requires a 90-day lunar orbit reconnaissance before landing

Is that a type-o? did they mean 90 hours? I can't believe they'd send their astronauts to orbit the moon for three months?

Funny how they've got that blue barrier for them to crash into at the finish line, then they get carried away on stretchers. Should be an interesting story behind that.

Did they completely tap their battery for the final sprint and can't even stand anymore? Or were they never programmed on how to stop?

For the curious
Prompt: I am curious about the corporate mergers that resulted in Open Text owning such a large portion of EDI sector

AI Reply:
OpenText’s dominant position in the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) sector was built through an aggressive, decades-long strategy of consolidation, rolling up the largest legacy EDI networks and modern cloud integration platforms under one umbrella.
Instead of building a network organically, OpenText utilized major corporate mergers to absorb billions of transactions and millions of enterprise relationships.

Timeline of Major EDI Roll-Ups
OpenText systematically absorbed competing Value-Added Networks (VANs) and cloud players, following a strategic timeline:
[Inovis & Harbinger] --(Merged 2009)--> [GXS]
(Acquired 2014)
  [OpenText Portfolio] ---------- [OpenText Cloud] ---------- [Liaison Technologies]
(Acquired 2018)
(Acquired 2017)
Covisint]

Key Acquisitions That Built the Behemoth
1. GXS Group (2014) — The Foundation
The Deal: Acquired for $1.165 billion.
Why it mattered: This single transaction transformed OpenText from a content management provider into a global B2B powerhouse. GXS itself was an amalgamation of legacy giants—originally spun out of General Electric Information Services (GEIS)—and had already merged with Inovis (which owned Harbinger, TrustedLink, and Peregrine Software).
Scale Added: Over 600,000 trading partners and 12 to 16 billion annual transactions.

2. Liaison Technologies (2018) — The Cloud Shift
The Deal: Acquired for $310 million.
Why it mattered: Liaison brought a powerful, modern differentiator called the ALLOY Platform. While GXS provided massive legacy footprint, Liaison added cloud-native capabilities and sophisticated API-to-EDI translation. This enabled OpenText to cater to mid-market enterprises looking to bridge older EDI architectures with web APIs.

3. Covisint (2017) — The Automotive Monopoly
The Deal: Purchased from Compuware for $103 million.
Why it mattered: Covisint was originally founded as a joint venture by automotive titans (General Motors, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler) to handle secure supply chain messaging. Acquiring it locked down highly complex, secure supply chain verticals for OpenText.
The Business Rationale
EDI systems exhibit massive network effects. A supplier prefers a network where their buyers already exist, and vice versa. By executing an M&A roll-up strategy, OpenText cleared out competing infrastructure, captured the critical mass of global traffic, and positioned its OpenText Business Network as the default central utility for enterprise global trade.

Still Curious?
Prompt: did opentext grid network involve maintaining legacy systems or replatforming?
AI Answer:
The short answer is both, but in a highly strategic, phased timeline.

OpenText initially maintained the legacy systems to avoid disrupting global trade, but eventually executed a massive replatforming initiative to consolidate everything into a single, cloud-native architecture.
Because EDI runs the daily supply chains of Fortune 500 companies, a sudden, forced "rip-and-replace" replatforming would have caused catastrophic business outages. OpenText approached this consolidation through a specific two-stage evolutionary strategy:

Stage 1: The "Keep the Lights On" Legacy Phase
Immediately following major acquisitions (like GXS in 2014), OpenText maintained legacy architectures
Minimizing Disruption: They allowed acquired Value-Added Networks (VANs) and translation tools to run natively on their original mainframes and servers.
The "Bridge" Approach: Instead of moving the data, OpenText built software hooks and data-forwarding layers over the acquired platforms so different legacy grids could talk to each other without forcing customers to change their setups

Stage 2: The Replatforming to the "Unified Trading Grid"
By 2020, maintaining dozens of fractured, aging codebases became too costly and inefficient. OpenText launched a massive engineering effort to replatform its entire B2B network into a single cloud infrastructure.
The Cloud-Native Shift: They systematically migrated billions of transaction streams off acquired on-premises hardware and onto a modern microservices architecture known as the Unified OpenText Trading Grid.
Standardizing the Data Engine: Rather than hosting separate translation engines for old Inovis, GXS, or Liaison systems, OpenText consolidated them into a unified "any-to-any" data translation layer.
The API-EDI Convergence: Replatforming allowed OpenText to bake modern web APIs directly into legacy EDI transaction paths, which would have been impossible if they had just kept maintaining the separate legacy systems.

