This is exactly end to end encryption, and the so-called "security researcher" appears to have no idea what he is talking about. So:

The Dell pledge is not for children born during "that narrow period of election significance" but rather applies to children under age ten that were not born during said period. AFAICT, the kids getting a thousand bucks do not benefit from this pledge at all. The Dell pledge also only applies to children who live in zip codes where the median HHI is under $150k.

Dell is piggybacking off of the infrastructure that already needs to be put in place to administer the accounts created by congress. I really don't understand why people seem to be so angry about this. The only real connection to Darth Cheeto is what the funds are named, and Dell didn't name them, congress did.

This may well be one of the dumbest questions ever asked on /. as it ignores the entirety of human history.

I used to work for Sling TV, and you basically have that backwards. ESPN is the part of Disney's package that people are willing to pay money for. The shutdown and negotiations every year is just Disney forcing the various providers to pay for and carry their other channels. That's why Disney always holds these negotiations during football season, so if they have to shut someone down their customers actually care. Every year viewership on Disney's other channels (and non-sports channels in general) is lower, and the prices that the content producers require goes up. Scripted television is in serious decline, and Hollywood is using sports fans to prop it up.

As an example, If you don't care about sports you can get Disney+ without ads for about $12 a month. Disney will happily throw in Hulu for that same price if you will watch some ads. You can binge watch the shows that you care about and then switch to another channel. Heck, you can buy entire seasons of their shows ala carte. You can't get ESPN however, without paying at least $45/month, and that's with a package with no non-Disney channels and chuck full of ads. For the record, that's basically what the streaming services are paying Disney as well. When I worked at Sling the entirety of the subscription fees went to the content companies (primarily Disney). There is essentially no profit in cable packages. All of the profit has to be made up somewhere else.

People that aren't sports fans, especially if they are entertainment fans, tend to believe that scripted programming is carrying sports, but it is the other way around. That's why AppleTV, which has spent over $20 billion creating content for their channel has about as many subscribers the amount of people that typically watch a single episode of Thursday Night Football, the worst professional football game of the week. Amazon Prime pays $1 billion a year for that franchise, and it is a bargain compared to creating scripted content. Apple makes great television that almost no one pays for. The other content providers are in the same boat. You'll notice, for example, that Netflix's most expensive package is $25/month, and the revenue per user in the U.S. is around $16. That's ad free. The lowest promotional price you can pay for ESPN is basically twice that, and it always comes with ads. What's more, sports fans tend to actually watch the ads.

Sling is selling day and weekend passes to people because it knows that most of its customers only have their service to watch the game. No one is watching linear television anymore, but the content creators have built their entire business around the idea of having a channel that they fill up with content. Even with Sling's ridiculous prices they can typically watch the games they want to watch for less than maintaining a subscription.

I have spent most of my adult life in the sports world, but I don't watch sports. I personally believe that in the long run sports television is probably going to end up uncoupled from scripted television. I think that is going to be very bad news for people that like scripted television.

Again, you're being willfully obtuse by taking a "very loose definition" of what (or, rather, does not) "probably" constitute "ultra processed" and attacking on the details. Everything on your list (again, other than coffee and tea, along with some spices) has been "produced at home" for millennia, and the things on your list that haven't don't have anything to do with whether they could be, but only the geography of where they could be. Just like your follow up "but I don't have land" bullshit.

"Milk" is not an ultra processed food (or, rather, it doesn't have to be). Something containing "red dye #5" is. You need a factory and a complicated supply chain for the red dye #5, but not for the milk. See how easy that was?

With regard to your follow up WRT cheese, come the fuck on. Cheese is nothing more than a way of preserving milk. You can make some in your home today, and the knowledge required to do so can be obtained by watching a five minute Youtube video. Really, five minutes. That's all. Will you have Le Grand Gruyere? No, you'll have farmer's cheese, or ricotta, or mozerella, or maybe a nice gouda if you're feeling frisky and want to wait a bit.

Most of your list could be "produced at home" by most people. Tea and Coffee are the largest problem on the list, but the only reason is geographic and not "processing" related. I'm pretty sure you know that, though, and are being purposefully obtuse for some reason.

Has anything actually stored hashes in /etc/passwd in the last thirty years?

"Yo, dawg..."

Much as I agree with you from a moral standpoint, from a legal standpoint it is not as cut and dried as you make it out to be.

If you want to make the argument that "data about you" is "your data" that's fine, but the presumption here is that it's the airline's data, and it is offering it freely (as in speech, not as in beer) to the government. Where is the fourth amendment implication? It is not your "house, person, papers, or effects," it is the airline's and they're happy to let the government sort through it.

Sigh. No it isn't. The airline is not a provider of medical services, it is not regulated by HIPAA.

While I agree that this is not something I want the government to be doing, what part of a database maintained by the airlines constitutes your person, house, papers, or effects? If the government demands access that would be one thing, but if the airlines say "hey, wanna buy our data?" and the government says "hell yeah" that is something else.

Apparently, "safeguards" mean "don't let the AI say something that hurts feels" rather than "don't let the AI act in a manner that is dangerous and unlawful." I say this because, apparently, Anthropic's systems have been leveraged by nation state actors for hacking campaigns (though details of this are minimal and read like marketing spiel about how awesome their tools are rather than giving information on what actually happened).

Anthropic's entire pitch has always been safety. Innovation like this tends to favor a very few companies, and it leaves behind a whole pile of losers that also had to spend ridiculous amounts of capital in the hopes of catching the next wave. If you bet on the winning company you make a pile of money, if you pick one of the losers then the capital you invested evaporates. Anthropic has positioned itself as OpenAI, except with safeguards, and that could very well be the formula that wins the jackpot. Historically, litigation and government sponsorship have been instrumental in picking winners.

However, as things currently stand, Anthropic is unlikely to win on technical merits over its competition. So Dario's entire job as a CEO is basically to get the government involved. If he can create enough doubt about the people that are currently making decisions in AI circles that the government gets involved, either directly through government investment, or indirectly through legislation, then his firm has a chance at grabbing the brass ring. That's not to say that he is wrong, he might even be sincere. It is just that it isn't surprising that his pitch is that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous and we need to think about safety. That's essentially the only path that makes his firm a viable long term player.

Agreed he's truly despicable. I'll also agree with dangerous as anyone who has that much money is dangerous by definition. There is nothing wrong with my understanding of ethics or principle. I also think SpaceX succeeds in spite of Musk and not because of him.

With all of that said, I fail to see how anyone's proclivities or politics play into whether or not a company they own will succeed at any given objective. I'd further argue that if you believe that someone is dangerous, you're fucking stupid if you pretend that they cannot achieve things that are clearly within their (demonstrated) capability to achieve, and the only thing you accomplish is convincing people they're less dangerous than they are.

TIL that the archaic definition of "fastidious," based on the original latin root, is "disgusting" or "disagreeable." Which, to be fair, is a label I would apply to a virus that causes something as horrible as Lupus.