At least one of their competitors already does the same thing. Also a 'premium' product, with crappy support, now papered over with AI.

> They're just advertising that their customer service sucks

Or that their product is too complex or not intuitive, causing support calls for stuff users should be able to work out for themselves. Failing that, their documentation is rubbish, or quite probably (knowing how it is with a lot of companies), the search engine on their support website is a crock of shit.

Ultimately, at least 80% of the support now done by AI should either have never needed support, or should have been solved by documentation. The last 20% is for the idiot users who are either too lazy or can't work the search engine, or seem never to have used a computer before - there I can see AI being rather helpful.

As an aside: I've been working with one of their competitors - their support is also terrible (even the AI suggestions), but their search engine is absolutely the worst kind of trash you can imagine. They have documents for just about everything, but of the last 10 support calls I've logged, probably 7-8 of them have been solved by the call agent finding a document that I couldn't (and in a few cases answering a question that wasn't addressed in the documentation). These are some of the biggest tech companies in the world, and they don't seem to get this stuff even vaguely right.

I have no idea how this pans out, but I'd imagine their first phone won't be a smart phone. They've got far too many 'low level' issues to work out first, and even getting hardware which doesn't need a manufacturer's binary blob to make it work is already a significant challenge. The subject of apps, app stores and operating systems will likely come later.

As others have said, the low level radios and modems have the capacity to be a real problem for networks. Most networks are held together with sticky tape and chewing gum - the only thing keeping them working is that all phones "play nice". They're not under any obligation to let "unknown" devices work on their networks, and so it remains to be seen how the FSF will make something "open", yet "controlled" enough that it's not easy for someone to clobber a mobile network if they start fiddling with it.

If I had to guess, I'd say the FSF will find a suitable hardware solution, which needs a signed binary driver to run. They'll then open source the binary blob, but a small group of developers will be able to kick off builds which sign blobs. The rest of us will download an FSF blob - we won't have access to any of the internals of it. But that's all just me guessing - I'll look forward to seeing how they solve these sorts of problems.

Indeed, getting line of sight when there's a 50 storey obstruction next to you is going to be tricky. So is signal bounce. GPS receivers don't really have the concept of "signal strength". That is, the GPS signal is below the noise floor anyway, so you can't really measure the strength of it. Instead, you have to spread-spectrum hunt for the edges of the digital signal, and when you've got a few edges in a row which look like they match the pattern you're expecting, then you declare that signal "locked on" and can start to work out the time difference between it and other signals.

So yeah, doing any sort of traditional signal processing to try and work out what are direct and what are bounces... that's tricky. More satellites is handy, but if you're in a tall building corridor, then it's likely you just can't get the "other two points of a triangle" to be far enough away to make a proper location calculation. Mixing with other data sources is probably the answer - cell towers would seem a good option, as would wifi and even bluetooth signals (which is one of the ways Google Maps can do it, because they have maps of wifi network names). Indeed, most map solutions use the fact you're moving to avoid putting you inside a building, or whatever too, so they're trying to make intelligent guesses as to where you are based on the context you're in.

My Audi had a purchase option for an additional speaker system to play engine sounds (which are only played inside the car - they replace the back seat armrest with speakers, and put a couple more under the seats, IIRC). It was something like an extra £400-500. I mean, are you like 8 years old? You need your car to go "brum brum" and make squealy noises when it goes around corners? I'd be *embarrassed* to have such a feature, hell, I'd probably pay to have it removed if it came with it. Besides, one of the wonderful things about EVs is that they make so little noise.

Audi also want to charge me to change the background picture on the infotainment unit too. They clearly have very little idea what sort of things I'm likely to spend my money on. I doubt Ferrari ever really need to worry about my tastes, but they also seem not to know much about people like me.

I wonder if they'd be *more* successful with shorter copyright?

If copyright was (say) 20 years, then fans (and AI companies!) could be making all sorts of derivative works from 20 years old stuff, instead of stuff made more recently. It's probably possible for the AI scrapers to roughly even get those dates right themselves - if it looks like $film_released_before_2005 then it's okay, otherwise no. As it is, copyright is so unimaginably long, that people are just ignoring it completely, not least because working out when something may or may not drop out of copyright is too hard, and of course leaves you with such a small training set as to be pointless.

