> Ideally it would be nice to just have one executable to run without the need to install everything

Agreed, but it's virtually impossible to actually do this. libc shouldn't be statically linked (it's pretty pointless if you try) and seems to be intrinsically part of the running OS, and so you end up relying on whichever one the distro has. You then end up compiling your single binary for every major release of every distro you want to support. If you want to support x86 and ARM, then you've got to do all of that twice.

After you've got to grips with all of that, you then also need to think about different paths to stuff, different package management capabilities, package or repo signing... you end up with so many different permutations of the same basic code it'd make your head spin.

One of the reasons a lot of stuff is written in languages like Python is so you can largely avoid the "dependency hell" problems. So long as the target system has a reasonably working Python, then your program will run just fine. You'll be working just fine on multiple CPU architectures, and different OS types.

Sadly though, sometimes you really do want to distribute compiled code, perhaps for license/IP reasons, or perhaps for performance or whatever. Then you've really got some fun in your CI pipelines :-( Thank goodness for containers ;-)

Sadly no commitment to never be quite so dickish again, though.

IMHO, that they ever *thought* this was a possibility that the consumer would accept is entirely the problem. This idea should have been shot down by the lowest levels of the crap filtering inside Github/MS. The executive shouldn't even have heard about it. As it was, top to bottom they all agreed it would be okay, and to go ahead. These people seem to live in an entirely different world to the rest of us.

Reversed or none, this is another reminder that Microsoft bought Github to enshitify it. Those of us that didn't exodus immediately should really start thinking about it. Self hosting options are easier now than ever before, but likewise, there are plenty of other platforms that do the same (or better in some cases). Your investment in "Github actions" just isn't so great you can't convert it to some other CI.

FWIW, I still use Github for a few public things that I don't especially care about. Going forward, I can see it being a backup for some other service because it still has mindshare (how many people ask google for site:github.com when they want the source code of something?). I'm not bothering with any of the addon services though - those can go somewhere else (which right now is mostly Gitlab).

I've been using an FB blocker hosts file (not sure if it was this one, but here's an example: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fdjaiss...) - thus far has been very effective ;-)

I like the idea of constantly reporting ads as inappropriate. Maybe start an FB group promoting that idea ;-)

When I last used facebook (many, many years ago), advertising was pretty low-key, but adblock used to get rid of it very effectively. I'd imagine ublock would do it now too. Only the hosts file definitely stops all those third party tracking pixels and images and whatnot that seem to be all over the web (still).

So let me get this right, Stockholm... I either have to accept a sub-standard experience from Amazon, or else I have to accept an (effectively) unlimited risk?

So it is entirely impossible for Amazon to help me out here, is it? Is it too hard for one of the worlds largest companies to add some optional features to help me manage my spending and limit my risk? Especially as it mitigates bugs in their own products?

*really*?

I really don't get it either. However, my SO listens to podcasts when she goes out for a walk around the block. She'll be gone for (say) a half hour to an hour, so that time lends itself to some gentle "ingestion" of something hopefully thought provoking.

However, I'd imagine that in time you'll be able to ask Spotify or Audible or someone "give me a 60 minute podcast discussing how AI is both succeeding and failing to modernise the procurement process of large organisation, with particular attention to how that affects small business who often get screened out of procurement processes because of the process itself, rather than the intent of the procuring organisation". It'll then go off an make you a podcast, put your favourite voice onto it and stick it on your phone to listen to it.

The EU regulated high power vacuum cleaners maybe 10-12 years ago. At the time, loads of people were up in arms about how we weren't going to be able to clean our houses properly. The news had pictures of people piling big, inefficient vacuums into their cars the day before the ban came along... and so on.

What actually happened is that manufacturers just made their products better. If previously they used 3000W to do something, they did the same using half that - through more efficient airflow, filtering or whatever else. So now we have equally powerful, mostly quieter and definitely better.

My point is... batteries aren't going to deliver 3000W for long, that's true, but these days you can get away with a fraction of that and still suck up as much, if not more. Sure, you won't be able to run it all day for your cleaning business, but it'll get around a couple of your rooms just fine.

