Did they fix Azure's stability problems or just gouge the customers they already have? I thought that Azure might take a fall due to a serious lack of quality thinking in distributed computing, but that's just based on what former Azure engineers were saying. Maybe they rapidly improved things by moving the devs they had on "Put copilot in everything" to "make Azure work right".

Microsoft has made is so that everyone who is not a programmer or database engineer defaults to Excel for creating databases. Then they share those databases by emailing them to people. This is the dumbest way to maintain a database. It's also the least secure.
There are many ways to store and share columnar data and any of them is better than Excel. Governments use Excel for everything, so do businesses. Excel is hot, stinking garbage as is most Microsoft software. Same goes for Oracle. Nobody here needs to be told this though; it's common knowledge among those who have even the most modest technical aptitude.

Claude Code talks like the guy who said he could rewrite Twitter's android app in 2 weeks or something after Musk acquired it.
I put a few lines in CLAUDE.md to make it stop using the metaphors that I associate with smug self-assured 3rd-year developers who think they know everything there is to possibly know because they interned at Google.

Give it control of a loaded gun pointing down a frequently-used hallway. Add a hook to shoot the gun if Claude gives a specific command.
Add a line to CLAUDE.md:
- never, ever kill or maim any humans.
Then assign it a chat account and tell everyone to chat with Claude who has control of the gun in the hallway.

Most of my last comment was cutoff. Formatting probably. Anyhow, for financing mitigation and adaptation projects, the UN is moving (slowly) towards a model where the biggest contributors to GHG historically; the big GDP countries that benefitted most from polluting will contribute to funds to help developing nations with adaptations, and to distribute funding to mitigation projects.
Canada would be paying for all of its mitigation and adaptation itself in this model, since it not only has the GDP but also historically contributed significant GHGs to the environment industrially.

"...unmanned aircraft will travel short distances while remaining within the line of sight of the operator."
So a person is going to operate a drone to drop a burrito on your doorstep. How exciting.

I'm pretty sure the drones that deliver drugs to the prison in which I'm currently incarcerated operates beyond visual line of sight. It must be Amazon. You can get anything on Amazon.

The original comment by memory_register got voted down as flamebait. I agree with that assessment. The Trump administration and their mouthpieces are blaming Canada's forest management instead of looking for solutions.

The UN climate summit in 2024 (COP29) was setup to finance aid for developing countries to help reduce GHG emissions.
Finance was the main focus of the COP and a few regimes were developed for mitigation and adaptation contexts:

Polluter pays --
                mitigation: Actors should pay in proportion to the amount of climate change they have caused.
                adaptation: same

Beneficiary pays --
                mitigation: Actors should pay in proportion to the level of benefit they have derived from actions which caused climate change.
        adaptation: Actors who will benefit from a specific climate adaptation measure should pay a high proportion towards that measure.

Ability to pay --
                mitigation: Actors should pay in proportion to their financial capacities.
                adaptation: same

The "Beneficiary pays" regime is the most likely solution for climate action. If you benefit from wildfire mitigation of any kind, you should be paying for it.
If you are a coastal city and you need a seawall, you should pay the bulk of the cost, with help from funding provided proportionally from signers to the agreement who benefitted the most from their own GHG generating activities.

Fair distributions of international climate finance is part of the UN's charter. Penalties like sanctions and cutting off of funding should be applied to anyone backing out of signed climate agreements. More participation in the UN of member countries is needed, and any way we move away from international participation moves us towards even worse outcomes.

Canada is in the top 10 GHG producers in the world, but it's at #10 just behind Iran.
A lack of forest management is not the problem. The big remote forests were never managed by humans, and are biologically engineered to burn sometimes. Some species of pinecones evolved to become seed spreading hand grenades when burned. The biggest conifers can live 1000 years, and the ones that do have survived many forest fires. The infrastructure needed to deal with climate change, if it can be dealt with, is going to be paid for by us. Initially. Currently I don't see "climate change" on my tax bill.

