Pricing things in TFS in dollars is confusing. This is a product to 'work' the Small Claims Court in the UK, which by its nature is cheap and relatively simple (more: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.moneysavingexpert....)

The Small Claims Court is exactly where you should go if you're a contractor owed (say) £5000 by a client who isn't paying. It'll cost you something like £25 to file your complaint, and now your client has to go to court. They can't "lawyer up" much - they can of course have legal representation, but they can't get some sort of slick-suited shithead to pull the case to pieces and get them off on a technicality. There's almost no process to pull apart and there's no arduous cross-examination or similar.

In short, Small Claims is you and someone else talking to a judge. You don't get hours and hours, and apart from having to take turns, there's not a great deal to it. You should of course have all evidence to hand, and I think there's a way to pre-submit some of it too. If you're right, you 'win', otherwise you 'lose'. There are no costs to bear if you lose, other than your £25 filing fee.

People without any legal training use the Small Claims Court all the time. It's specifically designed to be super-accessible, so you really don't need this service - however, if you've done all the right 'pre steps' before going to court, it can help your case. If it really cost £2, it's probably money well spent.

As an example, I know of a Small Claims case where a builder and client fell out about a bill. The builder said "we'd shaken on it", the client said "we never had a contract for it". The court ruled that without a contract, the claim was invalid. Whole case took maybe a couple of hours (after a bit of to and fro in letters and arrangements of course).

What else does this 'switch on'? I ask because Margaret Thatcher famously only slept for 4 hours a night. Politics aside, she was a tremendously successful person, but very publicly and very obviously went a bit crazy towards the end.

Microsoft MFA is indeed terrible. The problem with it is that your laptop can request MFA any time it likes - so while you're out at lunch you get an alert "approve this login!", but you can't because you're no where near your laptop. Then when you come back to your laptop, the workflow is such crap that it's unnecessarily hard to get a new code and approve it.

A simple check to say "is the screensaver on? If so, don't attempt re-auth until it's off"' would be a good start - but such things are beyond Microsoft.

> Why wouldn't you just use a legal address rather than your home address?

That assumes you have one. Sure, you can get one, but you've got to pay for it. If you're just making apps as a hobby, then you're going to be paying out, just to be able to do your hobby.

If you're a company (even a small one), then you likely have a legal address and already pay for it (likely via your accountant fees). But setting up a whole company for your hobby is also an expensive way to do hobbies.

FWIW, I played around with mobile apps. Getting from their test level up to 'production' level requires a lot of "live" information, not least a phone number. They even warn you not to use your normal phone number for it - well then, you're going to need another phone number just for your app support. Because of course you can afford to run a while support function for your little mobile app which occupies some tiny corner of the app store to service maybe 5 people.

Google definitely don't want small developers. Unless you're a million pound company, they don't want you anywhere near their app store.

I also suspect there may be some realisation that the constant flannel spoken by AI CEOs is wearing a bit thin. I'm sure Nadella knows a thing or two about hype-speak, so has seen through a lot of it, but what's left is probably not materialising.

You can bet he's got the inside track on the details of what's going on in OpenAI and others, so if he thinks it's "not all that", then it probably won't be. I'd imagine that if you got into the research centres, you'd be able to see that the AGI claims (especially) are woefully optimistic to the point of being delusional. That's bound to 'cool' your relationship a bit ;-)

Either way, despite what TFS says, I'll bet Microsoft has the stronger commercial position here.

Heathrow Airport (in the UK) recently suffered a major outage due to one of its power feeds failing. No 'foul play' was suspected.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if there's some meddling going on here. I actually doubt it, because if it's an attack, it's not very effective. If it's 'testing the fences', then it's probably doing the opposite because you can bet everyone will be looking for ways to be resilient to this in future. The most likely is 'natural causes', but linking three countries together and having them all have some level of failure sounds like quite a lot of inter-linkage.

What I do know is that the transformers they use are oil and paper insulated. They're also in service for *decades* at a time. They're all designed not to degrade, but of course they do eventually. There are warning signs of problems, but when they go, they go really spectacularly quickly. The other thing I always find interesting is how they're able to switch in alternative supplies with relative ease. Even just having a switch on a high tension circuit is an engineering marvel.

Side note: The teacher I had when I was about 18/19 for 'Power Electrical' had previously worked in these sorts of settings. He told us of a particular building full of switch gear that had a safe working distance of 18 feet. There was a track marked out on the floor that you couldn't deviate from, and you were told not to point at things for fear of making yourself into a conductor. That story stuck with me - whilst some of it looks pretty 'basic', it's really pretty awesome at the same time.

I thought the same - AWS now makes it much, much harder to make a public bucket unless you really, really want to do it. Via the browser there are a load of warnings, and even via the API you have to set some obvious mandatory flags to do it.

I wouldn't be surprised if in fact, the client application writes directly to the S3 bucket. It likely uses some credentials the app gets from the mothership from time to time. Someone didn't think to alter the bucket policy to prevent unauthenticated reads. That's at least an easier mistake to make, even though completely stupid.