Summary
OpenText used legacy maintenance as a short-term shield to preserve revenue and customer trust, but ultimately used replatforming as their long-term weapon to eliminate operational overhead and unify their monopoly into a single cloud dashboard.

OpenText operates the world's largest B2B integration and electronic data interchange (EDI) ecosystem, anchored by the OpenText Trading Grid.
It processes over 30 billion transactions annually and connects millions of trading partner relationships globally.

AFAIK, they bought up and consolidated all of the legacy EDI platforms.

Business plan
Corner essential piece of electronic processing market buying up companies who had bought up "dead" legacy companies
Maintain in place forever?
Replatform?
Profit!

Action-at-a-distance! Get your action-at-a-distance here or there! Packaged in a wave! No field of enquiry, is too small.

You, sir, do you want to read the story? Only two cents!

Extra! Extra!

Whenever I see something like "less than 0.03 percent", I have to wonder if they actually meant to say "less than 3 percent".

It's a 100-fold difference, so it'd be a pretty significant mistake, the difference between "1 in 33" and "1 in 3,333"

IMO, percentages aren't appropriate to use for odds less that 1 percent anyway. Humans are aleady bad enough at understanding odds, and this just makes it worse.

I particularly loathe the AI animated historical and scientific explainers produced by AI. For example, you get a neat simple story about something interesting like the evolution of clothing in hominids, and you wonder what has scientific backing and what is hallucinated.

It's a balance. The absence of enforcement of rules is toxic in a different way. I believe that when rules are spelled out up front, anyone who deliberately flaunts them does not have the good of the community in mind. So why should they remain members of said community?

The breaking of licensing terms often takes place in private. For example, if X steals his employer's source code, slaps a fake open source license on the stolen code, and submits it to Debian, there's no way to know. Except if another employee Y happens to find the code online and notifies Debian about X's fraud.

Enforcing a lifetime ban on X's contributions is the least Debian can do in that case to protect itself legally from the wronged company.

He thinks that any policy statement that says AI isn't allowed simply won't hold up, as the tooling keeps getting harder to detect...

It shouldn't be about detecting and preventing AI contributions with 100% accuracy. Some AI contributions will get through because people will always try something.

It should be about spelling out the rules, then banishing people who break them, ripping out their "contributions" and shaming them publically if and when they are found out.

This is not any more difficult than policing licensing terms is today. Debian already has a history of banishing non-Free software packages into special source repos. And, like any serious open source project, they already rip out code that isn't legally safe for them to use (eg if someone steals code and passes it off as their own and makes up a fake license).

Eventually, the answer will be to have a standard mechanism for reporting suspicious sloppy source code and whistleblowing on the cheaters.

What I think the OP means is that throwing randomly generated constructions at an external proof calculator, like Lean, until something gives, does not convincingly suggest that the LLM component is performing a useful task on its own.

I predict it will turn out some obscure forgotten paper from 1974 did it first.

Sorry, I misinterpreted your story as a work story with a corporate team mate submitting AI PRs. Lots of those around these days.

Border searches are complicated because there's a good deal of conflicting, ambiguous, and overly broad laws at work there.

- US citizens cannot be denied entry BUT they can be searched, harassed, threatened, delayed, and of course arrested if they have active warrants

- they can confiscate and hold anything you have with you, and they've got a fist-full of catch-all reasons that they can abuse to allow them to apply that to anything, including the clothes on your back.

