As the price of DRAM, SSD storage, electric power, and data center real estate rise, what prevents LLM service providers from suddenly raising their rates such that it's no longer less expensive than hiring a human? Compare what happened when Broadcom jacked up the price of VMware.

And what prevents programmers whose copyrighted programs have been included in the LLMs' training set from suing LLM service providers for copyright infringement on grounds that the output of the LLM is substantially similar to their programs, and the LLM is not following the license? I remember that demonstration where an LLM had effectively memorized the reciprocal square root routine from the GPL source code of Quake III Arena and failed to include the "appropriate copyright notice" mandated by the GNU GPL. Even permissive licenses, such as Apache 2, MIT, 3BSD, and zlib, require preservation of the copyright notice in derivative works. Doe v. GitHub, pending in the Northern District of California.

In Slashdot's home country, both copyright and radio transmission are regulated at the federal level. So what's the plan for to peterww and tepples to start to change the laissez-mourir policies popular among conservative members of the U.S. Congress? See "antisocialist", "extreme capitalism", and "laissez-mourir" in RMS's glossary.

I wouldn't be so sure of that momentum. Several countries in the European Union have implemented age gating through an application that runs only on an iPhone or a certified Android phone. An iPhone runs proprietary iOS, published by foreign monopolist Apple Inc. A certified Android phone runs proprietary Google Play Services, published by foreign monopolist Google LLC. The EU talks out both sides, regulating foreign "gatekeepers" on one side (the Digital Markets Act and provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to very large online platforms) and requiring use of services provided by said "gatekeepers" (provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to "protection" of minors).

What ID do Brits use if they use public transport instead of a motor vehicle?

Last I checked a few years ago, the United Kingdom offered no domestic non-driver ID. It offers only a driving licence, which requires access to a motor vehicle and probably paying someone to let the learner practice driving in their vehicle for some number of hours, or a passport, which is valid for international travel but expensive. If this has changed, let me know.

How might that work? Every approach I've seen has a drawback:
- Write the app using "web app technologies"? You end up shipping with each application a redundant copy of most of Chrome. Your users can't afford that kind of storage bloat in this SSD shortage.
- Use native code that calls the facilities of the operating system that the hobbyist developer uses daily? "Sorry, my app doesn't support your OS yet."
- Use native code at all? "Sorry, my code signing certificate ran out; I recommend building from source code. Here's how:" followed by a script that downloads and installs 20 GB of build-time dependencies.

And end up with a lot fewer people installing your app because of SmartScreen Application Reputation (on Windows), Gatekeeper (on macOS), App Review (on iOS and Android), and other deliberate friction that operating system publishers have ostensibly put in the way of wide distribution of malware that can read and exfiltrate every document in your user profile/home directory. A domain name, an entry-level VPS, and a TLS certificate to operate a web application are a lot more affordable than the code signing certificates to sign ports of a native application to all major platforms.

And again, the SSD shortage. Web applications keep working even if evicted from disk cache for capacity reasons.

Years ago, I thought of three application categories that won't get Free replacements any time soon: video games, players for rented movies and TV shows, and individual income tax return preparation software.

I live in a US House district that FiftyPlusOne has marked as a "safe" seat for the incumbent member of the low-government-services party. How would I go about convincing the public that a municipal bulletin board system is anything other than a waste of tax money?

Under current law, mobile carriers have power to exclude those devices from their networks.

Someone has already pointed this out, but it bears repeating. For that to actually be true, they would need to cost more from the budget than they add to it through both direct taxation, and the tax revenue generated through the effects of their labor and other economic activity on the GDP. Virtually all studies show that they're actually a net benefit there.

Perhaps for the LEGAL migrants...but not for the ILLEGAL migrants...they are a burden on the US taxpayer.....they're usually paid under the table, off the books and are the ones clogging up our ERs and classrooms.

Ellison's Paramount Skydance Warner Bros Discovery - and movies/TV can be very subtle in pushing a narrative or shaping public opinion.

As opposed to all the subtle (and lately not so subtle) narratives the current folks have been pushing for years now?

I've made a page to let you test whether you've actually disabled all video autoplay. "De finibus" has a conventional video, a conventional animated GIF, and a motion JPEG presented as a filmstrip animated with CSS. What does and doesn't play for you?

As a fellow NESdev member, I've identified several reasons why a lot of people have migrated from forums to Discord or other proprietary chat.

- Registration friction. People register for forums and never get their signup confirmation because their email provider misclassified the confirmation message as spam and dropped it without notification. Or they don't get their signup confirmation for days or weeks because the person responsible for manually approving new members is working through a backlog or on vacation.
- People feel compelled to type longer, more detailed posts in a forum than in a chat room. That's fine on a desktop or laptop computer but not so practical on the on-screen of a mobile phone.
- Notification friction. It took seven years after Chrome and Firefox added support for the Push API before Apple did. As Alex Russell put it, "progress delayed is progress denied." Email notifications run the same risk of getting mistakenly dropped as spam.
- People expect to upload and watch video related to a post. Discord allows even free users 20 MB per attachment, enough to post a short video of a game that people can watch before downloading and running it. Forums tend to impose attachment size limits that haven't been reviewed in the years since the forum was established, often on the order of 2 to 4 MB, as well as limits on what media types are usable.
- People don't want their wording mistakes publicly indexed on Google and Bing and then archived indefinitely as "receipts" for use in later cyberbullying or cancellation campaigns against them.

In the grand scheme of things someone being here illegally and working construction is about last on my list of priorities

They bother me.

They are taking up housing that US citizens could use....everyone keeps complaining about needing more housing, eh?

They are a burden on our schools and other public resources.

They are dead weight on our medical system...in many cities they overrun the ERs of hospitals making it difficult for true US citizens to get emergency care in their own country.

Just a few examples.,,....the US budget would save a lot of money if they were GONE.

It turns out that immigrants commit fewer crimes than citizen

There you go again, conflating ILLEGAL migrants with LEGAL migrants, especially those that actually wish to come legally and become US citizens because they want to melt in and believe in our principals ans way of life.

Add some guard towers with machine guns and the border is starting to look like post WW2 Berlin.

Except in Berlin they were trying to keep people IN....there's a big difference from letting people freely leave if they want....and invasion from foreign entities.

Frankly, iI'd be all for settting up our snipers, they could get some free practice...

And a No Man's land....complete with a field along the border of land mines.

Operation: Hot Tamale

Thank you...thank you....I'll be here all week...

Making motor vehicles without safety features illegal also removes choices/products.

Multiplayer video games ought to be designed up front for private servers after end of support, in the same way that motor vehicles are designed up front for the safety of occupants of that vehicle, occupants of other vehicles, and pedestrians.

A choice becomes a Hobson's choice when all sellers in the relevant market choose not to offer an option to buyers, such as an option to run a private server after end of support. A Hobson's choice is no real choice.

If the publisher of a single-player or small-group multiplayer game can't make a useful subset of the server software available to licensees, they should go out of business.