Perhaps more troublingly; they'll allow facebook to see what the people you see do.

My good-faith advice to anyone who is considering letting zuck into their refrigerator just to solve the crushing problem of what to cook with available ingredients or whatever would be "probably not worth it"; but that's ultimately a them problem one way or the other.

The trouble is that much of the pitch here is that you are supposed to provide footage as you wander around; merrily making the you problem everyone else's problem as you do so. And, yes, 'no expectation of privacy, etc, etc.' but there's a fairly obvious distinction between "in principle, it wouldn't be illegal to hire a PI to follow you around with a camera while you are in public", which involves a typically prohibitive cost in practice and "you paid them to upload geolocated footage, nice going asshole", where the economics of surveillance change pretty radically.

If people want to outource their thinking to facebook themselves I'd have to be feeling fairly paternalistic to intervene; but given that the normalization of these is, pretty explicitly, about facebook having eyes on everyone I can only hope that 'glasshole' continues to be a genuine social risk to any adopters.

Anyone who puts their money behind wildfire smoke as the leading public health threat of 2050 is just showing their abject lack of faith in the potential of malice and incompetence. Who are these faithless degenerates to tell us that we can't re-introduce enough trivially controllable infectious diseases or deregulate enough toxin smelters to outmatch some trees?

Sorry if I wasn't clear; that's the part I have deep concerns about getting done. My impression has been that(while, in theory, people are supposed to be averse to spending money) it's much easier to get funding for novel or sexy initiatives, especially if they promise to be magic-bullet solutions, than it is to push through money for boring stuff, even if it's low risk and abundantly proven; and the risk these recommendations address seems to sit firmly on the unfavorable side of that.

"We need to do a bunch of fiddly changes to eliminate quirks of build reproducibility, and generally have more eyes on important software" is not a terribly intimidating project in terms of novelty or risk; but "basically, just spend more on reasonably competent, reasonably diligent, software engineers than it seems like you strictly need to, in order to make improvements that outside observers could easily mistake for status quo, forever" is a deeply unsexy project. It's a much better project than "Agentic digital transformation" or something; but that's the sort of likely failure that someone looking to spend company money to look like a thought leader on linkedin will practically trample you in their eagerness to approve.

As best I can tell; most of the complaining about freeloaders is sideshow in the battle over who deserves subsidies, not objections in principle. I'm less clear on whether there's also a positive correlation between whining about the subsidies going to people who aren't you and actively seeking them yourself; or whether the cases of people who do both are disproportionately irksome and so appear more common than a dispassionate analysis of the numbers would reveal them to be.

This seems like the sort of advice that is going to be exceptionally hard to get followed because it's mostly so dull.

There can be some interesting futzing in principle to keep unnecessary sources of variation from getting folded into build artifacts, normally followed by less-interesting making of those change in practice across a zillion projects; and basically anything involving signing should at least be carefully copying the homework of proper heavyweight cryptographers; but most of the advice is of the "fix your shit" and "yes, actually, have 10 people, ideally across multiple orgs, despite the fact that you can get it for free by pretending that the random person in Nebraska won't make mistakes, get coopted by an intelligence agency, quit to find a hobby that doesn't involve getting yelled at on the internet for no money, or die" flavor; which is absolutely stuff you should do; but the sort of deeply unsexy spadework that doesn't have magic bullet vendors lobbying for it to get paid for.

What seems sort of damning is that the explanation is "our tech sucks".

The 'explanation' is that the demo triggered all the devices within earshot because apparently a device designed to perform possibly-sensitive actions on your behalf was assigned a model line wide, public audio trigger in order to make it feel more 'natural' or something; rather than some prosaic but functional solution like a trigger button/capacitive touch point/whatever; and that the device just silently fails stupid, no even informative feedback, in the even of server unresponsiveness or network issues. Both of these seem...less than totally fine...for something explicitly marketed for public use in crowded environments on what we euphemistically refer to as 'edge' network connectivity.

You obviously have limited control over the network in a situation like this; so nobody expects the goggles to fix the internet or facebook's server resource allocations for you; but having some sort of "can't reach remote system" error condition has been ubiquitous basic function since around the time that dirt was still in closed beta.

I suspect that this is symptomatic of the same phenomenon; but it seems especially weird that they'd be trotting the CTO out to give a, from context, apparently intended to be exculpatory postmortem when the problems with a device you are intended to wear on your face, in public, are 'sensitive to external trigger shared across entire product line' and 'silently fails stupid if network conditions are suboptimal'.

You definitely wouldn't come up with a fresh 10,000 liters of the stuff just lying around somewhere; at least not without resorting to nuclear chemistry or natural gas processing on a pretty heroic scale; but if you purely needed to ship something, anything, to be able to say that the amount provided wasn't zero; the terrestrial supply isn't zero either. I think the US is good for high single thousands of liters on a typical year, from nuclear warhead maintenance; Russia at least theoretically in the same ballpark in terms of warheads that would need their tritium checked, though no assurances either that that is happening or that they'll sell, they had formally stopped doing so at least for a while over a decade back; not sure what the mixture of reasons was between domestic users and not wanting inferences about their weapon maintenance.