- they can make it nearly impossible to get legal property back if they set their mind to it. The bag of tactics to delay return of property is deep, and the more you refuse to comply with their "requests", the harder they can make it to get your property back. Saying "they can't keep it FOREVER" doesn't mean much in practice when they can take months or YEARS to return it, and even then only after an expensive legal fight. (and that's if they don't "lose" it in the process) They're well-known to delay or ignore court orders, and unfortunately judges seem reluctant to use the court's authority to force them to follow the court orders. Just look at the hundreds of court orders they've defied, compared to the ZERO arrests that have been made for such defiance. You and I can't get away with that, but they can, and they KNOW they can, so they're really not worried about consequences if they ignore a court order.

- when (legally) detained at the border, destruction of property is a crime. The courts are going to have to work out the specifics, but a big part of it is going to hinge around whether or not giving someone a duress password can be considered "destruction of evidence". He's not the one that typed in the password, and that is what destroyed the evidence. I personally think he should have just kept his mouth shut, and used the shortest possible duress password that's early in the "try all combinations" search list like AAAAAA or "letmein". The "destruction of evidence" law was written long before duress passwords existed, so a judge is going to have to decide whether or not the law is broad enough to cover them. I foresee them comparing a duress password to an incinerator trap placed inside a safe, that if you try to drill the safe, the incinerator turns on and turns the documents into charcoal before you can get the safe open. Usually in a case like this, the prosecution has to show some proof or at least strong likelihood that there was damning evidence in the safe. If they meet that bar, the court/jury is allowed to infer that the destroyed evidence "would have been harmful to their case". But I haven't heard any mention of any specific crimes, it looks like this was a "fishing expedition" on his phone. And courts REALLY don't like fishing expeditions. If all they can say is "we strongly suspect there was evidence that SOME law was broken on the phone", that won't meet the legal standard. It's not a legal search unless you can specify in detail WHAT you are looking for.

- the border people clearly screwed up in actually providing an obviously fictitious reason for his detention. That's definitely going t be used as part of his defense, because if the detention wasn't done legally, then the "destruction of evidence during a lawful search" is going to get dismissed. They can't legally detain you at the border for a DOMESTIC investigation, which is what they were doing, so they had to frame it as a border security detention to lock him in that room and have domestic LEA start questioning him. It shouldn't be difficult to prove this was abuse of border authority, and that'll get the "destruction of evidence" charge tossed. (it's like you can't be arrested for resisting arrest)

- this whole thing happened because they wanted to coerce him into letting them search his phone but couldn't get a judge to sign off on a warrant for that, so they got the bright idea to have customs trump up a "random search" to lock him in a room with LEA (INSTEAD of customs) to do their illegal detention/investigation. They're basically using customs to bypass the courts on getting a search/arrest warrant. I'd wager there's an excellent chance this alone will get the case dismissed. The smart move for them would have been to have carefully "coached" the customs people on what to do and let them handle it. That might fly in court, but not this. Customs wasn't performing the interview and search, LEA was, and that *should* make the whole detention unlawful, which will vacate the Destruction of Evidence charge.

So he has a variety of defenses here, and he doesn't have to pick just one. He can raise them all, and if any of them are upheld, he walks. This is why he's VERY likely to win this case. None of his defenses are air-tight, but they're all pretty good, and he can try them all. It's basic statistics - if he's got five defenses and they each have a 30% chance to fail, that still cuts him free more than 99% of the time. And I think his odds are much better than 30% on these defenses. It's going to be a hassle, could take quite a long time, and theres's going to be legal bills to pay, but I expect the charges to be dropped or he will prevail in court. (we may even see the EFF get on board)

Agreed. It's a very expensive way to replace homework.

The CORRECT approach is to make homework voluntary, with no partial credit. Then do in-person oral examinations but only AT THE END OF THE DEGREE (ie the last week of a multi-year schooling process).

This used to be the case in universities and schools for centuries, and was replaced more recently by continuous assessments. Let's go back to the previously proven methods.

Psychologically, it's tougher on students, which is a good thing as it produces more resilient human beings.

Students will do nothing (because they can) in the first year, they will panic in the second year (and many will drop out) and the remaining ones will work extra hard in the third year to pass. All of them will have learned a valuable lesson that they can use in the rest of their life.