Of course, they're likely far too bone-headed stubborn to even consider such an idea, let alone go along with it. I'd bet they'd prefer to lengthen copyright to "keep AI out of it" before they'd ever think about any other options.

The more niche the subject, the easier it is. That is, if you try to poison the LLM on the works of Taylor Swift, it's likely to be much harder than on (say) the way to kill a process on an operating system. In the TS case, you've got to overcome an awful lot of very popular 'real' content for the LLM to consider your slop to be a likely extension of whatever it's spewing out. In the case of killing processes, there's a lot less of that information around, and so poisoning it is (relatively speaking) easier.

I wonder how long it'll be before the troll farms are able to manipulate AI on 'big' subjects like world leaders, or government records on a variety of hot topics?

Probably all true, but right now, OpenAI is something of a small player because the Microsofts (especially) and the Googles have pushed their own AI products with their other products - keeping OpenAI out of those playgrounds.

If somehow the playing field is levelled and OpenAI get to compete in those spaces, then they'll sure as you like start trying to muscle out other people. Then we go around the same loop all over again but with different players.

My cynical suspicions are that the likes of Google and Microsoft are trying to shoe-horn AI into as much as possible as quickly as possible. That way, they'll be able to claim it'll take longer to unpick it all to let other AI players in later on. They're currently the quick brown fix jumping over the lazy EU regulator dog, and doing as much as they can to make as much money and territory as quickly as possible. When the EU regulators attack dogs wake up and start biting the fox, then they're all hoping to be the most complex, most AI-in-everything that they can be so that they get longer to unpick it all than anyone else and so they get hurt by it less than anyone else. I can't imagine any of these companies think they'll get away with what they're doing forever, they've all been burned enough times. They're just trying to cause everyone else to spend too much money on it, and to end up less burned by it when it all comes tumbling down.

Yeah +1 for Home Assistant. I wasn't familiar with these Pop buttons, but something similar is trivially easy with an ESP32 (and ESPHome), some bits of wire and a push button switch. Indeed, now I know there (was) a market for these sorts of things, maybe I'll spend some time making such a thing.

(FWIW, I have a zwave 'scene button', which has 5 buttons on it and is rechargeable (about the size of a car key fob). It's a great little thing, and works great with HA - I can't remember what it cost, but it sure wasn't $100, and it can't be bricked by anyone - likely doesn't sell well because it says "hub required", which I personally take as a positive, but most people don't)

We brits aren't great at rooftop solar - we're getting better, but there's a long, long way to go. The square kilometres of untapped space are many, and if we get to using it, then the demand for grid electricity changes dramatically. Sure, cloudy days aren't as good as sunny ones, but I'll bet a lot of houses are just consuming "power vampires" right now, all of which could be powered by some solar, even on a cloudy day.

Say nothing about our pretty terrible record on insulating our houses - if we do that, then the use of gas drops off a lot, and for those with electrical heating, things improve there too. The government is stuck in a rut of raising taxes until productivity improves, but if they ever get to doing some sort of incentives for domestic rooftop solar and (probably more importantly) thermal performance of our houses, then we could shift our whole grid and carbon discussion by quite a distance.

But yes, our dependence on gas is far too great.

Domestic fees are capped (by the government) in some attempt to make going to university affordable for British people. The fees are already higher than just about anyone can afford, so students need to take loans to pay them. Despite this, the fees are below the cost of the course, and the price caps haven't kept up with inflation (which of course has been high lately).

There are no caps on fees to foreign students, so they've been something of a cash cow for universities for years. The relative number of foreign students you're allowed compares to domestic students is limited by the government.

However, of late they're not filling the foreign student quotas they're allowed. This could be for a number of reasons:
1) Brexit means it's harder for any students to come to the UK. Everyone needs to get visas and paperwork, which has likely become trickier for just about everyone. Europeans used to just be able to come here, but they now have all that paperwork to do as well. I guess if you have a hard-to-get-into-country and an easier one, then there's some value to go to the easier one.
2) Cost of living. The UK's always been pretty expensive, but that's only got worse in recent times. Just your average living expenses are now higher than they were, so as a student, you've got to carefully consider if you're going to be able to afford it. Given visa restrictions, "getting a job on the side" (as most brits now have to) is maybe not an option.

