...and wouldn't it be nice to get something in return for our tax dollars? Other than billion-dollar ballrooms and pointless wars, I mean?

I have a ":w! saves" mug ;)

I have to ask: did you literally never use a computer lab at all in the DOS era?

Not "logging into DOS" - logging into your account. I literally said "mimicked the DOS prompt, including common commands", e.g., you're at the DOS prompt. When you want to login, you ran LOGIN.EXE, which "mounted" your network account. I believe it was Novell NetWare-based.

The reason is Ed Zitron has been making the rounds of business media lately pointing out that their (OpenAI, Anthropic) accounting doesn't add up at all. It's very enlightening to business types, who don't really understand our technical discussions about the mathematical limitations of LLMs, but understand very well when "profitability" is an accounting trick, and when sufficiently large markets simply don't exist for the implied returns from stratospheric valuations. The Emperor's New Clothes And All That.

The latest domino is Meta/Facebook who, like ElonCo, have announced that they have no use for all the GPUs that they bought previously, and are hoping to rent them out to customers instead.

Presumably, these customers will be able to do the kind of "Great Things"(TM) which the AI scientists on staff at Meta aren't able to do themselves. I'm talking about those AI scientists that Meta hired for $100m with great fanfare last year.

Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing World Hunger and Cancer solved in the third quarter this year by Meta's customers accessing NVDA chippies at a fraction of the price that Elon intends to charge, or failing that finding a way out of the continuing Hormuz Crisis by asking Google Gemini to make a plan and emailing it to the White House.

Do they need cover to reject anything? In my projects, I reserve the right to reject anything, for any reason, solely on the grounds that they are my projects, and if someone doesn't like it, they can fork off (their own repository).

Once the target enters the correct password, PamStealer displays a message stating that the file is damaged and can't be installed. This is designed to be a decoy to prevent the target from suspecting anything is amiss.

Same sort of technique I used back in secondary school, lol ;) We had a programming class (in Basic on DOS), and it was painfully trivial, so I'd always complete the assignments in like 5 minutes and then spend the rest of class messing around. So one thing I wrote was a program that mimicked the DOS prompt, including common commands, and when someone ran the login command and typed in their username and password, it would say that the password was incorrect so they'd think they had typed it wrong (while it was actually saving their username and password, then logging out of my account), so that when they tried again, it worked. I would launch on a bunch of computers in the lab after class when I could get away with it..

Among the passwords collected were the teacher's administrator username and password. So when it came time to write my final project for the course, among the various demo-style scenes in it was a stereogram generator. The hidden image in the stereogram was her username and password. ;)

(Thankfully she had a good attitude about it... seemed like she wanted to get mad at me but also found it funny. In retrospect, that could have gone very badly had she gotten angry...)

Yeah, this is what I always worry about when I see studies like this. I know they always try to control for confounders, but it's really hard to do right. If you mess up, you get another "Regular wine drinking improves your health!" craze (wine consumption is correlated with wealth and better access to healthcare, and also, people with serious health problems often have to give up drinking)

Without a hostage there is no ransom!

It was a civilian plane afterburners! As somebody who lives about 500m directly under one of Heathrow's landing flight paths,

But Concorde didn't use afterburners during landing. Very occasionally on a go-around it did but that was rare - this is "abort the landing", not "we need you to circle longer"

Concorde did use reheat on takeoff. That was for up to about 2 minutes on hot days, more usually around 90s. Concorde didn't carry enough fuel to run the afterburners unnecessarily. (Around 60s is acceleration to rotation speed, the rest the initial climb)

The only other time Concorde used afterburners was the acceleration to cruise speed - and that always happened over the ocean.

I could already run Docker Desktop, using WSL for the virtualization layer. What's the advantage of this? Is it only the "without third-party software"?

Middle-range strike drones are much cheaper than JDAMs (smaller payload, but you don't care about that against trucks), longer range, and let you operate in fully contested airspace or even when the enemy has air superiority.

Aerial bombs are for entirely different purposes; they're for destroying fortified positions. Whether the aircraft should be manned or not is an entirely separate question, but one thing is unambiguous, it needs to be big enough to carry said bomb (aerial bombs are very heavy).

But again, complete overkill for a transport vehicle.

Being rich doesn't make you stupid, but being really rich starts to isolate you in a bubble of luxury and sycophants, and eventually you start to forget what the rest of the world is like, and start making decisions based on the unstated assumption that other people don't matter.