This is pretty standard when someone leaves Microsoft.
The management above the person leaving sends a nice message about them and their work and NEVER tells the truth about _why_ they are leaving.
At the upper levels I don't think there's really any sincerity about anything said, one way or another. This is just how corporate America operates.
Nextcloud has done great work in terms of EU-Soverignty and offering credible replacements for all the pieces of the the Microsoft stack.
Nextcloud Talk works well for video conference meetings.
MS Teams is a pretty terrible piece of software. The design of it is bad, and the implementation is bad.
Any software that tries to copy it will also be bad.
If you haven't spun up a nextcloud AIO instance yet for your organization(s), you should try it out.
I hope you've all read the Aschenbrenner paper from 2024.
https://situational-awareness....
Never mind Trump's rambling speaking style. He's aware of it and he likes it.
We know that people in the Trump admin have, at minimum, been briefed on the Aschenbrenner paper. I assume some of them have read the whole thing.
The point he's making - that we're on the cusp of ASI, and the USA MUST not get there wildly behind, for example, China, is correct. And that the USA should not be shackled by an international framework that rival nations are going to ignore anyway.
He's directionally correct, even if you think he's too stupid to know what he's agreeing with.
No. I think hollywood has always been subversive and run by foreign pedophiles. For example, look for the interview with Shirley Temple about what they tried doing to her as a _child_,
I think it has produced enough pro-American-MIC films every now and then to stay out of more government trouble.
You usually don't realize (at the time) that the media you watched as a child was subverting you (and your parents desires). And unless you revisit those films a generation later with a critical eye, you may not realize it ever.
But that's how the ratchet effect works. The newer media that is now visibly odious to me is only visibly odious to me because it is targeting the edge of an overton window that has continued moving since my own youth. The leading edge of socially allowable media subversion continues to advance until a historical reset event sets it back somewhat. Or, sometimes, when there is sufficient market rejection.
In the case of hollyweird, the concentration of power has significant drawbacks; destroying that concentration of power will probably be a net benefit. (to be clear, I think It will amplify other problems instead).
In general, I think evil seems to be more effective when it is centralized and powerful, with captured institutions, while maintaining the ability to operate openly, and has de-facto monopoly control over the domain in which it operates, and when most people do not understand what is being done to them.
If Trump had promised to destroy hollywood, I would have voted for him 10x harder.
(And i expect I would be disappointed because he wouldn't actually follow through with it)
Anyway, hopefully, AI gets the job done and finally kills that wretched industry. I look forward to further democratization of movie making.
(fwiw, my knee jerk reaction is to oppose the merger.)
The current generation of these smartglasses devices will fail and disappear.
Let me show my work:
1. women cannot use these smart glasses to take selfies.
2. therefore, women will not wear them.
3. therefore, the only people who wear them will be men
4. anything that men do but which women do not do is probably criminal, but certainly creepy, a red flag, or a cause of the ick
5. therefore, men will be shamed (or arrested) into not wearing them either
QED.
I don't think training a model with copyrighted data is any kind of gray zone at all.
Running inference against such a model _might_ be infringing.
But I don't see the legal argument that model training would be.
Think of model training as lossy data compression. You provide an input, it produces a compressed artifact, and it can no longer reproduce the original when you uncompress it. It can produce _something_. It cannot reproduce the original.
On slashdot, we all agree that format shifting copyrighted works should be allowed and unrestricted, right?
If there is applicable case law here about how lossy a "reproduction" can be before copyright has something to say about it, that would be relevant. Do you know of any?
I think you're repeating something that feels emotionally valid but in my experience, isn't factually (or legally) accurate.
I have found AI models to be frustratingly _obedient_ of copyright.
I'll be in a situation where I ask a specific question about what a document says, and the AI repeatedly says the work is copyrighted and it can't just tell me what it says _verbatim_, but it can answer specific questions for me in its own words (while telling me to check the original).
Two examples from my life are procedural questions about what Roberts Rules of Order would require in a given situation, and, what ASD STE-100 says about how to name/word things.
The applicable US law would appear to be USC 17 Sec 106 and 107, which on one hand limits derivative works, but on the other, allows fair use for purposes of teaching, scholarship, or research.
(USC references provided by AI, btw. Which I haven't read)
I used to agree with you, and then oddly enough, about 25-30 years ago, I came across this signature on another regular slashdot posters postings:
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
(AI tells me the attribution is "The Red Lily", Anatole France, 1894)
I think the only Premium TVs left are the business TVs that give you meaningful mechanisms to not have intrusive "Smart" features.
Is there a meaningful difference between a Sony TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features, and a Wal-mart TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features?
