Teams is another Microsoft miss in the world of chat apps. Like Skype it destroyed, MSN Messenger, and Live Communication Server before, Microsoft cant get chat right. Moving to the cloud only model also alienated a lot of government and enterprise IT shops, who just see their licensing costs skyrocket. People want to run it the way they want to themselves. They should have made Teams an installable Windows Server product, and make it communicate with external parties using fancy DNS resolution, a-la email.

There was a survivor from the plane who described a loud bang before the plane crashed.

This "feature" actually saved me quite a bit of work at a job I had a few years back. The documentation people were so afraid that anyone who was not a full-time Word expert would irrecoverably screw up the corporate branding (IOW, formatting) of their docs, they didn't want developers to directly edit them. So I was often able to get away with emailing a quick text summary to them, and they had to do all the fidgety proof reading, formatting, etc.

I don't know how they managed to get their jobs done, given that they had no real source control and mainly juggled each update amongst themselves over email and random impoossible-to-find folders on Sharepoint.

Since all the docs had the same basic layout and they were mainly trying to make them look consistent with whatever corporate branding was being promulgated that week, it could easily have been done by writing them in "markdown" and having a script that converted them directly to PDF. Or maybe even learn LaTeX. Then the docs could all be maintained and diffed in github like all the other project artifacts. I didn't even bring that up because I knew that their heads would explode.

This places an absolute upper size on the alien battlefleet seeking to use Earth as a food source.

Trump's abandoned The Wall, as he found that the album doesn't mention Mexico even once, although he found the marching hammers very inspiring.

Back in the days of the Rainbow series, the Orange Book required that data that was marked as secure could not be transferred to any location or user who was (a) not authorised to access it or (b) did not have the security permissions regardless of any other authorisation. There was an additional protocol, though, listed in those manuals - I don't know if it was ever applied though - which stated that data could not be transferred to any device or any network that did not enforce the same security rules or was not authorised to access that data.

Regardless, in more modern times, these protocols were all abolished.

Had they not been, and had all protocols been put in place and enforced, then you could install all the unsecured connections and unsecured servers you liked, without limit. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to actual security, because the full set of protocols would have required the system as a whole to not place sensitive data on such systems.

After the Clinton email server scandal, the Manning leaks, and the Snowden leaks, I'm astonished this wasn't done. I am dubious the Clinton scandal was actually anything like as bad as the claimants said, but it doesn't really matter. If these protocols were all in place, then it would be absolutely impossible for secure data to be transferred to unsecured devices, and absolutely impossible for secure data to be copied to machines that had no "need to know", regardless of any passwords obtained and any clearance obtained.

If people are using unsecured phones, unsecured protocols, unsecured satellite links, etc, it is not because we don't know how to enforce good policy, the documents on how to do this are old and could do with being updated but do in fact exist, as does the software that is capable of enforcing those rules. It is because a choice has been made, by some idiot or other, to consider the risks and consequences perfectly reasonable costs of doing business with companies like Microsoft, because companies like Microsoft simply aren't capable of producing systems that can achieve that kind of level of security and everyone knows it.

In and of itself, that's actually the worrying part.

In the 1930s, and even the first few years of the 1940s, a lot of normal (and relatively sane) people agreed completely with what the fascists were doing. In the Rhythm 0 "endurance art" by Marina Abramovi, normal (and relatively sane) people openly abused their right to do whatever they liked to her, at least up to the point where one tried to kill her with a gun that had been supplied as part of the installation, at which point the people realised they may have gone a little OTT.

Normal (and relatively sane) people will agree with, and support, all kinds of things most societies would regard as utterly evil, so long as (relative to some aspirational ideal) the evil is incremental, with each step in itself banal.

There are various (now-disputed) psychology experiments that attempted to study this phenomenon, but regardless of the credibility of those experiments, there's never really been much of an effort by any society to actually stop, think, and consider the possibility that maybe they're a little too willing to agree to stuff that maybe they shouldn't. People are very keen to assume that it's only other people who can fall into that trap.