That last point also applies to domestic students. University is, for many people pretty unaffordable, and so they're turning to other choices such as apprenticeships and other vocational options. Some of those are really really good, and of course mean you earn money while you're learning, rather than charging you money to learn. Contrast to the government mantra some 20 odd years ago that "everyone should go to university" (which was ridiculous, by the way) - useless courses filled with students, all contributing to the costs of the university, but likely not costing much to run (and then likely not being of use in the workplace).

A lot of the cheaper-to-run courses are now less attended than they once were (see my last point). They likely subsidised the more expensive courses, which now isn't so much the case, and so departments are having to find ways to balance their books.

Lastly, research grants are harder to get, and perhaps not as lucrative as they once were. Aside from International competition, a lot of research is now done privately, where once almost none was done that way. Some universities have some utterly stupid terms and conditions on their research, which makes them less attractive to the private sector than alternatives, but that can't surely be true for all of them.

So all in all, there are lots of reasons why universities are in trouble. Truthfully, we've probably got too many universities and some consolidation is probably appropriate, but even still, it will have a dramatic effect on the future prospects of the nation if any of the good ones just aren't that great at the business side and end up closing down.

Maybe, but at least a few packages have been infected by an actual maintainer. That is, they obtain maintainer status, do some nice things for a while then submit an obfuscated patch to something, which is actually malware - and then the damage is done. No MFA is going to fix that.

As for signatures... a given project's CI is just going to sign the package and send it to the repo. In the above example, that's just going to sign the malware.

IMHO, the only way is for repos to compile the packages themselves, having (presumably) verified the source is acceptable. That needs source code inspection, and it needs quite a bit of compute to do the compilation too. Then the repo signs the package.

I suspect some 'premium' repos will appear that need a subscription to use, but in return do the due-diligence on the packages they hand out.

Here in the UK, I checked mine, it says:

Carbon emissions: 0 g/kWh (uk average 171 g/kWh
Renewables: 84.8% (uk average 43.2%)
Nuclear: 15.2% (uk average 12.7%)
Gas: 0% (uk average 35%)
Coal: 0% (uk average 6.3%)

I probably do pay a bit more for my day time electricity than other suppliers, but no one beats my off peak (night time) rate, and I often get a few "bursts" of off-peak rate during the day, all my EV changing is at the off peak rate and sometimes they do a hour of free electricity (so it's not definitely more expensive).

I've been with a couple of different suppliers over the last 20+ years, all of them "green first". I probably haven't had the absolute cheapest electricity as a result, but I'm fine with that. The table above makes me feel pretty good about my energy usage.

The one thing that's absolutely bent about the UK though... the price of my electricity *still* tracks the gas price. That's crazy, and needs to stop.

Huh? Did you (not) read a different TFS from me?

> While the new findings do not show that there is life on Enceladus,

The researcher's own words were:

> "When there is complexity happening, that means that the habitable potential of Enceladus is increasing right now,"

I believe the thinking goes like this...

1) You observe a planet or moon. So far, zero evidence of life.
2) You observe water on said body. Now you have a tiny chance of life.
3) You observe movement of that water, plumes, or ice, or tides or whatever else - now you have a slight chance of life
4) You observe 'organic compounds' - chances of life go up a bit more ... and so on.

With all of this, you start to justify the billions of euros in spend for a probe to go there (as opposed to sending it anywhere else) and have a proper look. Which leads to the researcher saying...

> The results, he added, support plans by the European Space Agency (ESA) to investigate the moon for signs of life.

Seems pretty reasonable to me. In 2047, we'll be able to determine directly if there's life there or not. Roll on 2047 - finding actual life anywhere except Earth would change humanity forever.

We mainly use our Amazon stick to load up Netflix and occasionally Kodi. If they're going to lock out Kodi, then I'll need to find another way to do that bit. Ideally I'd get Netflix on that other thing too, then I don't really need to look at Amazon for anything. Netflix aren't completely against running on open source projects, although it'll take a lot of convincing it's worth their time to do it.

Amazon Prime video is "for free" - and it shows. I just watched Reacher (which is average at best, but he does get his shirt off a lot, if that's your bag). The thing is, they insist on putting in ads - but they're the same 3 ads every time. I didn't want a new mop the first time, and I sure as hell don't after the 10th time. If I could "do telly" without ever having to see Amazon promoting something or other, then I'd consider that a 'win'. As for the games, photos and other fluff they have on there... yeah, not doing that.

So all in all, this could be the end of Amazon Prime Video (or at least, a considerable reduction in its utility).