By way of an example, we have a Shark (upright, manual, battery powered) - no idea what power it consumes, or what airflow it creates, but it seems to suck dirt out of places you didn't know you had. Even carpets just cleaned with a 'normal' vacuum cleaner give up a whole load more when the Shark gets to them. We don't often try and clean the whole house in one go, but to date, I don't think we've run its battery from full to empty.

The things about this that are most troubling are that there are no ways for the user to mitigate the problem - you just have to wait for a security update.

Amazon are really good at a lot of things. They've made the shopping experience really, really easy - but with that comes a problem, that convenience is also a vector for attacks. They do not have any ways to limit the potential damage - there's no way to say "always ask for my credit card CVV number", or "always ask for MFA" before making a purchase, you can't limit the purchase amount, or the amount spent today or anything else - you either have to allow everything, or allow nothing (ie. don't ever store a card with them).

(IMHO, Amazon shopping bears some similarities with online gambling - before regulations requiring spend limits and timeouts, gambling companies made it as easy as possible to spend all of your money too. They made the 'top up' as frictionless and invisible as possible, and they never showed you any sort of statement to say how much you'd made or lost, so it was (too) easy to overspend - Amazon feels very similar, although with less 'game of chance'*)

* You might argue the search results are a game of chance, or possibly the quality of some of the products, but that's rather different from gambling ;-)

That the Kindle is vulnerable is regrettable of course, and probably 'easily' fixed by them. This won't be the last problem of that sort though - maybe it'll be another Kindle bug, or a FireTV, or an Alexa or Ring... the problem will still be the same. Once someone's got your account, they can do some serious damage and there's no way to protect yourself from that. You can only hope you see it happening soon enough and block the credit card or whatever - as a consumer, I don't find that very satisfactory.

You'd imagine that DJI has a drone you could use to (much more accurately) map a physical site...?

(I haven't looked, but their cameras are good quality, so maybe there's some software that integrates or something?)

FWIW, I'd love a high res 3d model of my house, the fences and maybe the trees around it etc, preferably in a format I can fiddle about with ;-)

What you're describing is definitely very cool - and likely something humans will do one day. However, the stated reasons for going into space at all are "to find life", and we're pretty sure there's none on Venus. We think there's at least the chance it might once have been on Mars, so coolness aside, Mars is the only* place worth visiting if you're looking for life.

* yes, moons of Jupiter may also have life, but that's even more theoretical than life-once-existed-on-Mars. We'll get there eventually too, but it's not the best place for a first try at it.

So... if you want to put a strategy together for having humans live on another planet, then Venus might be the best option. If your strategy is to find life though, then Mars is likely a better choice.

I wonder if they've done it, but know it's sub-optimal. If anything, they'd probably be better off adding chat to VSCode and then AI-ing that - but that's a hard proposition, and people have tried and failed to make extensions like that actually be useful.

If you're an AI company, you could definitely see there being something in having an AI involved in the discussions about design or development that go on in dev teams everywhere. That is, the AI could (at the very least) gain context for subsequent 'vibe coding' (or code-assist type coding), but it could also be producing documentation, and possibly requirements from those conversations. Tools for that already exist, but they need you to tell the AI what's what - this approach sort of makes the AI "incidental".

My first reaction to this was "oh no, that'll be awful", but I can see there's _some_ sort of way forward here that could be useful. I'm also left wondering if every last burp and fart that comes out of the tech team will be consumed by AI for "productivity reasons" - if so, that'll make it a pretty uncomfortable place to work. It remains to be seen if any of it actually IS useful though - my general experience thus far suggests it's got a 50/50 chance or less, but we'll see...

Good advice.

I'd personally instigate a rule that any meeting with more than 3 occurrences gets deleted. That is, you get to book your "weekly catchup", but it magically disappears from the calender in week 4. If you still need it, then go ahead and re-book it, otherwise, it's a talking shop and we didn't need it.

I'd do the same for "weekly reports" too - pretty much any repeating task performed by anyone ;-)

> they should have rolled back to the previous version of the sun.

Not just the sun - the universe.

The sun emits solar 'wind' (formed of charged particles), which can indeed affect electronics, but it typically has to get through our magnetic field first (so satellites are vulnerable). Aircraft are less protected, but still plenty protected against the majority of it. The sun does also emit cosmic rays, but in relatively small quantities.