If I'm right, it's a horrible architecture, which isn't designed to be secure at all. It's "junior devops" level stupid. No fail safes, no layers of security and clearly no governance over the implementation. These things usually aren't isolated either, so I'll bet there's all kinds of stupid all through the app too.

I suspect you listen to crap radio stations. The good ones have DJs that definitely add something to the show, be that jokes, games or interesting commentary. For me personally, the ads are the crap bit that detracts from the overall experience (not all our stations have ads, mind you).

However... if you have the budget to mainly play music for the whole show, then there's much less need of a DJ. One radio station near where I grew up had a saturday night show hosted by "Damian Darke", who never spoke - the computer just played the music which presumably one of the other DJs had scheduled during the week. In a slightly more human-touch show, if all the DJ is doing is jumping on to say "that was ... with ..., it's just coming up to eight o'clock, here's Janice with the news", then (a) those interjections are often pre-recorded and just played at the right time, and (b) could easily be speech synthesised by a computer.

Even the "AI" solution in TFA needed a human to set it up - maybe it cut the time to create the show by some huge percentage, but there was still a human involved - just as there always has been. I'm not really sure what the problem is - if it's entertaining to listen to, then it's good enough. If it's "AI slop", then it's not - most ad-fuelled stations are really good at measuring listenership, so they'd know if it was good or bad pretty quickly.

Back to crap radio stations... I seem to remember a Simpsons episode where the radio DJs were threatened with the "DJ 3000", with (I think) "27 modes of inane chatter". They do a sort of demo where it says "Oh boy, those folks in Congress really did it this time", and one of the humans says "it's so clever how it keeps up with current events". Definitely parodying the sort of hosts you're talking about ;-)

Yes, clearly Google think it's worth it to them to pay to get Gemini pre-installed. The commercial value is immaterial though - it's only illegal if it's designed to squeeze other players out of the market. If the deal Google have struck has clauses that prevent other AI players from doing the same thing, then it's likely illegal, otherwise it may be perfectly legal.

I wonder if you can even pre-can the hallucination? Maybe by publishing Medium articles with misspelled library names or something, which the AI's eat up and regurgitate later on, perhaps?

import requests ...becomes...

import re-quests

(or something)

A few years back, I bought a Logitech Webcam (C920) for £20. Then we had lock downs, and the price zoomed (see what I did there?) upwards. A colleague of mine proudly told me he'd bought a 'pro' camera at the knock-down bargain price of £50. In fairness, they were selling for £75 in some places, so he got a good deal at the time, but had he bought it 6 months earlier, he could have had two for less than the price of one.

My point is, Logitech will absolutely put the price up to the highest the market will bear. Doubtless tariffs have pushed up their costs too, but I suspect in part they're putting the prices up because people *expect* things to be more expensive, and so will pay extra.

Paying someone to pre-install your (cr)app on their devices is pretty standard practice. Without it, TVs and even phones would cost a good chunk of change more than they do today.

Paying Samsung to put an AI tool on their phones presumably commands a premium because Samsung have their own AI (albeit, probably the shittest of all AIs, given Samsung wrote it) - putting a competing one on would naturally demand greater fees.

Paying Samsung to put a tool on their phones at the expense of someone else's competing tool, that's not okay.

So in summary... I'm not sure there's anything wrong here, other than if google need to pay so much to get it on there, maybe it's not actually very good?

Don't worry though, this will be the last time you'll need to do this. Once the entire world uses google.com for everything, then one little cookie will track you over the entire internet.

This started a long time ago, but most recently was when maps.google.* became google.com/maps. All of a sudden, your need for directions helped in personalising ads across the whole Internet. Now they're doing the same with search.

Fwiw, this was always going to happen - it was really just an issue of scale and logistics. Those problems are solved, so the last little segregation of your privacy can now be removed.

I dislike this too, but actually it makes your "hundreds of dollars" TV cheaper, not more expensive.

If LG didn't put ads and crapware on their TVs, they'd cost a bit more (no idea how much, let's say 10%). Most people buy on price (within a certain bracket of features), so that would mean LG would sell far fewer TVs in that bracket. If they don't sell enough, then they don't make back the R&D for that model. It's a race to the bottom that no manufacturer can opt out of.

What massively sucks is that you can't be an informed purchaser and pay more to opt out of the "smart". You can't pay more on the purchase price (see above) and can't even pay to remove the crap after purchase. You can't even "hack" TVs to use a 3rd party OS either.

I wouldn't say 'draughty houses' are the answer - air tightness with some air circulation at least means you can control it as you need it. If it's just got gaps all over the place, it just blows all the heat out of your house regardless.

I do agree ventilation is necessary though - mould is a significant problem which needs taking seriously. Simple things like having your bathroom fan always running on really slowly can take you a long way, for example. Windows with trickle vents that you can open and close are also pretty important.