Recalling the state of OpenAI's corporate IT security when they dropped their first LLM model to the public. It was crazy pathetic. Like Mattel's "My first company" bad. No idea on Anthropic but I would strongly expect that China, Russia, among others have already penetrated. Only the fact that neither govt really knows what they are doing yet, and don't have the full-scale hardware would keep them from running Mythos or whatever today. Also that you don't use your secret weapon to just steal credit card numbers**

**Like .ru probably shouldn't have revealed the whole "We can jam continental GPS from 2000km in space" bit so soon

Either that or it's a persistent urban legend.

That's a fair point. However I would posit that altering current culture to be less selfish, less consumer, etc is such a big lift at present to be in the league of fusion, living on Mars, and global vegetarianism.

France's nuclear program has been a success for it's intended goals. They are energy independent**, developed an in-house industry (employment) , met environmental goals, defense goals, and done it all safely. Including the handling of waste, and their uranium/plutonium recycling. The major ding against ASNR is cost, but most nations subsidize to some extent (US -> oil; Germany-> autos; China->...everything) and France chose this. Hard to argue it's success from a 1970's perspective.

Where the conversation changes is looking at nuclear from a 2026 perspective where solar/wind+storage is competitive in most (but not all) places. And new, drilled geo-thermal options show promise for larger baseline/continuity. Renewables also have negative externalities which should be part of the discussion.

** Few if any western countries are 100% energy independent mostly due to economics

Is that true? I can't find any reference to it, and it seems like the kind of thing that would be documented, if only to make fun of it.

And because they knew the product was going to die anyway. Open source alternatives have caught up and there's nothing to keep customers from switching.

This isn't a justification, but it's an explanation. If they thought VMWare would be a long-term cash cow, they would keep it going. They know that won't happen, so they've opted to squeeze as much cash from it as possible, as quickly as possible. They recognize that will accelerate its demise, but apparently believe it will make them more money, since they won't have to invest anything in maintaining or marketing it.

I'm surprised they aren't more worried about legal action, though. It seems like it would be safer to continue complying with the contracts, perhaps with far inferior (and far cheaper) support quality until those ended. As for the perpetual licenses, it would seem safest to just shrug and say "Yeah, you can keep using it, and we'll keep giving you every update we release", while cutting the engineering team down to nothing. The aggressive approach they're taking seems likely to net them some ugly fines after some uglier legal fees.

Same. Look, the motivation of a corporation isnâ(TM)t the service or widget they are selling.
Itâ(TM)s not even to maximize shareholder value.

Instead, it is to maximize the wealth of the employees. That is to say each employee will do whatever they can to remain employed.

Their managers will do what they can to keep being able to manage people. typically by finding ways to hire as many people to manage as they can. And the executives will likewise do anything they can to keep their jobs for as long as they can and squeeze out as much wealth as they can. The only thing keeping that in check is the ability for the corporation to make enough profit to pay for it. These firms compete with other firms to sell the most stuff using the lowest cost/fewest staff . Then comes the layoffs, etc. Equilibrium of sorts.

However public sector is that there is no such automatic limiting factor because there is no competition, and taxes& fees can simply be levied.

The idea that one slice of workers, namely healthcare service workers, is willing to risk the rest of California for their temporary job security would seem to reinforce my theory.

The idea that this same slice of workers is ok punishing the rest of California for Trumpâ(TM)s Medicare/caid cuts is tough to accept.

Not remotely. US hospitals are required by federal law to provide emergency care, regardless of ability to pay.

It's absolutely not even the thousandth time a researcher has submitted an invalid report, then whined about not getting paid for it.

This is correct. Mod parent up.

But it's not a vuln. So it would be worth nothing.

For a report that isn't a vulnerability? Well, it would have cost them $50k, and they'd have gotten nothing for that money -- other than to encourage researchers to submit invalid reports.

Also, a bunch of Google Apps. Moto bundles those as well. You apparently don't consider them crapware, but other people disagree.

As for Facebook, etc, there's another class of "virtually pre-installed" apps (I forget what the actual term is) which aren't actually part of the system image. Instead, the system image has a list of apps the device will automatically download and install after factory reset, so they're present by default but you actually can remove them. Whether Facebook is really pre-installed, virtually pre-installed or not pre-installed depends, of course, on the OEM and how much Facebook is paying them.

Google's terms mandate, of course, that even pre-installed apps can be disabled. OEMs are not allowed to block that.

Not being much of a gamer I haven't followed this story (at all!) so the headline and initiative name "Stop Killing Games" made me think it was 1.3 million signatures from people who want to ban games in which people are killed. "No way that's going to pass," I thought. People love virtual murder.

Then I figured out that it's the killing of the games people want to stop, not the games that include killing.

Vaguely related, I had a serious EverQuest addiction ~20 years ago (the reason I gave up on any but the most casual of gaming), and I noticed a few weeks back that it's still available on Steam, and free to play, so I downloaded it and logged on, and even found my old character still there (though with zero gear because I gave it all away when I quit playing). The UI is dramatically different, but the general content seems the same. It's no longer very interesting to me, though.

The pre-installed apps are just as unremovable on Moto as any other (unless you unlock the bootloader; some Motos have unlockable bootloaders). It may be that you define their pre-installed apps as not crapware, but that's a judgement call, not a statement of technical fact.