The Ethereum blockchain's "Merge", switching from proof of work to proof of stake, freed up all the GPUs for the generative AI boom.

This article claims that the camera requirement exists to support Windows Hello authentication. How would Microsoft's Windows Hello or Apple's Face ID work without a camera? Or what other means of quickly authenticating the user to the operating system and to the external passkey/password store would you recommend instead?

The only downside I can think of is that low-end Windows laptops could become a lot more expensive to support display and 40 Gbps on all ports. This could drive laptop makers toward an operating system with even more restricted functionality: ChromeOS.

Incidentally, there was such a discovery. 'It's not wrong that "[facepalming man with brown skin emoji]".length = 7' by Henri Sivonen came out in September 2019. It explains the difference among code units, code points, and extended grapheme clusters, the difference among UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, the difference among JavaScript, Python 3, and Rust length semantics, and the difference among storage, display width, and arbitrary quotas that are roughly fair across languages.

You don't need to simulate all that, at least initially. Scan in the brains of people who are at extremely high risk of stroke or other brain damage. If one of them suffers a lethal stroke, but their body is otherwise fine, you HAVE a full set of senses. You just need to install a way of multiplexing/demultiplexing the data from those senses and muscles, and have a radio feed - WiFi 7 should have adequate capacity.

Yes, this is very scifiish, but at this point, so is scanning in a whole brain. If you have the technology to do that, you've the technology to set up a radio feed.

We famously don't know what we don't know when it comes to the human brain, so any prediction is more a thing of fairy tales than anything actually based in reality.

The Koch Brothers paid a bunch of scientists to prove the figures being released by the IPCC and clinate scientists wrong. The scientists they paid concluded (in direct contradiction to the argument that scientists say what they're paid to say) that the figures were broadly correct, and that the average planetary temperature was the figure stated.

My recommendation would be to look for the papers from those scientists, because those are the papers that we know in advance were written by scientists determined to prove the figures wrong and failed to do so, and therefore will give the most information on how the figures are determined and how much data is involved, along with the clearest, most reasoned, arguments as to why the figures cannot actually be wrong.

...Then there's an inefficiency in the design.

You should store in the primary database in the most compressed, compact form you can that can still be accessed in reasonable time. Tokenise as well, if it'll help.

The customer should never be accessing the primary database, that's a security risk, the customer should access through a decompressed subset of the main database which is operating as a cache. Since it is a cache, it will automagically not contain any poorly-selling item or item without inventory, and the time overheads for accessing stuff nobody buys won't impact anything.

If you insist on purging, there should then be a secondary database that contains items that are being considered for purge as never having reached the cache in X number of years. This should be heavily compressed, but where you can still search for a specific record, again through a token, not a string, then add a method by which customers can put in a request for the item. If there's still no demand after a second time-out is reached, sure, delete it. If the threat of a purge leads to interest, then pull it back into primary. It still won't take up much space, because it's still somewhat compressed unless demand actually holds it in the cache.

This method:

(a) Reduces space the system needs, as dictated by the customer and not by Amazon
(b) Purges items the system doesn't need, as dictated by the customer and not by Amazon

The customers will then drive what is in the marketplace, so the customers decide how much data space they're willing to pay for (since that will obviously impact price).

If Amazon actually believe in that whole marketplace gumph, then they should have the marketplace drive the system. If they don't actually believe in the marketplace, then they should state so, clearly and precisely, rather than pretend to be one. But I rather suspect that might impact how people see them.

Features so good they have to force people to use them.

Doesn't it seem as though the past 10+ years of software development has seen just about everything get worse?

Even if you define "censor" to refer only to public sector acts, the government can censor on behalf of a private person by enforcing exclusive rights asserted by said private person. In the case of iMessage and other closed platforms, the exclusive rights in question are often those granted under anti-circumvention statutes implementing the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, such as 17 USC 1201 and foreign counterparts.

Both XML and JSON have a syntax, which describes what makes a document using those languages well-formed. However, not all well-formed markup is valid in a particular application. For example, you don't want "-567" or "butt" as the value of the "width" attribute in an "img" element in HTML. For this reason, applications of XML and applications of JSON have semantics, which further refine what is considered "valid" for that application. An XML or JSON schema can be used to quickly reject documents that are well-formed but not valid.

GNOME Web (codename Epiphany) is a WebKit-based browser for *n?x systems and Haiku. Safari is a WebKit-based browser for macOS and iOS. There's apparently MiniBrowser for Windows.

Something that quick won't be from random mutations of coding genes, but it's entirely believable for genes that aren't considered coding but which control coding genes. It would also be believable for epigenetic markers.

So there's quite a few ways you can get extremely rapid change. I'm curious as to which mechanism is used - it might not be either of those I suggested, either.

I didn't see any outrage. If you need to see outrage that desperately, seek help.

Programs for macOS and its predecessor Mac OS have been called applications since the mid-1980s. Three usage examples for the short form "app" in Wiktionary come from computing books and magazines from 1999, which predates the iPod, let alone the iPhone. The term "killer app" in particular dates to PC Week in 1988.