Many cosmic rays come from much further out than that - potentially hundreds/thousands/millions of light years away. They don't stop for anyone - they can be detected deep in the ground, so "oh just put some shielding on it" isn't really an easy solution. We don't tend to see cosmic rays in much of a 'burst', so there's unlikely to be a "cosmic ray weather report" as there is for the sun - it's more of a case of one here, one there - so they're much harder to predict or work with.

Protecting against solar particles and other sun activity isn't very hard - but it's expensive (it adds raw cost, but also weight). Protecting against cosmic rays needs a lot more thinking about. As OP says, boron shielding can help - but it's hard to get it right - too much and it's expensive/heavy, too little and it doesn't do much - working out which is which is hard because it's very hard to test if it's worked or not, given the random nature of cosmic rays appearance on Earth. Instead, we have some electronic mitigations which can't stop it, but can work around it - that's what they're talking about here.

> I'm starting to wonder how much longer this can go before we end up like the UK.

Whilst there are a lot of things wrong in the UK, I'd advise you very, very strongly not to listen to some of the loudest voices in America about it. Stories such as Sharia Law in London, or "no go areas" for the police and such like are absolute fantasy. We're also not "flooded" with immigrants - there are some tensions for sure, but actually, the percentage of immigrants (nationally) is really low.

Honestly, most Brits are completely baffled by some of the crap coming out of America about Britain. I don't know which island they're talking about, but it's not this one. It's like they see some tension somewhere, multiply it by a thousand in their minds, and then state it as fact. That they're some know-nothing billionaire who hasn't even been to the place they're talking about, and not someone who actually knows what they're talking about on the subject doesn't seem to lessen their reach either, which we also find rather strange.

Zipcar didn't make it out of London. London has, as you say, umpteen other options, so the times you *need* a zipcar instead of one of those options is (say) when you've got a big supermarket shop (that you couldn't get online), or you need to take some stuff to the tip (that you couldn't get AnyJunk to do for you). There's the problem - for every *need* of a car, there's an alternative that might work about as well, so it's really only the exceptions that work.

Contrast to the towns outside London (like where I live). We have two car clubs here (Co-Wheels and Enterprise, although I'm not sure Enterprise is still working). Co-wheels is great - there are two cars within about 10 minute walk of my house, both are nice hybrid cars, plenty of room inside, drive easily, everything is automatic and they're comfortable and well maintained. We're "between company cars" at the moment, and Co-wheels is filling the gap for me (although my wife sometimes wants a car sat on the driveway, so we have rented cars too).

I did have a 'rash' of problems with co-wheels though... one time it was parked a good distance away from its allotted spot, and I couldn't find it (I was in a rush, and a taxi was quicker than hunting around for a car I didn't even know was definitely there to be found). That problem would be solved by a better app, which maybe they'll get to one day (*they* knew where the car was, they just didn't tell me!). Another time the car had a flat tyre (it looked torn, so the foam filler wouldn't have worked). The previous driver must have known, but didn't report it, so they happily rented to me, but I couldn't drive it. They refunded me and fixed the car pretty quickly. I tried to take the bus that day, which was broadly speaking disastrous - none coming at the times their app said they would - honestly, it was quicker walking the 1.5km.

I'll also say Co-wheels is Community Interest Company, so it's not quite a not-for-profit, but isn't an out-and-out capitalist company either. They're not chasing profit for shareholders really, other than to keep their company running.

> and the moment SpaceX makes a mistake and knocks out a Ukrainian drone on a mission

SpaceX doesn't need to do any such thing - they really just need to supply up to date location information to Ukraine. Ukraine can then send drones or whatever to any locations it doesn't like the look of, taking out testing and launch locations in the process. A large explosion ought to stop the terminal working, so SpaceX really doesn't need to do anything about it at all.

Of course, if SpaceX worked with the Ukrainians in an on-going manner, then they could just be zapping any terminals the Ukrainians told them to disable. That would possibly be better, but would be harder for all parties. I'd also say, a handful of drones may not be using more than one terminal - it could be one is the 'hot spot' for the others, if it's lost, then they all just dive and hope to hit something important (or whatever the Russians program them to do). It's also possible they leave the terminal switched off for the first part of the flight. Spotting one terminal, intermittently coming towards you may not be as easy as it sounds.