss of jobs, so maybe this is not quite as predictable an outcome as I initially thought.

If your job is filling out forms or collating information to produce reports, if it's taking notes, if it's taking inventory, if it's managing schedules, if it's producing documentation...

All those jobs are going to fall to IT. Not entirely, but it'll be human oversight and an AI replacing a team of white collar workers.

At the same time, it'll be embodied in robots and unskilled manual labor jobs will evaporate (this is already happening).

Good luck adjusting when the disruption is broad, deep, and rapid throughout the economy and workers can't retrain as quickly as jobs are eliminated. This isn't the automobile, this is "cheap obedient slaves with almost no support cost for those who can afford the upfront price tag".

I was really talking about in the beginning of Internet advertising.

I do actually recall what things were like before AOL and eternal September. Google didn't start the hire, they just perfected arson.

In the beginning, websites hosted their own ads. Then they farmed them out to someone else to manage, then that was (almost instantly) abused to deliver malware, then people started using adblockers and websites started implementing adblocker detection and refusing to serve people with such protections enabled.

Nobody seems to be willing to route both the original video and the ads through the same server to seamlessly splice the ads in and make ad detection and suppression more or less impossible.

I'm not sure Disney needs to worry much about inserting ads into streams; the low effort direct-to-video sequels they churn out are effectively merch and theme park ads.

If they give away access to that crap, they'll make it up on plushies and clothing and theme park ticket sales.

Orbital datacenters make no sense when you consider power consumption, radiator requirements, and speed of light delay communicating with the ground. The laws of physics say an orbital datacenter cannot work as efficiently as a terrestrial one.

My question, given that the datacenter concept is obviously a cover story, is what is it a cover story for? The most obvious is that it's to cover stock market fraud, but if satellites actually go up, then there are other, more sinister possibilities.

That factory will stop looking for full time workers now that they've discovered the desperate will take underpaid part time slots that don't require benefits.

We should be looking at this story with horror, not admiration.

Theft of IP is only OK when large American companies do it.

When I was young, I thought people blathering on about class war were propagandized idiots. Turns out I was the propagandized one.

People generally act based on their own selfish interests, and the rich want to be richer. They can buy policy, we can't. They are insulated from us by their wealth and we don't matter. We have no rights, we're not people because we're not rich. They can steal from us but can then wield the power of the government to prevent others from stealing from them in turn.

They don't need to form an army and march on us, they act based on their individual interests that happen to align with those of other rich people most of the time - and sometimes they do actually conspire against us.

They're not going to identify where the weapons are deployed and they're more or less already notified in the public press that they're coming and from which countries. Also... it's not like Russia can do anything about it. They're not going to attack a NATO base to destroy a weapons cache. They can't strike all that far into Ukraine accurately enough to target anything specific either.

I'm all for Russia wasting effort that could have been applied elsewhere to give more advantage to them on the battlefield, though.

They are breaking the law after all