Both of these approaches have been used. Some vehicles have both things. For example a Sprinter T1N always has glow plugs, but a block heater is an option, but an Espar heater is actually more common! And when equipped, it comes with a timer, not just a knob controller like you would get with the cheapest install kit.

More hardcoded passwords and the like in the renewal processes where people have been doing them manually and don't know how to automate them correctly. These people should be outsourcing this...

You can't. You won't. You will outsource all of that to your web provider. Mine handles renewing my cert for me automatically. I could provide my own, but I don't have to. Instead, they handle getting it... from Let's Encrypt. I will not even notice this change, because they will continue to do so.

I have done my own self-signed certs and whatnot, I have installed certs from Verisign professionally yada yada, but there's no reason for me to do anything other than this for my vanity site. But there's really no good reason for most companies which can't afford to have an IT staff to do anything else either. They are not dependent on their website to do business.

I see them ditching their consumer line, since it's too hard to differentiate there now, and focusing on pro equipment. Their camera line is very successful.

It can't, though, and for two reasons. One, a person is required to check off on the data. Two, LLMs don't faithfully represent data. They ingest it as tokens and then what they crap out is influenced by random numbers produced internally as part of the token selection process. That means a person cannot certify that the data was faithfully reproduced without checking literally every value, because that's simply not how LLMs work.

You can potentially address this with a hybrid approach, where the LLM uses a tool to collect and manipulate the data, but this is shifting the problem to whether the LLM used the tool correctly. It might be more obvious when it doesn't, though, so it might still be a win.

What LLMs seem best at when it comes to text processing, and they are still not infallible, is summarization. But you can't trust its negatives, so it's only useful for identifying other possible positives. That's not worthless, it can help you catch things, but you can't trust it to do the parts you'd most want it to do.

I rarely have to adjust any options for a game to play correctly any more. Usually the internal benchmark does an acceptable job of choosing settings. Of late even pretty rinky-dink games have even been correctly figuring out that I want vsync (I have a 60 fps display, of course I do) which is nice, but they also seem to correctly pick the performance settings. I imagine that this is something that Unity and UE have finally figured out for them.

This has a really obvious answer which has been thoroughly explored here but I would like to explore why that answer is bad even though it's true, and pointing out it's true is not bad.

First some postulates:
Government should not be allowed to contract anyone to manage our data.
Government should not hire contractors to work on systems which will be used to manage our data.
Government should never be sending our data out to anyone else or allowing it to be stored on systems not under their control.

Obviously I realize that this is status quo stuff, it's more common than not in fact. Only legacy and defense systems are still held and run by feds and states, everything else is generally outsourced to a contractor (Accenture, Deloitte...) and is also probably running in the cloud — specifically on AWS, Azure, or Oracle.

But these things should never happen specifically because they are each individually poisonous to privacy, let alone all three together. All of this software should be developed in-house like it used to be. Government outsources software development and management so that it can do things it's not allowed to do otherwise, not because it's the only way to do it. It allows them, perhaps most importantly, to hand our data to others. Huge amounts of our PII is being processed not just on cloud instances provided by these players, but actually through their services (e.g. Amazon Transcribe) which are AI-based* and also mean that they actually process all of the data on our behalf and are in a unique and ideal position to harvest it.

* Amazon Transcribe used to support phonetic substitutions but now it doesn't, which I take to mean that they've just handed the whole job purely to a LLM which does it in one stage... you hope.

Kodi was originally XBMP (... player) before it was XBMC :)

Even an old PC can run far more games than any console can. It may not run the latest AAA game, but there's plenty of older ones which are just as AAA

For the ultra-wealthy, chaos is great. They will ride it out with their stockpiled supplies and remote resorts and child rape islands, and if necessary, their bunkers. As we lose our shit they will buy it up and we will own even closer to nothing. They don't actually believe that the USA can fall, which is stupid but predictable, and it probably won't any time soon.

In fact we do buy it from Canada, we buy way more than we just got from Russia all the time. This is just a way acceptable to his base for him to transfer money to Putin to use to attack Ukraine. It's not unhinged, except in the way that all evil is unhinged. It's Trump doing what Putin tells him, because Putin owns him.

Deutsche Bank was being extorted by Trump even once it became obvious that he wasn't going to be paying back his debts, because if it came out how fucking stupid they are (that they got suckered by a phone call by obviously-Trump pretending to be someone else who worked for Trump's father, who defrauded them into loaning him money with the lie that he was already in charge of the family fortune when he wasn't) that would make them look like the clown fucks they are. But then that came out and they dropped him, and he had to start banking with Russia. Both of his sons opened their stupid fucking faces and let us know that was the case on TV, on separate occasions. The rest follows naturally -without any need for appeals to the long-running conspiracy theory about "Agent Krasnov". I don't know or even actually care whether that's true when what we can see is so obviously damning.

ISTR there's a classic sci-fi short story or maybe even book about this, but maybe I just imagined it. Where the artifacts of our fallen civilization are lost because they were fragile glass things, and there was something about ancestor cannibalism being to transfer nanites...

Anyone who wants to know can look right now and find out that yes, the Flock cameras are always watching. But since they don't belong to the government, that's legal. You might argue that it shouldn't be, that if they're just turning around and handing the data to the police on any request (that is, without a warrant) then they are effectively functioning as a part of the police department. And in that case I would agree, but so far courts have permitted that to continue.

Yeah, but again, so far if a private company is doing it and then giving the data to the cops, it's not government surveillance. An even worse example of such a partnership is that the US Postal Service hands all of the mailpiece scanning data to the FBI. The feds are logging 100% of our snail mail metadata, and tracking who is sending what (type of mail) to who. All backbones are monitored and a percentage of traffic can be sampled in realtime, Never forget QWest. Need I go on? The government is spying on us in every way, both directly and indirectly. Most people are fully head-up-ass about it so they don't have to think about it.

Also, when your Steam Machine is too long in the tooth to be credible for new AAA games, you can still use it to play other kinds of games, it will keep getting updates through the community even when Valve is done supporting it, you can blow away the OS on it and load something else without anyone trying to stop you, etc etc. You can also play far more games on it than you can play on any given console. It's just a far superior value unless you absolutely have to play some console exclusive.

You could point to lots of things and say they are the problem.

I'm going to go ahead and say one of the problems is lack of vertical integration. Everyone seems to want to let other corporations effectively be in charge of their business. Sony's big enough to have their own fabs, or at least take a major stake, but hasn't. And inb4 anyone says that isn't sensible, Sony themselves disagree and are starting to change this, so perhaps they have figured this out themselves. It's not just the simple direct immediate economic benefits, it's also provision of the benefits of longer-term stability.

Once upon a time, a game console was a special piece of relatively inexpensive purpose-built hardware. Relative to the cost, they had impressive graphics capabilities linked to their design being specifically for gaming, prioritizing single-process performance and graphics memory bandwidth for results which PCs struggled to match.

Today, home PCs have massive bandwidth, and a game console is just a cost reduced PC with a crippled OS and unified memory. So why would you want one over a real PC with a non-crippled OS if the same games are available on the PC? And most of them are. It's not all of them, but if you need a PC anyway (and many people still do) then is it really worth it to buy a whole other PC you can only play games on, and which you will basically just have to throw away when you're done because they are so locked down?

When lots of people have significant disposable income, sure. That's not now...

The problem is policing.

One approach to addressing police accessing information they shouldn't in the name of investigation of crimes is to require any information collection outside of a hot pursuit to require a warrant. If there is a legitimate investigation that should be easy, right?