Pokemon, Magic and other cards games also use this model.

Except it's not so random. if you look at a booster pack, they actually now say what's inside. It'll say things like "Each booster pack contains 1 rare or mythic card, 5 uncommon cards, 10 common cards" and generally speaking the cards are evenly distributed so if there are 15 rares you have a 1/15 chance of getting one particular one.

Loot boxes are quite a bit different in that they often don't specify what you're buying - how often is the ultra-rare skin going to show up? It'll usually be just things like "3 skins" or some other thing.

Even blind packs have the probabilities shown of each figure. In fact, blind boxes often have all the figures in a case - so a case of 32 boxes will have 1 of every figure in it so if you want a 1/32 figure, you buy a complete case (and not 32 boxes) and you're guaranteed to get it.

but they need to weigh how many non-sharing users will drop the service after their hotel/AirBnB TV stops working halfway through their business trip.

Streaming providers can tell the difference.

First, many allow multi-streaming - so you pay for 4 streams from your "home", but outside your home, you get 1. So the home streams fine, and you get 1 remote stream which keeps everyone happy.

Second, streaming providers pretty much know the IPs of all the hotels out there - just as they know the IPs of VPN services. It's why VPN services can spin up a new server, it works for a while, then it stops working. Just analyzing the behavior of users can easily tell. Hotels typically have users on for a few days then disappear. VPNs generally have users popping up all over the place, and their IPs are shared with dozens of other users who also shift their IPs around a lot.

So it inconveniences people a lot less. The ones it does inconvenience though are VPN users because they get counted as "out of home streaming" but they can only do it once and then they reset their VPN connection and they got to reset their home account again over and over.

Actually it's not a hole - it's a hole for front facing cameras, but on iPhones there's 3 lenses there - 1 is a standard RGB front facing camera, 1 is an IR structured light projector and the last is an IR camera, the latter two provide depth information similar to the Xbox 360 Kinect system.

This turns the hole into a wide pill. Apple sought to make use of this by making a software feature that can expand it as needed to serve as a way to provide notifications.

If you extend the island to the top of the screen, you get a notch It's going to be an issue as laptop designers have to fit a front facing camera and screens have thinner and thinner bezels.

So, when the nuclear people are all telling us how wind is more expensive because of the need for batteries, I'm always reminding them that actually it's Nuclear which can't cope with the variation in power needs and benefits very much from power storage. I'll avoid being a hypocrite and point out here also that batteries aren't just for renewables.

Actually both are in the same group - non-dispatchable. That is, neither nuclear nor wind/solar can adapt to changing loads. But both do it in the opposite way. Nuclear takes hours to ramp up and down, so you're always running it at less than current demand because demand has to be higher than what nuclear can provide - you cannot have a situation where demand is suddenly below nuclear output.

On the other end, solar and wind have erratic changes in output, so you want to run them above demand so if their output drops, they can still meet demand (you can curtail solar and wind output, but demand should never exceed what solar and wind can provide).

A battery is the ultimate dispatchable power plant - its output can be changed immediately to meet demand, and if demand is too low, it can reverse directions and create demand to meet supply (which is great in a solar/wind situation where excess supply is normal).

Other dispatchable sources include fossil fuels - natural gas easily adjusts its output within minutes, hydroelectric, heliostats (thanks their salt battery).

Does Windows 10 onwards still respect the hosts file? Genuine question, because IIRC modification of it triggers windows defender to freak out

I think it does - even Windows 11 seems to do it.

But Windows Defender freaks out because modifying the hosts file is a super common way for malware to do hijackings as well as being persistent - they could hook Google.com so it reinstalls when you visit Google. Just like another way is to redirect your DNS settings.

Of course, it's a lot more complex nowadays since many apps don't use the system resolver stub - modern web browsers can use DNS over HTTPS (DoH) which bypasses the hosts file as well.

Most farmland would be uneconomic if they ha to pay property taxes at the prevailing rate. Since farmland is considered valuable as, well, farms, most forms get a HUGE tax break on the property taxes relative to their acreage.

That's been the general reason farmland hasn't been mass converted to industrial or residential land even when the towns and cities start to abut them and raise land values.

That incentive alone generally keeps the farmland farmland. A special "zoning" of cheap property taxes provided only certain activities take place on it. Farms can often get in trouble for doing non-agricultural things on their land - like say, being a venue for weddings. Sometimes even food processing is excluded - so a farm can sell you flour just fine, but they'd get in trouble if they sold you bread.

Of course, the other problem is once the land is gone, it might not be retrievable - you sold it off and it got converted to light industry. You buy it back at light industry zoning and taxes and it might never go back to agricultural zoning. Even worse, what if it gets re-zoned and the AI bubble bursts and the buyer defaults. You hope everything is on the up and up but you ,might end up holding the bag because the buyer and lender went bankrupt, but now you're left with converted land.

It already is a parody - the charter of the board of peace basically says Trump is chairman for life and he's the big decision maker. And nothing says how the billions of dollars are to be spent (every member nation has 1 year to ante up $1B).

I guess we know where some of it will be going.

Modern PCs, generally around 2010-2015 and newer, boot times stopped being a thing. Windows and Linux boot up to a state where you can login in basically seconds.

In the 90s and 2000s, it was a lot more painful because often times the slightest changes required a reboot. On Windows especially - change the IP address? Reboot. Plug in a new mouse? Reboot, etc. So you could be forced to reboot quite often and it took several minutes which was usually at the most inconvenient time. It was just an interruption in flow and having to close every window and then reopen them again so it took several minutes to reboot, then another half hour to get back to where you were before the reboot.

