Those kinds of shenanigans are a good example of why I remain self employed to this day. You can keep your Office Space style bullshit. Modern corporations, especially aggressive companies like Amazon, have gamified the workplace into just sucking every last ounce of energy out of their 'human resources'. You're more a slave and less an employee every year.

Some intrepid sould would be forever thanked if they hosted a site (offshore, safe from DMCA takedowns) with user-contributed instructions on how to remove or disable the cellular modem on popular car models.

If they want my data, they need to pay for it. By, for example, making the car free or steeply discounted. Until then, fuck off.

Posting a commit message is not a legally binding authoring attribution and doesn't magically change things.

It's just like if I published a git tutorial site that had "coauthor: my_actual_name_here" hidden in an automation file. That would not magically give me copyright of every piece of code submitted by anyone who followed my git tutorial.

Democracy is for retards.

Government did this. All of this. Government regulated so much that only a rare few can afford to compete.

This is late stage statism. Retard voters are to blame.

Like you.

A lot of the audio production in individual videos is really bad. This isn't anything to do with YouTube per se, not their compression algorithms or other features. A lot of YouTubers have absolutely no concept of microphone placement, of using audio compression, of reducing background noise. All of which are things which will drastically affect audio quality and the ability of a speech-to-text model to create subtitles.

It would be nice if YouTube would normalize all the uploaded videos to one set standard. Note I'm not suggesting that they compress the videos as that might change the intended presentation of professional audio productions. I just mean peak-finding normalization which could be implemented losslessly and without breaking existing video links.

Having said that, when I look at my own channel - and I am not claiming to have great audio; I have a host which would destroy a lavalier microphone in mere seconds. YouTube's subtitling is really good. It automatically switches between English and French and Hebrew, and even with a fair bit of background noise (welding, grinding, cooking, crowd noise, music) it generally gets the text correct. So I don't know what the original complaint is, except that it's not perfect. Well, guess what, neither is human hearing. How about that famous Jimi Hendrix line, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy."

This is something like The Face on Mars, where author Richard C. Hoagland went down a rabbit hole and connected the dots on a whole bunch of other landscape features nearby to back up his theory that the face was actually a face. Then a later mars satellite went by and photographed it from different angles in different lighting, and lo and behold it was just light and shadow. Along with the rest of the rocks that made up his 'alien civilization'. You see what you want to see, and find patterns where there aren't any.

In the case of the JPL scientist shot to death, that one is local to us. It involved a crazy guy who was known to be causing problems around the Crystalaire community of Llano in the previous week, and when he trespassed on the scientist's property, the cops were called, crazy guy was arrested, and then he bailed out and came back a few days later and shot Carl Grillmair, the scientist, blaming him for his arrest. It's the high desert of Los Angeles County and there's a lot of methheads and tweakers commiting breaking and entering on rural properties in order to find things to steal and fence for their next hit. A property we're involved with nearby has been broken into three times. Everyone here knows this one was totally random, and very unfortunate. Carl had the property for the unobstructed views of the night sky, and it's fairly convenient to LA, being just on the other side of the San Gabriels from JPL. It's very unfortunate, but there is no bigger story therein. Can't speak for the other cases.

We used ZIP drives in a post production facility doing computer animation and early non-linear editing. I think I had a SCSI ZIP drive on one of my Commodore Amigas at home and used them for a while They are essentially a hard drive in a cartridge, so of course the failure rate is going to be higher than a fixed, sealed disc. They very capably filled a brief niche before thumb drives and easily removable eSATA and USB connections etc become popular. Before that it was kind of a pain to move and re-mount a disk reliably from one PC to another.

I avoid going to the movies these days purely because of the insane amount of commercials shown beforehand. I paid money to get in. And you are showing me commercials on top of that. I don't do commercials. They are not something I want to waste my life watching. I am not your target market. If I can't pay for a commercial-free experience I'm not doing it.

There are precious few theaters out there that don't show commercials. And none near us. I am down to 1 - 2 visits to a theater per year for films I really want to see on a big screen. I didn't stop liking going to the movies, but they've driven me away and the at-home experience is now excellent.

Larger screens and better sound are good. But they're not addressing the elephant in the room. I'm happy to pay a few extra dollars for a commercial free experience.

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.

does that mean they'll continue to manufacture the same old models for the US market, which will possibly become less secure over time due to advanced hacking techniques applied to the same old well known hardware? Will it then result in a net loss in security over time?

It might resemble Cuba with their 1950s automobiles, frozen in time. I do agree that there is concern about backdoors and surreptitious identifying data sent to servers under control of China. Would it be better to allow new models, but require them to be completely torn down and reverse engineered by teams inside the FCC, or for their firmware source code to be handed over for inspection? (there's still room for nefarious business....hand over one set of code and install a slightly different set, or install a backdoor with a firmware update....)

I feel there's a legitimate concern here, and there always has been. What's a better solution, if any? Or is this the right solution for digital sovereignty?

Since I'm still using windows 10, I can just lean back and chuckle. It's been a hell of a shit show to watch over the years. Glad I'm not in it.

...when they renamed the company to follow that weird bent. It was very easy very early on to see that none of this would ever be popular, people had a hard enough time getting interested in even wearing polarized glasses to view movies in 3D, that whole trend has crashed and burned. (I like stereo photography myself, but I understand the problem with mass appeal) But the fact that they expected people to run out and buy these super expensive VR headsets and do things with them is just laughable. I've watched that market try to take off since the 80s and there's just not a compelling use for it. I thought they were mad for going down that road yet again. Maybe that day will come, but it was super obvious from the start that Meta plowing billions of dollars into it and changing their company name wasn't going to make it happen. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall to hear the pitch about the metaverse inside Facebook. Techbros deluding themselves. I think they were just scrambling to place a bet on whatever the next hot thing would be after the initial round of social media companies and they lost horribly. In the mean time, their original product, despite being enshittified repeatedly, remains somewhat useful and popular. (just install SocialFixer and ad blockers before you touch it, don't use their app....)