Or maybe inefficient in a way that can't get fixed by random budget cuts. We see a lot of inefficiencies in big companies that are profit driven and ruled by unelected, amoral and smart people who would do anything in the name of efficiency.

It may take 10 people to screw in a light bulb and an outsider will find it ridiculous, and sure, it is. However, they are all doing their part and if you fire just one of them, no more light bulb being screwed, the company will be in the dark and there will be trouble. So, not an option. Or, then, you can fire the entire light bulb screwing team and replace them with a single person and do like everywhere else where a single person can screw in a light bulb, except that the company uses custom light bulbs and no one person can screw it in. So you may want to replace your custom light bulbs with standard light bulbs, but doing so will have a cost, and for a time, and maybe forever, you will have both the 10 people team for the custom light bulbs and one more guy for the standard light bulbs. So, 11 people to screw-in a light bulb...

Or you can just fire these guys anyways and let the company go dark. That's essentially what Elon Musk did to Twitter/X, that indeed was way overstaffed for what it delivered. The result: it is still overstaffed, even if less so, but now, it also runs like crap now and they are losing users and customers. Maybe it will recover and maybe it will run more efficiently later but it is not a given. The difference between Twitter and government services is that we can do without Twitter, but we can't do without government services.

There is a saying that goes "for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong", DOGE is such an answer.

Trump is exploiting a loophole. He cannot impose tariffs unilaterally unless there is a threat to national security. So everything is a matter of national security.

I am all for making CS (actual computer science!) a requirement. But AI, nah, except maybe as a side note about what it *cannot* do, or maybe in the context of linear algebra.

The reason I think teaching CS and coding is a good thing is for the same reason why teaching maths above simple arithmetic is a good thing: it teaches logical thinking and a rigorous approach to solving problems. When you write a computer program, you can't be sloppy, what you write is what the computer will do, the computer will not do what you think you have written. In a world where we are surrounded by machines, I think this is an important skill to have, machines don't think, you have to do the thinking for them, and programming puts you right mindset. It can even extend to giving instructions to people, contracts, etc... especially in an industrial world where you and the person making your stuff will likely never meet, and all they have is what you have written.

  In addition, coding is a useful skill by itself, and it can be fun because you get concrete results.

AI is totally unlike that. The core of it is maths, but that's maths that is already taught at school, at least in STEM fields, so nothing special here. There is linear algebra, derivatives, standard stuff, math classes can be updated to talk about this application but that's about it. But beyond that, it is sloppy and doesn't require much skill, in fact, that's the whole point, and even the experts don't really understand how it works besides the fundamental maths. So what there is to teach at school (beside maths)? In practice, it could be like sexual education. We don't teach kids how to fuck, they don't need classes for that, but we teach them biology, and also the risks (which in case of AI would be things like false information/hallucinations).

The be fair to these posts, BTC eventually reached $100k and on average for the last 5 years progressed a lot more than the global market. So maybe these predictions were optimistic on the time frame, but I am not going to call "LOL!". Baseless or not, those who bought based on these predictions made money.

I am just looking at the charts, I have no skin in this game and I don't intend to. Will it exceed $250k one day? Maybe, maybe not, maybe it will crash, but $250k in a few years is not out of the question. Very improbable for the next month or so, but If I was sure it would get to $250k in the next 5 years, it would still be a very good investment.

I don't like gambling, I don't intend to play Bitcoin, and I don't have any regrets, but I must admit that some people have hit the jackpot, and my reactions is more "GG" than "LOL".

Yoda's specie is made deliberately mysterious, but Georges Lucas supposedly said that Yoda is "actually the illegitimate child of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy."

That would make him only half pig.

For the transphobic part, I don't know, but it may have to do with his frog side, as some frogs are able to switch sex. Maybe, as a hybrid, he lost this ability.

So, while there is some merit to it, I don't think that "transphobic pig" is the right term. "Gonochoristic frog-pig hybrid" would be a more scientifically accurate description.

Maybe they didn't need a scene that is more than 2 minutes long, and that the actor getting a sore arm from time to time and the occasional blooper didn't justify the added complexity, cost, and loss of flexibility a support rig could result in.

I agree that it is most likely deliberate.

I have a friend who is French and living in the US as an actor / voice actor. More often than not, he is asked to keep his French accent, sometimes to the point of overacting. And it makes sense, they cast a French guy to play a French character with a French accent.