Such a sale would be basically ceremonial if it has to come from the existing supply which is already spoken for every year; and there would be no point in Interlune as an intermediary; but if some finance construct wiggles one way if the sales are zero and another way if the sales are merely small, it presumably might be worth someone's time for Interlune to be listed as the supplier to Bluefors, even if it's just them slapping their label over whoever Bluefors normally buys from and doesn't actually change the allocation to different purposes or the total size of the market.

It's adjusting the allocation that would be at least difficult(potentially viable if the VCs doing 'quantum' are paying better than the people doing ultra low temperature MRIs or academic physics, or if you can out-lobby the 'national security' neutron detector market that doesn't get anyone excited but zOMG Dirty Bombs the Homeland!; but probably not cheap); and actually changing the supply that would be hardest, but possibly of actual interest.

I'd be a trifle surprised if it's an outright lie; perhaps I'm not properly accustomed to contemporary standards of allowable market manipulation; but it seems to have been carefully worded to make a somewhat exotic but fairly barebones commodity futures arrangement, which could be entirely fulfilled by interlune doing some paper-shuffling resales of helium 3 from any source or simply selling zero liters during some or all years between now and 2038, sound like a tale of Bluefors actively paying to send rockets to the moon because it's obviously only freezer capacity, not any of the other issues, that is keeping 'quantum' from doing whatever it is supposed to do.

Not at all. I'm saying that the two situations, despite the parent poster's dishonest or confused equation of them, were totally different; with the fact that one involved direct state pressure on the media and the other didn't('liberals' not exactly even having control over the FCC in 2018; much less there being evidence of it being used for the purpose in the Barr case).

It's precisely the naked abuse of state power to try to force the media to toe the line on their repugnant little exercise in hagiography that makes this case deeply problematic; and that was simply not present in the Barr case. The fact that Kimmel was run off the air basically for not jumping to the conclusion that obviously Kirk must have been shot by some sort of trans antifa jihad sniper; rather than one of the numerous squabbling factions of hard right violence enthusiasts who have been feuding with one another for years, was icing on the shit sandwich; but the main story was the abuse of the FCC.

I'm sure that I'm not supposed to infer anything from how little the press release says about when the money actually changes hands and under what conditions.

Unless I'm missing something there's an annual quantity(of up to 10,000 liters; no stated minimum so presumably including zero) and a delivery period; but there's no actual statement of which years the annual quantity applies to(are they the same as the years of the delivery period? Do they start immediately?) and no statement of either when the product gets paid for or of what happens if it ends up not being delivered.

Depending on those fairly nontrivial details this could be anything from "refrigerator company spends 300 million dollars on lunar widget today with payoff potentially a decade or more out" to "if you happen to have some helium 3 in 2035 Bluefors will take your call; today we shake hands and make effusive statements in preparation for the bubble vacuum that the fall of 'genAI' will leave".

I'm fairly sure that there have been enough actual commodities deals(both actual sales and various options-related hedging) that if they wanted to talk boring details they would know exactly which ones to mention; which makes me suspect that it's less exciting than it is intended to appear.

Ah yes, I definitely remember that time in 2018 when the FCC threatened ABC's broadcasting license in order to get rid of Barr; both sides, both sides!

Realistically, what will matter is what currently-clean-on-opset Pete will do to organizations(likely with Brendan Carr's slimy assistance). If they think that just doing journalist-level is going to work there's not much reason to just designate someone who can stay awake while holding a tape recorder to go collect the party line while everyone else skips the event. It's not like they are going to answer any but the most softball questions.

If anything, unless there's someone significantly smarter than Pete moderating the policy behind the scenes, this seems less likely to encourage compliance than the traditional measures; where you dole out little nibbles of exclusive and technically unauthorized 'access' to people you deem largely friendly precisely because the stuff at press conferences and releases is pure commodity(especially now that chatbots can, badly, munge it into other formats so there probably isn't even much future in rewriting or reading from the teleprompter those commodity releases).

I'm not surprised that Valve is dropping 32-bit support; the 'gaming on 32-bit windows' market cannot be all that large or all that lucrative; what does surprise me a little bit is that the announced end of support doesn't line up with anything I immediately recognize. End of 2025/beginning of 2026 actually puts them considerably later than most stuff using chromium for UI rendering(not sure if they've been doing a bunch of backporting or if they consider the fact that they are mostly rendering their own content a security control); but doesn't line up with the deprecation of any other 32-bit dependency I recognize offhand.

Anyone have a plausible speculation on whether there is something else getting deprecated that likely drove the decision; or if it's just a matter of having to pick a nice round number to pull the plug on something that could be continued but isn't really worth the hassle?

I definitely can't imagine any issues running a functional market economy under the theory that the first amendment allows you to make or conceal any claim you like about a product.