These days everything saves and resumes across reboots so not only are reboots faster, the fact that most of your environment is restored means it's much less painful to get everything set up again.

Rebooting used to be an extremely disruptive thing that you put off until you either couldn't, or you found a convenient checkpoint where you can reboot without disrupting much. I would often queue up the reboots - some device needed installing, but I didn't reboot, but once I hit the checkpoint, I rebooted and did everything that needed a reboot to minimize disruption.

These days? I don't bother. I look at my desktop PC, realize Windows had rebooted, and now it's no big deal anymore - a minor annoyance at having to start up all the programs that didn't, and dealing with VMs that were suddenly killed, but no big deal.

Nowadays though, it's often the BIOS that takes longer from power on to loading the OS than the OS loading and being in a usable state.

The other regulations take time to implement and require Congress to get off their asses and work. That's why Trump tried to short-circuit the whole process.

Which is silly, since with complete control of the government - the executive, the legislative (both branches), and the judicial, you should be able to do anything you want the proper way. The problem is the proper way is slow, and it's designed that way because every change should be deliberate to avoid plunging everything into chaos.

All the tools were there to be used, all anyone had to do was actually use it.

More correctly, with humans, you can find a line of reasoning that lead to the outcome. It's one of the reasons why there is often a "6 whys" method of figuring out what went wrong - the goal is to drill down why something happened. This only works if you can get the line of reasoning from the problem to why the solution was chosen incorrectly.

The 6 whys method doesn't serve to assign blame, and blaming the humans in charge is why it doesn't work. By taking blame out of the equation, you aim to figure out the series of steps that lead to the unwanted outcome and what can be done to prevent it from happening again.

But AI does not provide such reasoning, or why it even attempted that line of reasoning because it can't. As such, there's no chain of logic to follow that lead down the path and you can't learn from it. And if you can't learn from it, you can't prevent it from happening again.

Seeking to blame or fire someone is human, but seeking to learn why something happened so you can avoid it in the future is what is needed, Firing the guy because he made a mistake is natural, yet it just sets you up for it to happen again because your fix was to get rid of someone who made a mistake, not try to fix the mistake. Inevitably someone will make theh same mistake again.

Sexing chicks is because roosters generally are terrible chickens in general - you can't have too many or they start to hurt each other so they become harder to raise if you want broiler chickens. And hens are generally useful because they lay eggs so you can decide if you want them as broiler or egg layers.

The shredder is basically the most humane way of getting rid of the unwanted roosters - it's instant death basically. They're also sexed as early as possible which is why the more experienced folks can do it with younger chicks.

If you want to save chicks, find a way to make roosters useful as broilers or other forms of chicken. Because right now the needed population of roosters to hens is very low.

Chicken is also a very efficient form of meat - basically everything you feed a chicken goes into meat production - it only requires 1.1 lbs of feed to make 1 lb of chicken.

People freak out if you threaten to take their guns away.

Do they? Because the last time the President suggested it, along with people from the DHS, the best the NRA could muster was a "it was a bad idea to bring a gun". The only group that called everyone out was a local gun owners group who emphasized he was carrying legally and properly and it was his right to bring it to a protest.

As far as I can tell, those people "going nuts" kept quiet when the President suggested not having guns. Kept silent when DHS secretary and others suggested the only reason to have a gun was to cause trouble.

When it was the other party and suggestions came up, ti was all about "it would've been different if they were armed" and "no one would've died". Or "we need to protect ourselves from government!".

The big problem is not the funny fails, but the fact you're giving an LLM basically full access to your life. And we all known how LLMs can be easily manipulated into doing things with minor jailbreaking.

People have come up with ways to interact with it and to even get at the API keys it needs to do various tasks. Even simple things like convincing it was you except from another email address.

It's less "funny fails" and more "giving a chatbot keys to the kingdom" and then "giving the world access to your chatbot".

It's one of the most fundamental flaws of AI - you're mixing control plane and data plane together. When this happened in the 60s it lead to AT&T having to scramble because people could make free long distance calls. In the 90s and 00s, it lead to SQL injection attacks. And now we're down to prompt injection attacks that could screw up your life.

Here's the thing. Oil is concentrated in a few countries, and if you do not have oil resources, you have to pay other countries for it.

Electricity, though, is everywhere. You can get it in various forms, and while you may have to buy solar panels, once you put them up, they power EVs for a really long time.

So you could import a gallon of oil and once you use that gallon up, import another gallon of oil, Lather, rinse, repeat.

Or you could import a solar panel, and now have basically a limitless supply of electricity for decades.

So your country could either import oil constantly, replacing the oil you use, or you could import the solar panel once, and constantly produce the energy the EVs need to keep running.

Supposedly, in the US, if instead of growing the corn used to make ethanol for gas fill cars with, you instead put solar panels in its place, the amount of energy generated would fulfill the driving needs of way more cars. Or put another way, you could use half the land to power the same number of vehicles, but now have land to grow more useful crops for food and such.

Yes, let's use AI, which consumes enormous amounts of power we don;t have, vast tracts of land we have to clear away, level and build on and huge amounts of water to cool all the heat it generates.

Let's use this resource hungry thing to help us find ways to use less resources to save the planet.

Perhaps we can start by not using this resource hungry thing in the first place. The first "R" is Reduce, which means you use less of it. Using less power, land and water by not building unnecessary data centers seems to be the best place to start.