You should answer this question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"we all know damn well why we limit gambling to one city in one state of the union."

Except we do not. Most states allow social casinos and many have a state lottery.

Google has been slowly fucking Google Earth desktop so they can push you to the less-featured web and mobile versions where you pay to have your dataset hosted online instead of on your device and have AI incorrectly interpret shit you're doing.

Google's investors and C-suite need to get placed in an octagon with a pride of lions.

A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.

A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location's atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.

These are solving completely different types of problem.

You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon's gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.

... they could find some adventurous guy to go on an epic journey to recover the lost hard drive?

It obviously gives us guarantees in terms of what the source will do and what the compiled code should need.

These do not provide memory safety, so memory bugs would not be solved by these. They will find unexpected behavioural issues, though.

The precondition and postcondition statements are not cunningly-disguised assert statements because they're not asserted at runtime. They're enforced at static check and/or compile time.

The policy hints mean that if the kernel is doing something you're not expecting, you find this when testing the code. Equally, though, it means that users cannot cause the software to venture into realms unknown through many of the usual attack vectors because those will require permissions that aren't there.

Wrong, it's a slight of hand. This is not about individual cameras, this is about the network that uses all cameras together to follow you no matter what you do, no matter where you go, people shouldn't have a government that follows their every step by using AI and networked devices. If this was about individual cameras you would have a point, it is not, it is unreasonable to allow a government to exist that creates a panopticon of this scale, citizens shouldn't feel like they are inside a prison and the warden is watching.

"The only solution" is in fact, not the "only" solution.

The correct and LEGAL means for the police to gain access to the phone is to take it and seal it in a tamperproof container (aka electronic Faraday Evidence Bag), go to a court and ask for a warrant to search the contents.

We have established LAW and procedures for the state to gain access to the device. It is inconvenient ON PURPOSE. and serves as a checks and balance in legal proceedings.

IF that is the case, seize the phone, get a Search Warrant.

The problem is, the state couldn't be bothered following ESTABLISHED law and procedures.

Simply accusing someone of some unspecified crime isn't a right the state has to just bypass Constitutional protections, namely the 4th and 5th Amendments.

Americans have rights, secured in our founding Constitution. I don't care what feelings one might have to the rest of the case. Rights exist, enshrined and we ought to defend them tirelessly forever.

There is some established case law that says that one cannot be compelled to give up a Password, Pin or Pattern Unlock, as a violation of the 4th and 5th Amendment.

Those Amendments are key to a person's rights to be SECURE. Which is the key word here. He SECURED his rights, under duress, by refusing to comply.

THIS is separate from the police chasing him as a possible criminal for crimes I may or may not like.

Rights work by being the STARTING POINT, not an afterthought or worse, something the state can simply ignore in an attempt to prosecute people for potential criminal activity.

The state has legal remedies they ought to seek if they want access to secured personal property. We all know what that is. GET A WARRANT, which is almost always a rubber stamp (very easy bar to jump over). They couldn't even be bothered with that.

Everyone ought to understand, if we do not defend our rights, the state certainly won't.

I mostly do heavy multi-disciplinary engineering problems (these I also use for checking an AI, as they're typically not good at these sorts of problems), complex coding, OS analysis, stuff like that. However, sometimes I do throw the occasional odd-ball - I've used ChatGPT to propose a workable quantum mechanics that will cope with Doctor Who canon, for example, and to produce an outline for a story in which symphonic metal appears in 1964 that is compliant with current sociological and psychological models of behaviour.

Claude Opus 4.6 was coping surprisingly well with just about everything I threw at it (but ran out of credits fast), but Opus 5 is churning out incoherent babblings to the point I'm worried I may have accidentally summoned Cthulhu.

But Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek got hopelessly confused on just about everything past a very low level of complexity. They can handle large problems, yes - Gemini has a huge context window - but complex interactions baffle them.

ChatGPT is able to identify issues correctly, but can only outline solutions, it's just not good at depth. 5.6 is a lot better, but still not good at deep answers. ChatGPT is also prone to agreeing for the sake of it, which makes me nervous about trustworthiness.

That is fair enough. I've been trying out Kimi on the free model, and have subscriptions to Claude and ChatGPT. If Kimi is actually as good or better than ChatGPT, at the pro level, then it might be worth my while moving over as ChatGPT has become very disk-hungry of late and I'm pushing right to the very limits on what it can reliably process.

Although the Chinese models are all considerably smaller, it's not obvious to me that they're as good or better. They could be, but I'm not convinced the benchmarks that currently exist are stressing the models enough to establish where models actually are any good.