Normal and sane is, sadly as Rhythm 0 showed extremely well, not as impressive as we'd all like to think it is. The veneer of civilisation is beautiful to behold, but runs awfully thin and chips easily. Normal and sane adults are not as distant from chimpanzees as our five million years of divergence would encourage us to think. Which is rather worrying, when you get right down to it.

Pretty much agree, I'd also add that we don't have a clear impression of who actually did the supposed rioting, the media were too busy being shot by the National Guard to get an overly-clear impression.

(We know during the BLM "riots" that a suspiciously large number of the "rioters" were later identified as white nationalists, and we know that in the British police spy scandal that the spies often advocated or led actions that were more violent than those the group they were in espoused, so I'd be wary of making any assumptions at the heat of the moment as to exactly who did what, until that is clearly and definitively known. If this had been a popular uprising, I would not have expected such small-scale disturbances - the race riots of the 60s, the Rodney King riots, the British riots in Brixton or Toxteth in the 80s, these weren't the minor events we're seeing in California, which are on a very very much smaller scale than the protest marches that have been taking place.)

This is different from the Jan 6th attempted coup, when those involved in the coup made it very clear they were indeed involved and where those involved were very clearly affiliated with domestic terrorist groups such as the Proud Boys. Let's get some clear answers as to exactly what scale was involved and who it involved, because, yes, this has a VERY Reichstag-fire vibe to it.

I would have to agree. There is no obvious end-goal of developing an America that is favourable to the global economy, to Americans, or even to himself, unless we assume that he meant what he said about ending elections and becoming a national dictator. The actions favour destabilisation, fragmentation, and the furthering of the goals of anyone with the power to become a global dictator.

Exactly who is pulling the strings is, I think, not quite so important. The Chechen leader has made it clear he sees himself as a future leader of the Russian Federation, and he wouldn't be the first tyrant to try and seize absolute power in the last few years. (Remember Wagner?) We can assume that there's plenty lurking in the shadows, guiding things subtly in the hopes that Putin will slip.

"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." - Kenneth E. Boulding

The spec it came up with includes: which specific material is used for which specific component, additional components to handle cases where there's chemically incompatible or thermally incompatible materials in proximity, what temperature regulation is needed where (and how), placement of sensors, pressure restrictions, details of computer network security, the design of the computers, network protocols, network topology, design modifications needed to pre-existing designs - it's impressively detailed.

I've actually uploaded what it's produced to GitHub, so if the most glorious piece of what is likely engineering fiction intrigued you, I would be happy to provide a link.

I've mentioned this before, but I had Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude jointly design me an aircraft, along with its engines. The sheer intricacy and complexity of the problem is such that it can take engineers years to get to what all three AIs agree is a good design. Grok took a look at as much as it could, before running out of space, and agreed it was sound.

Basically, I gave an initial starting point (a historic aircraft) and had each in turn fix issues with the previous version, until all three agreed on correctness.

This makes it a perfectly reasonable sanity check. If an engineer who knows what they're doing looks at the design and spots a problem, then AI has and intrinsic problem with complex problems, even when the complexity was iteratively produced by the AI itself.

Conflict is to control human food, bird seed can be literally sprayed out of a plane. I dont think we would need to, mosquitoes are not a primary diet of any species in high numbers.

Natural NNs appear to use recursive methods.

What you "see" is not what your eyes observe, but rather a reconstruction assembled entirely from memories that are triggered by what your eyes observe, which is why the reconstructions often have blind spots.

Time seeming to slow down (even though experiments show that it doesn't alter response times), daydreaming, remembering, predicting, etc, the brain's searching for continuity, the episodic rather than snapshot nature of these processes, and the lack of any gap during sleep, is suggestive of some sort of recursion, where the output is used as some sort of component of the next input and where continuity is key.

We know something of the manner of reconstruction - there are some excellent, if rather old, documentary series, one by James Burke and another by David Eagleman, that give elementary introductions to how these reconstructions operate and the physics that make such reconstructions necessary.

It's very safe to assume that neuroscientists would not regard these as anything better than introductions, but they are useful for looking for traits we know the brain exhibits (and why) that are wholly absent from AI.

They're not replicating our capabilities, nor could they. The architecture is completely wrong, as is the design philosophy. Brains are not classifiers, the way neural network software is, they are abstraction engines and dynamic compositors.