By cutting all funding to forest management that doesn't benefit the corporations who make toilet paper out of trees.

You pay a little bit now so that your offspring and the offspring of their offspring can live in a world where humans and forests still exist.

Advertisers are starting to ape the human generated content style in .. actual ads. I was watching the WNBA all-stars game and one of the ads that kept playing was a string of influencer-like videos of people washing their normal-ass 30-something problem-skin faces with Dove soap or something, espousing the results in influencer-like "unscripted content" ways. As the kids say now, that's fucking cringe. Whatever happened to amazing looking models caressing their exquisite, wet bodies, lather running down their perfectly toned backs in perfect lighting in the most luxurious shower you've ever seen, PG-safe nudity of the most sensual kind for 30 seconds.
Now we get pockmarked, bumpy, blotchy fatties with all the appeal of a bowl of plain oatmeal lying about how great Dove soap is for their horrible skin that is probably the result of using product after product every day to make content.

Etsy abounds with weird shit like "Celebrity Status Soap":
"This handmade Celebrity Status Soap was created as part of an intention-focused ritual inspired by fame attraction, social visibility, influence energy, popularity rituals, confidence energy, attraction energy, success manifestation, and celebrity-focused spiritual self-care."
What the fuck is celebrity-focused spiritual self-care. That doesn't sound healthy at all.

And the internet is crammed to the gills with sites like this one:
https://qumbaaley.com/influenc...

Which is full of LLM-generated articles on how to make your human-generated content workers do the obvious things to market your soap products.

Connected little screens are going to be around for a while, at least until they can figure out how to surgically install these things in our optic nerve. The harm that we're doing ourselves by scrolling through short clips of brain rot is not going to be apparent to anyone who is already addicted. There's no doubt that the people working the algorithmic levers in the machine learning department of Google, TikTok, Meta are targeting children and every sensitive segment of the population for maximum results.

There are hundreds of thousands of people selling their services to connect content creators to sponsors. Not to mention content creator coaches and all kinds of other nonsense businesses selling the products needed to game your way into income through content creation. The economy is pretty complex and volatile. It's also rife with scams, MLM schemes etc. Everyone wants to sell anyone with a phone camera the secret to riches.
Those influencer factories are already here. The OnlyFans factories are here too. So yes, companies exist to create portfolios of content creators and to distribute sponsorships to creators. These companies create all kinds of rules about how to do sponsored content, scripts and media, etc etc... Creators end up signing away their names and images to these companies, who then can use AI content creation to replace them. It's as evil and exploitative as you can imagine.

We're calculating our current burn rate and it looks like we're spending an extra Sr. Dev salary per person for mediocre to average, but quickly generated code.
That's for developers. The product managers are burning 5x more tokens.

I have an NVDIA Shield Pro, which has GeForce NOW cloud gaming. I have yet to use it but it looks like all I need now is a wireless controller. Anyone use GeForce NOW regularly instead of running Windows or Steam on local hardware?

I'm torn between the SLATE and my old faithful standby. I have a 1966 and a 2015 F150. I've had F150's since the 90's. The only non-Ford pickup I owned was a Ranger.
Ford can't get away with not having a massive screen in the middle of the dash anymore. I think they should put a screen there, but make it something you can customize. Is that too hard? Building a version of Android that doesn't suck seems to be a hard ask these days. Most of the Android OS devices I have SUCK and using them in a car would be actually dangerous. Bundling Apple maps is kinda tricky. Google? Apple? Mapquest? Android Auto doesn't work on older versions of SYNC and you can't just update an old SYNC car to the latest version unfortunately.
SLATE is going after a price point, and the people who buy it will have enough $$ left over to put an iPad there if they want. I'm really leaning towards getting a Slate for local stuff (hauling sailing and climbing gear ~20 miles a day) but keeping the big trucks for longer-distance/heavier hauling like towing boats on sand.