For Mr Rutte, I believe it is the same idea, he is a Dutch politician and even as a secretary general of NATO, he still represents his country, and his accent is a way to insist on that part. He is not American, he is not British, he is Dutch and his country matters in the international community. I think that's the message.

Made up expressions and etymologies happen all the time. Like made up quotes from famous people.

When I see such explanations online, or by word of mouth, I usually assume it is wrong, and it usually is. Even generally reliable sources (ex: Wikipedia, major news outlets, etc...) often get it wrong, sometimes you need PhD levels of research to get to the bottom of it. Of course I don't go that far, I just treat these "explanations" as good stories, not facts I can rely on.

That LLMs make up good stories too is fitting. And if the story is good enough, a new expression may just have come into existence. Language is not static.

It is more general than that, Signal does everything it can to get people in contact. In particular, it will notify you when one of your contacts join Signal. You can disable this, but it is not the default. It is significant, as it can reveal information you may not want to reveal. You may not want to tell your contact that you have joined signal. Of course, there is also the massive issue that you are using a phone number to join.

I understand why they do this, they want as many people as they can on their platform, and there are good reasons for that. But it is still a convenience/security tradeoff, one that is fine for everyday use, but probably inappropriate for classified conversation. Technically, Signal do the best they can, but they are still targeting the general public, there is no gatekeeping, quite the opposite in fact.

A modified version of Signal on a private server not using phone numbers would work, but not the actual Signal app. Or maybe Matrix.

I don't understand why Americans have a problem with PDOs (i.e. the rule that says that Champagne can only be made in one part of France). It is exactly like a trademark, but for a region instead of a company. If anyone can make Champagne, anyone should be able to make Coca-Cola too.

PDOs absolutely don't prevent you from making similar products, you just can't use the name. Again, just like trademarks. you can make your own cola, you just can't call it "Coca-Cola".

In the case of Champagne, the generic name is "sparkling wine", and there are many other "brands". For example, Italian Prosecco and Champagne can be interchanged in many cases. This will probably enrage oenophiles, but really, the main difference between Prosecco and Champagne is about branding, and brands need to be protected in some way so that consumers know what to expect. Champagne is just the brand of the Champagne region in France, which, in addition to the origin, sets standards of quality.

And yet, people make money with email. Many email providers have ads, including the most popular: Gmail and Outlook. Many others use paid subscriptions and profitable. And they all have to comply with local regulations. There is no real content moderation because it is direct messaging, but there are spam filters.

Email is a very open protocol, too open actually. Along the years, development made the barrier to entry a little higher to combat spam, but it is still accessible.

That we discover that the asteroid would miss the Earth is expected, it was a 97% chance after all.

However, I would have expected the news to come in much later, possibly years, as more data is collected.

I know it is a troll, and I hate Elon Musk as a (supposedly) human being, but I think you are kind of right here.

Electric cars existed way before Tesla, and Elon Musk wasn't even a founder. However the marketing was genius, and that's the kind of thing Elon Musk was really good at. While other EV manufacturers focused on the zero-emission, "green" aspect, Tesla focused on making what is essentially a toy for big boys. Fun to drive, plenty of gadgets, geeky names, etc... It was enough for people to want an electric car. A smart and well executed move, because let's be honest, for most people, being "green" isn't worth the high price EVs sold for at the time.

Tesla or not, what happened was inevitable given the technological progress, but Tesla with Elon Musk marketing made it happen first.

On the scale of Google, it matters. Attackers won't try 10000 codes on the same account, they will be kicked out well before that. But they can try 10000 different accounts though a botnet and statistically, one of them will work, then, maybe retry every few hours. It will give the attackers a steady stream of accounts, and statically, every account attacked this way will be hacked after a few years. You can't block logins for too long either because it would make for an easy denial-of-service attack.

6 digits makes it go from 1/10000 to 1/1000000 which significantly limits the effectiveness of brute force attacks. Mobilizing a botnet for a 1/10000 chance can be worth it, but maybe not for a 1/1000000 chance.

Use TOTP.

It is called "Google Authenticator" in your Google account settings because it is the app they are recommending, but any app or device supporting the TOTP standard will work. It is a free standard, completely offline, and doesn't require any personal information. You can register any number of devices, you can also print out the QR code or passkey they give you and store it somewhere save if you want to add devices at a later time.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...