I guess I am blessed to not be an audiophile and not have flawless supervision
FWIW, I have:
- a 20 yo 720p dumb 42" plasma
- a 20 yo 1080P dumb 50" plasma
- a 1yo 4k Samsung 65" TheFrame TV
That last one was a splurge I wanted because the "Art Mode" is just too beautiful, and at the time, Samsung really had the only coherent offering. (I guess there are now "off brand" ArtTV attempts from HiSense and others.. i have no experience with them.)
On the ArtTV, we watch youtube or DVDs or XBox on it a little of the time, and all that stuff looks fine to me on the 65" Samsung. But the TV is otherwise displaying pretty artwork almost all of the time, and whatever Samsung has done with the screen, dimming control, bezel, etc, really does work and really is lovely. And you don't need a service or an app to get the experience - just stick a USB full of public domain masterpieces into the TV.
Even so, the Samsung ecosystem is pretty annoying. I can have it show my images in ArtMode, but i cannot have the "real" experience you'd get with a subscription - with Art XML metadata and stuff (artist, date, etc). We don't always remember what a piece is or who painted it when it comes up..
Anyway, AFAIK, the only way to get TVs that aren't enshittified spyware is a business SKU, right?
In my house, we use Steam to play "windows-only" games on:
- Devuan with XFCE
- Devuan with Cinnamon
- Arch with hyprland
- bone stock Ubuntu 24
- ubuntu 25 laptop w/ second GPU
From my POV, there's not much need to port games to Linux. With the heroic efforts of Valve, most Windows games now just work. Win32, DX, D3D, and whatever else windows game devs have been using seems to have become the defacto reference gaming API on Linux.
Steam makes it work on every linux distro we've tried.
In writing this, it occurs to me: The F/OSS ecosystem does a very good job of re-implementing someone else's API/products (WINE, Proton, LibreOffice, etc)
The F/OSS ecosystem does a comparatively poor job at independently developing its own technology and then standardizing/universalizing those choices. E.g. the transition from X11 to Wayland; the systemd "situation(s)", desktop environments... gui greeters, audio muxers...
I think Valve has done the right thing. They made existing games work on Steam; they made Steam work on most linux distros.
Making everyone use a reference linux platform seems to be a total non-starter.
We already have a reference gaming platform: Windows 7 thru 10. And what we learned in 2025 is that Steam on nearly _any_ Linux often implements that windows reference gaming platform better than Windows 11 does.
Forget about whether or not this is or isn't spying. Even if you take their claims at face value, this balloon would represent airspace incursion by an out-of-control unmanned aircraft. And airspace incursions are something the US military should handle, efficiently and promptly, as a matter of routine. This shouldn't be a giant diplomatic incident or require some great policy analysis to decide to take it down. The message should be plain and simple such as:
In the interest of the safety and security of people of the USA, we have ended the flight of your out-of-control balloon which had entered US airspace without clearance or authorization. We reserve the right to inspect the wreckage as part of our investigation of this incident. After that investigation is complete, you may make arrangements for the return of the aircraft remains, at your expense, via any US embassy. Sincerely, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)
NORAD almost certainly knew about this balloon heading towards our airspace probably 5 days ago (late Monday or early Tuesday) when it was still many hundreds of miles away from the west coast, which means that authorization to shoot it down would have been requested at virtually the same time. There should have been plenty of time (hours) to take care of this safely and efficiently before it actually entered US territory, but my guess is that the authorization to shoot it down didn't come until much too late... possibly as late as Wednesday, after it had already crossed into inhabited US territory. Hence the reluctance to shoot it down, and hence the uproar.
One of the best parts about the FCC Broadband Map in my opinion was the idea that it was essentially "crowd-sourced" in that users could file challenges to the data and fix mistakes. But I was surprised to discover recently that there are huge limitations on the challenge process.
A month ago, I was interested in purchasing a property and one of my criteria was having fiber service available. The FCC Broadband Map showed fiber being available there, but before placing an offer, I called the broadband provider to confirm. The representative on the phone apologized and said that no service was available at that address, nor did the system show it becoming available soon. I mentioned that the info at the FCC Broadband Map was incorrect for this address and needed to be corrected, but she did not know what to do about that, but she would "make a note about it" and pass it along. I happened to check the map again about 30 days later, but it was still listed incorrectly. I decided to be helpful and file a challenge myself directly via the FCC website.
Unfortunately, before clicking on "submit" you are required to certify that you are either a current resident at the address or are the legal owner/manager of the property. No one else is permitted to file a challenge, based on the current website language. That's a significant hindrance in this case, because the current owner of the property obviously has no incentive to update the map to make the property look worse to prospective buyers, and obviously the provider here can't be bothered to fix it either. If interested 3rd parties are not allowed to file challenges on behalf of others when they have evidence, then the entire challenge process is sadly flawed and strongly designed to favor the status quo.
In fact, based on the OP, it sounds like this challenge which came from a competing ISP was actually against the FCC's own challenge policy, and I'm pleasantly surprised it went anywhere without simply being tossed/ignored.
When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
