Fuck him and the horse he rode on. Fuck his business. Fuck his technology. Fuck his company. Fuck his employees. Fuck his investors. Fuck his government ties. Fuck him defending this shit. Fuck everyone who wants this. Fuck the government for buying into it. Fuck the laws that allow this if they do.

Geez people.... Regardless of who is President, the issue here is worth taking a good look at. $2 billion is a LOT of money to burn through each year! And this is a program that arguably went FAR beyond what people expected it to do (ensuring libraries and schools had an afford Internet connection). Handing out free hotspots to people? Yeah ... I'd rather not fund THAT with my tax money. Just use free public wifi like the rest of us do.

We use both in production here; but, let's be VERY CLEAR: there is absolutely NO FAIR COMPARISON between a locally hosted model on above-average hardware and what Anthropic (and I assume others) is offering with their, currently, subsidized plans.

Really, I think most of the hate comes from the way the self-checkout kiosks were handled and deployed. The systems themselves aren't so awful.

Hindsight is 20-20 and all that... but I think they should have only deployed them for the "12 items or less" type of express checkout. That would have helped acceptance and adoption. The people only trying to buy a few items are the ones prioritizing getting in and out quickly, even if it takes doing something differently than before.

Self-checkout gets exponentially frustrating when you have a lot of groceries like fresh foods where you can't just scan them. You've got to look them up on the touchscreen. That and purchases like alcohol where a human still has to check your ID before the process can complete.

Customers start feeling like they're doing a job that cashiers get hired for, so why aren't they getting a discount for it?

I think it's useful for humans to not practice being an asshole. However, everything Anthropic does and says seems to want to convince us that Claude has reached consciousness.

Your comment sounds like nothing more than another anti-Apple rant with no substance behind it.

Quite a bit of computer tech gets no real "second life" once the manufacturer decides it's no longer supported. It's insane to pretend this is an "Apple thing". Just going through my small pile of formerly useful e-waste, I'd point out such things as one of my old VoIP modems/routers, which was required for a residential VoIP service that's no longer in business. Looked into it to see about potentially re-flashing its firmware to "open source" it again, but came up empty.

iPads registered to users and impossible to unlock is no different than what happens with Samsung tablets, except using Google and Gmail accounts instead of Apple iCloud. If people could be trusted not to steal, this would never have become a thing. (If you can prove you were the original purchaser of a locked iPad or iPhone, there are ways to provide a copy of the sales receipt to Apple support's "unlock team" and they'll unlock the device again for you. I've had to do that before.)

...in the hands of a competent, careful and passionate programmer like Linux Torvalds.

What I worry about is when Bob in the junior software dev team, who does his job to put food on the table, and just good enough to keep his job, uses it to vibe-code company data as his day job.

I suspect that Flock's contract allows them access to the cameras for maintenance (or any) purposes.

To which field? Math? Not even close. Data theft? absolutely.

If the mathematicians ever used ChatGPT to talk about math, then that is the source of the results. LLMs, by definition, cannot usefully contribute to anything that requires more than rearranging existing data. Rearranging existing data is their only function.

I have a set of 5 Echo Dots around the house and ever since I "upgraded to Alexa+" -- it's a train-wreck. Sure, the AI gives much smarter answers to questions. But they continuously forget my preferences for the voice I chose for them to use. (My wife and I both prefer their "female 2, relaxed" voice, as most similar to the original and more "professional" sounding than the others.) But no, it keeps going back to a voice that sounds like a bubbly, annoying teenage girl. Worse yet, there's no way to set a voice as default for all devices. You have to go around changing it for each one independently.

And that's before all the creepy, info-stealing behavior it has. EG. Someone will come over and ask it a few questions. Next thing you know, it's asking them to share their name since it's a voice they don't recognize.

There is no such thing as permanent DST.

You choose to join another timezone. For instance, Ottowa could be in the CDT timezone while Winnipeg would be in CST.

If this sounds stupid that's because it is.

First: I'm on the side of eliminating DST.

Second: Most discussions seem to ignore latitude. This article sort of touches on it, as Canada is mostly north of the US lower 48. Further south in US the swings in hours of daylight aren't as big as the north. In the north the days are so much longer in the summer, much shorter in the winter. ( a 7.5 hour difference in Seattle vs a 4.5 hr difference in San Diego). While both in the same time zone; the difference in daylight hours is much greater than the current time change.

You know what's the same in both cities? Solar noon. Set the clock to match solar noon, or PDT, and the localities will sort out what works best for them for operating hours, school start times, etc.

And in the WTF dept: Alaska observes DST. Juneau peaks around 18.5 hrs of daylight at the summer solstice. Do they really need more hours of daylight after work? And the days are so short in December, kids would go to school *and* come home in the dark. I guess you could shift the clock a bit so only one is in the dark?

The private sector has a solution to all of this that "just works". You acknowledge the supply and demand. Swamped with public record requests? Great! Hire more people to handle them as their job description/title, and charge enough for them to cover their salaries or hourly contractor rates.

IMO, asking one group to pay $2.3 million for a records request is unreasonable. But why can't you ask all of them to pay a fair share so the process works smoothly and effectively for everyone involved? A qualified govt. contractor hired to fulfill FOIA requests is typically paid a midpoint salary of about $88K per year.

Fact of the matter is, TX has been more the extreme, modern Facist-Republican governed state than "traditional Republican" for decades now. It took a lot of people some time to come to that realization. But definitely by the 1990's, watching what was happening in Texas made me solidify my views as more Independent/Libertarian than Republican.

As just a couple of examples?

- TX passed a law requiring people get a permit to legally possess Pyrex glassware. (Thought was, if you weren't a research lab or a school, you probably only had it around your residence if you were making illegal drugs.)
- TX was well known for their "Vampire cops" who were legally allowed to hold a person down after they were pulled over, and draw their blood to check for alcohol.

The general populace of Texas doesn't necessarily reflect this at all, especially with so many liberal-minded people who moved there from places like California in recent years. But the people in political power there operate with a lot of support from those who like the traditional ideals Texas claims to stand for, while acting in ways contrary to some of those ideals.

If I took an ax to the back of somebody's head, there's no jury in the world that would let me off cause it was the ax's fault and not mine. Time to haul in Sam for a little questioning.