In addition to what they mentioned , I hate airports so much, they feel super alienating and hostile, even down to the architecture and interior design. Everything is stupid expensive and since they won’t give you a meal on the flight most of the time, and security hates people bringing food and drinks through, you kind of have to get something there. Airport security is also just a nightmare in general, having to pull my luggage and outfit apart and then reassemble it quickly so I don’t hold up the line is just stressful.

The fact that Amtrak doesn’t have security, complex boarding, or assigned seats is probably one of the biggest reasons I will always choose a train for travel if it’s a practical option. Most of the travel I do is in the northeast and mid-atlantic, so that works for me, I’ve even taken the train out to Chicago a few times, it was about 5 times longer than the flight would have been but still, cheaper by 100 dollars and way nicer. If I have to use a plane to make a trip, it legitimately makes me try to avoid the trip. Would be nice if we had more high speed trains than just the Acela to make more routes practical.

I suspect that they’ve been pressured to keep it out of public by turbo tax lobbyists, but with the straight on attempt to kill it lately, they decided just to ignore that pressure and push it out to spite those lobbyists.

This group will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai.

Don’t worry, the hen house guard force will report directly to the fox.

And of course this is all definitely worth it so checks notes we can become dependent on a handful of private companies to move us through our highly car dependent society and dismantle what little public transit is left.

Yup, totally a good idea and definitely worth it.

Interestingly, certain types of welding are not actually that difficult to pick up, and you could get to a base competency with simple guides and fairly cheap equipment and a bit of practice on scrap.

You could absolutely build a perfectly functional bike by MIG (metal inert gas) welding mild steel. Even with little to no experience and cheap equipment.

These days, most mass produced bikes are aluminum because it’s a cheap material and the difficulties of welding it (very heat conductive, hard to get the metal at the joint to flow) are kind of irrelevant in a mass production setting. A lot of people still prefer steel bikes due to the rigidity and durability though.

They’re assuming that just because they can bullshit legal authorities to get the things on the road, that’s a fait accompli. Once the services is operating and generating income it’s untouchable.

Thing is, they’re going to cause problems that will affect people, they will cause traffic jams, they will piss people off, they will cause accidents. These vehicles are, by design, unattended, sure they have cameras, but, anyone with nondescript clothes and a face covering can sabotage these vehicles without much risk of legal consequence.

The cost of maintaining a fleet of these vehicles in the face of road rage induced sabotage will sink these companies even if they are able to bribe every politician in every major city.

Enclosure of the digital commons. An attempt to at least. I do think that it’s ultimately doomed.

Fundamentally, the internet is an open thing, by the very nature of how it works, thus it is difficult to enclose. Google is more likely to destroy its market share than to fully gate off its user base.

But when all is said and done, the average person will be left to pick up the pieces of the fractured web they leave behind.

There is a difference between opting out of a default feature and having the option to install a plugin.

I can go replace the horn in a car with an air raid siren, but that’s very different than every car coming with an air raid siren you have to turn off.

Maybe some of the obviousness is a sort of camouflage in that if it looks like a fishing scheme, people at YouTube won’t look any deeper. I think the actual goal of the bots is to manipulate the algorithm. Like, most of the time, the obvious bots just get ignored, especially on videos from bigger creators, no reason to put effort in to making them believable.

Like, maybe they comment on video A to show “engagement” with that content, then they go and comment on video B. Fool the algorithm into associating people who engage with video A as the same kind of audience who would engage with Video B. Thus getting the algorithm to recommend video B more often to viewers of Video A. For something like that you wouldn’t need the bots to look real to other commenters, and having them seem like innocuous fishing scam bots might reduce the scrutiny on their activity.

I could see a lot of different reasons to do that. Could be as simple as some shady “Viral marketing consultancies” trying to boost a client’s channel in the algorithm. Could also be something more comprehensive and nefarious, like trying to manipulate social discourse by steering whole demographics towards certain topics or even away from specific topics. I do wonder how much the algorithm could be nudged by an organized bot comment spam ring.

I don’t think you sound paranoid at all, at least not compared to me. Bots are everywhere on social sights and there is a well documented history of different groups using various tactics and strategies to hide the bots or distract from what the bots are doing.

I think there is a pretty big difference between an optional plugin and it being built in by default.

Often times reviewers will get cards before release day without going through the manufacturer, as cards will ship to wear-houses and stores in preparation for launch day, and reviewers can get access to buy the cards early through contacts at those places.

One of the things nvidia did this time was they blocked reviewer’s access to drivers until release day, despite them having the cards through third parties.

Oh yah, for sure 90% of people shouldn’t be wasting the money on Nvidia cards at this point. There are very few situations where they make sense.

Intel and AMD both have way better price to performance cards.

To some extent it comes down to nvidia’s software. Like, some people like their upscaling, and I’ve heard from streamers that they need them for NVENC.

On the other hand, their Linux drivers are an pain and they’ve been less than cooperative on that front in the past.

Until Microsoft decides that enterprise customers should be using it and enable it by default with an update.

That seems like a fairly credible threat.

Realistically, most of the users are on smartphones, so, they could do that without seriously hurting their user base, and they’re also not a for profit company obsessed with maximizing the growth of their user base

issues around these kinds of legal liability situations are why so many companies hung on to systems like fax machines for so long. Or why so many banks still run on cobol.

If a company’s machine does something illegal, the company is liable for allowing the machine to be set up in a way that allowed it to happen.

“Your honor, I didn’t know the computer would do that” is not a viable legal defense.

The issue is that there are a lot of situations where a file can not legally be copied, saved or shared, and a screen shot by these systems would be considered that. It’s not that the files would be impossible to save or copy as is, but it’s not legal to, and having a system that might do it automatically without human input is a massive legal liability.

Even if companies in such a situation turn off recall on a system, there is no guarantee that microsoft won’t, at some point, push an update that activates recall on systems that had previously opted out of using it, or even reinstall it on systems that had physically removed the program from their system. Such as was done with programs like edge and Cortana.

It’s so crazy they’re still trying to push this.

Like, even if the screenshots are stored locally, even if they’re encrypted, even if they get deleted after being scanned by the model, even if it’s turned off by default. Even if there is a DRM feature that supposed to keep it away from sensitive information. There will always be edge cases and exploits.

Any company that is handling sensitive information that they can’t legally save and/or share won’t be able to use windows if this is even an option to have on. Like, their business OS monopoly is going to get knee capped by this. To what end? To get training data for agents? For better advertising targeting? To force people to buy new computers, and thus new licenses, by obsoleting and ending support for older ones? It just doesn’t even make cold corporate sense.

That’s still not very much compared to most data centers. Like, 7000 terabytes is a lot of storage for one person, but it barely even registers compared to most modern data centers.

Also, 2800 desktops networked together isn’t really a super computer or a data center.

such a network is interesting as a scientific tool for gathering and processing data, certainly, but not a data-center and not a super computer.

These are likely only using a few kilowatts, calling them data centers or super computers is an absurd hyperbole.