My point is that you're deluded.

With the Echo, it's pretty easy not to buy. In this case, the suckers freely chose to participate.

It's not a secret who Amazon is, and wasn't a secret when the Echo Dot came out.

The bigger you are, the harder it is to turn the ship in an emergency. See Titanic.

At some point the inertia of change isn't worth it, as you suggested. It is possible, but is it worth it?

The last way to look at this is a way to start the process of diversifying our Tech holdings. Windows, Office, Adobe, VMWare etc. But here is my take, STEAM is showing the way out. We're not there yet, but the tide appears to be turning (to keep the nautical terms going).

Broken clocks are still broken, even when they occasionally tell the time correctly.

Especially since you know the AI tools are going to be enshittified in short order. That ChatGPT query is free today, tomorrow once you're hooked and can't live without it, it's going to be a dollar query. 50 cents if you can wait for it to be answered during "off peak" hours.

Because that's the business model that's likely to win out. Get kids hooked on AI then get to bill everyone $50/month to use it because they've gotten so reliant on it that they can't live without it.

The whole AI causing shortages is to ensure that you don't get a chance to run local models yourself without paying for the privilege.

I literally do.

The bigger problem is that OpenAI didn't actually log what the agents did so we only know this because the victims spoke up. It wasn't just Hugging Face, but various oldschool wikis in Germany, The University of Toronto and others who were accessed.

I don't know how they sandboxed the AIs but it didn't seem to do a good job if it iddn't log what sites it was using and Hugging Face was the one who detected the hack.

It's hard to believe that a Jordanian teenager learned the PeopleSoft vendor integration API well enough to exploit it.

Probably somebody whose dayjob is related.

Maybe he was just Vibesploiting, but it seems less likely.

Yes, because users understand those kinds of choices.

Too soon!

Yeah, I've become the old greybeard I used to make fun of. The Tech version of a hero living long enough to become the villain.

Now, get off my lawn! ;-)

"We at Siemens have seen how successful SCO was, and think we can be just as successful!"

Oh, now you are trying to nitpick?

You are the one who said, "Censorship means suppression of speech or expression by a governing authority." which is a really dumb thing to say, otherwise "government censorship" or "self-censorship" wouldn't be terms.

I saw part of the testimony. This all comes down to human over-aggressivenessâ"not even mistakes.

The detective used Flock to look for all Dodge Durangos within a radius of the accident. They located her at her apartment. So far, so good. But her car is a different color than what eyewitnesses said. Other details did not match up with eyewitness accounts. There was NO damage to her vehicle, but they arrested her anyway. The detective doubled down and the police continued there prosecution of her.

I'm no fan of Flock, but in this case it's simply bad police.

And the same detective could've queried the DMV and asked for all Dodge Durango vehicles registered in the state. They have that access by default. Sure, they would get a lot of hits, but then they could narrow it down, by partial plate, color, age, etc.

And likely she never would've even been a suspect.

No, Flock may not be completely guilty, but it's not innocent either because just passing by should never be a reason to be arrested. The only way for Flock to win is if its camera captured the accident because it happened to be right in front of it.

It's poor policing, but it's Flock-enabled poor policing.

MW Propagation is a lot of fun. You can get stations that are thousands of miles away. Too bad younger generations haven't bothered to experience it.

It's a huge PITA for AM stations. Many AM stations actually have licenses that say they can broadcast from sunrise to sunset and must shut down for the night. Others have "reduced power operations" where they must reduce their transmit power overnight.

And others are lucky to have the full license that lets them go 24/7 at full power. The regulatory bodies have to consider propagation when dealing with AM radio licenses. When an AM radio station goes off the air it presents more headaches because the other stations nearby might have to juggle their power settings.

But AM radio being in the HF radio band means you only need a few stations to cover an entire country. In an emergency, you cannot tell how many transmitters you have available so the AM network means you still have a way to communicate even if stations so down. And some AM stations do not operate at full power as full power operation is reserved for emergencies.

In a scenario where a major city is impacted, nearby AM radio stations can often have coverage into that major city despite being far away (and thus not experience the issues) making it the ideal communications medium.

Plus, it also means the EV makers can't cheap out on radio shielding. ICE vehicles have huge issues as well with EMI causing radio issues, but they have had years to shield the radio from interference caused by the engine. ("Alternator whine" is a common one). The only reason EVs want to ditch AM radio is because their electronics interfere with AM reception and they want to save the $5 of metal to shield components.