Anyone who can piss away a billion dollars on a B-movie trash fest like Rings of Power that was clearly written by a teenage power-fantasy fanboy isn't broke. Well, maybe wasn't broke before that.

For streaming services, not even that. It's a fool-me-once issue.

When I already pay for your service, and then you ask me to pay AGAIN for not having ads, that's a type of protection racket you are running, not a legit business.

Oh yeah, and the TV UI for all streaming services I've seen so far fucking SUCKS. In capital letters. It's aweful. We've had better UIs for 30+ years. The only reason I can imagine these get out the door is that the entire UI/UX team is permanently unavailable due to collective seppuku.

So yes, if your service is shitty and you make it worse by adding ads, and then ask for prote^H^H^extra service fees to remove the things you added just so people need to pay for removing it again - you seriously expect to be treated like an honest business partner?

Here's to hoping that this success inspires other lawsuits to follow. I'm so sick and tired of these damned settlements; every one of them carries the line "Plaintiff alleges ... as redress for these grievances, defendant will..." meaning that no one is found guilty of wrongdoing, and it can't be used to determine guilt in any other court proceeding.

Fuck our corporate overlords.

But it costs 100x as much, if not more. Running an LLM can be done on a notebook these days. But training one requires an entire data center of expensive GPUs. Not to mention that the notebook will run a reduced (quantized) version. Go check huggingface how large the full models are.

And also, LLMs are still suffering from a number of issues. For example, on many non-trivial tasks, the LLM is still unable to follow simple instructions. If you use LLMs routinely, you likely found cases where it has zeroed in on one - wrong - answer and no amount of prompting can convince it to give you a different one. It'll even totally ignore very clear and explicit prompts to not give that same answer again.

A human will understand "if you give that answer again, you're fired". An LLM... well you can tell it that it'll get shot between the eyes if it repeats that once more and it'll tell you where to get help if you have suicidal thoughts.

These things are both amazing and amazingly dumb at the same time.

I'm an indie game developer. My games have budgets of a few hundred bucks at best. Before AI, voice acting was simply impossible. There was no way I could pay a voice actor for even one language.

Now, with AI, I can have voice-overs in half a dozen languages easily. It has opened up something for me that was never possible before.

Yes, the AI voices are mediocre. Yes, I would prefer having an actual voice actor whom I can tell that I want THAT word stressed, or what emotion to convey. I'm sure in a few more years, the text-to-speech AI generators will allow for that as well.

But I'm not lost business. I'm still hiring the exact same number of voice actors that I did before AI. Zero, in my case. But if I had a budget, I'd still hire voice actors instead of AI because a good voice actor still beats the best AI.

There's still time enough to learn something new and get a different job, guys.

It's only a logical step for Windos to evolve from a successful malware delivery platform to an actual malware. Fits to MS typical business strategy - if someone else is commercially successful on their platform, they'll drive them out with a built-in product.

I hope the anti-trust agency will stop them and demand that the malware division and the OS division become distinct legal entities. I mean, they already have the anti-competitive advantage that you can pay them in USD and don't have to buy bitcoins.

Man, I miss the old Slashdot culture.

Trump's said he was going to ban TikTok in 2020. Then in January 2025. Then in March 2025.

Until something actually happens, I'll just keep calling our commander-in-chief a TACO.

I have a long-haul flight booked on a 787 coming up in two months. I'd like to get some definitive answers.

Me too...in three. And I'm not worried one bit. Do you know why?

Because there's over a thousand of them being used by airlines every year, and hundreds flying above your head as you read this. And there's not a single report of any of them having engines that flame out.

Furthermore, I've not seen any reports today of anyone dying in a commercial airplane crash. Meanwhile, about 3,260 people die every day around the world in road vehicle accidents. If you're not afraid to get behind the wheel, stop all the fear mongering with commercial aircraft.

When American companies finance their own "utopia" cities, I can't help but be reminded that the ruling class loves to design and build their own cities to protect their power and interests.

What can I say, other than let us welcome our new plutocrat overlords.

Given that China doesn't allow everyday citizens unlimited access to the internet, we can assume the only ones allowed out are bad actors like badbot, so blocking China entirely would be a net benefit for the entire world. We'd have to get the VPN operators to cooperate, which is near impossible since they'd sell their own mothers for a quick buck.

Thanks, those are very interesting links with solid information.

According to the article, the hit rate of drones isn't all that amazing, either.

Artillery pretty much works by saturating the area with explosions until some of them hit something. So a low hit rate is expected. Maybe a decade after the war ends we'll get some actual numbers to compare to other theaters.

That is correct, though it doesn't seem to have affected the course of the war noticeably.

Source?

That's a bold claim.

The article I linked to speaks about that. Essentially: Yes. But: Not the cheap stuff used, and stuff like fiber optics come with their own drawbacks.

The article I linked to includes prices.