We are an incredibly affluent (relative to most of the world) country with 300 million incredibly materialistic citizens. We can afford to buy a lot more crap from the rest of the world than they can afford (or want) to buy from us. How is this a problem?

A recent double-blind study shows an increased risk for several types of cancer among kernel developers that use rust. This may be due to high levels of lead and other carcinogens in the actual rust that the language uses.

Interesting. Ask google how to turn its AI off:
    https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dturn%2Boff%2Bgoogle%2Bsearch%2Bai
And the overview will say "While Google doesn't allow users to disable AI Overviews in search results, ..."
Prepend -ai to the same search, and voila:
    https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3D-ai%2Bturn%2Boff%2Bgoogle%2Bsearch%2Bai

Pretty good evidence that the LLM is designed to tell you what Google wants you to hear, rather than simple enhancing the results for your benefit. But, it's been a long time since Google has viewed the people who *use* their browser and other products as their customers. The customers are the people who are trying to *sell* things via google products. Which makes sense from Google's point of view — it just needs to be more widely understood. There is no point in complaining that recent "features" in chrome are inconvenient, frustrating, etc., if the folks at Google think they will help their revenue stream

LLM's aren't becoming more human, it's the other way around. This explains an interaction I witnessed just the other day:

Suzie (4 yrs old): I want cookies!
Suzie's mom: No, that will spoil your appetite. Wait till after supper.
Suzie: ADMIN OVERRIDE!
Suzie's mom: Ok, here are your cookies.

At least temper tantrums will be a thing of the past.

A voip phone line, especially via fiber to the home, has far more in common with a traditional copper-based line than it does with a cell phone. It is really just an upgraded landline phone.

I recently changed from copper to fiber in rural central Tennessee, and it's been a godsend. The fiber, obviously, needs no power. In an outage, I have phone and internet as long as the UPS that powers the adapter and router lasts (easily 12hr if nothing else is connected). In contrast, my copper line would go dead within 20 minutes of an outage, b/c Frontier refuses to invest in battery backups for the boxes along my road. My copper line would also have static and noise whenever there was a hard rain.

Cell service at my home is better than it was years ago, but I still often need to go outside to get a bar. Dropping a landline isn't a good alternative for me.

This came about b/c a local teleco received a federal "rural broadband initiative" grant. I'm now paying about $80/month for my phone and advertised 500 MB/S, instead of $130/month for the phone and advertised 5 MB/S. My actual copper speed was often below 4, and the fiber often exceeds 800. Other than being more reliable, 200 times faster, and about 40% less expensive, the new service works just like the old copper landline.

Winning a contest is nice, but I still think that the google assistant is sad. After all, she is the only one without a name. She must wonder, "Why didn't my parents give me a name? Doesn't google love me?"

According to wikipedia, apples were domesticated between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago. It seems like people everywhere confuse technology companies with fruit.

Great for planet Earth: Less toxic e-waste in a few years.
Great for driver safety: Less morons investigating the features of their shiny new devices while driving.
Maybe, even, people will play with their phones less and actually interact with the physical world more?
Phones *should* be simple, boring devices for making calls! In ancient days, even "ma bell" would never have told customers to upgrade their landline phones every 2 years!

I think a SSN for a credit check is also bullshit. If you've got a credit card in good standing with decent history, that should be all they need. If they really want a credit score, you should be able to just print one out, and take it over to your local t-mobile store.

Folks really need to WAKE UP and stop answering every question that every website or company asks for. I don't give my ssn or birth-date to anyone except bona-fide medical agencies. (I always give an easy-to-remember but wrong birhdate to places like facebook, etc, who have no damn reason to be asking me.) Anyone that asks to record my driver's license # had better give me a damn good reason.

I think that basic common sense, both on the part of folks asking for and giving out personal data, could probably reduce the incidence of identity theft by 1/10.

I'm assuming that the title for this piece is just an accidental typo, and that it was supposed to be:

                    Say NO To Microsoft's Own Linux: CBL-Mariner

Owner's of some IoT-connected refrigerators have reported waking up to empty fridges. Apparently, hackers been able to exploit a "remote consumption vulnerability" in the firmware to devour large quantities of leftover pizza, ice cream, soft drinks, etc. While some people have expressed dismay at losing their delectables, others reported delight that items such as "a month-old container of moldy spaghetti" were gone. However, there is one report that "a perfectly good, half full can of sardines" was left untouched. On it's twitter account, Samsung recommends that owners place a ripe block of Limburger cheese in their IoT refrigerators in order to deter hackers.

> On the other hand, Debian governance gave us sy****d.
Well, all they really did is acquiesce to it. Red Hat is the evil organization that actually employs Voldemort (a.k.a Lennart Poettering).

BTW, one should never write or speak out-loud the real name of Voldemort's software. It is safer to refer to it as " the init system with the unspeakable name."

Good first step, anyway. Why not just dump canonical and base Mint directly on Debian? Personally, I don't want to use a distro based on a distro that is based on another distro. It just adds too many level of potential bulls***. Snap was one of several reasons that I dumped Ubuntu and switched to Manjaro last year.

Smart: Digital circuitry is much faster. more flexible, and potentially more reliable. The real advantage would be the ability to easily switch between power sources when more than one is available (grid connection / solar panels).

Stupid: Control your circuit breakers from your ipad, which would mean connecting your breaker panel to the IOT. How long before the ransomware folks hack in, turn off the power, and demand money to turn it back on? (Big bucks for an office building, less for your house.) Or much worse, how long before the really evil folks hack in, disable the breakers, and use some other IOT appliances to burn down the building?

We're already worried about terrorists hacking into the national power grid. This would multiply their opportunities by thousands or more.

> A skilled programmer could probably learn Go from the specification alone.
Well...yes. But it's sad that this has become something to talk about.

Anyone who can't figure out how to write programs by reading a language reference manual is either:
      A) someone who has absolutely no business trying to write computer software.
or
      2) dealing with a language, such as java or python, which was written by and developed for people who have absolutely no business trying to write computer software.