So do it yourself. Honestly, this kind of kneejerk response is stupid. Is Google a good company? No. Does that mean everything they do is useless/untrustworthy? Also no.

You can fetch OSS Rebuild's SLSA Provenance:

$ oss-rebuild get cratesio syn 2.0.39

or explore the rebuilt versions of a particular package:

$ oss-rebuild list pypi absl-py

or even rebuild the package for yourself:

$ oss-rebuild get npm lodash 4.17.20 --format=dockerfile | docker run $(docker buildx build -q -)

"destroyed by their reaction of hiding"

My point was exactly that while we think we have all the context we need, we sometimes don't, to potentially devastating effect. The fact that the internet brigade has a high chance of being "right" in this case doesn't invalidate the point. People can have perfectly legitimate reasons to not want the details of who they're in a relationship with broadcast at large.

All you post tells me is that people are very hungry to see people "get what they deserve" and extrapolate all sorts of things to make them feel justified about doing so.

I opened my post with "I think cheating is bad" so what do you think, dummy?

I think in broad strokes, infidelity is bad, but when it comes to a specific case, I'd say nobody is in a position to judge without much more context.

And that's what makes this kind of stuff rather shitty. People feel confident filling in all sorts of details from their own imagination and prejudices, and even if you get it mostly right 9 times out of 10 (to be very charitable, in my opinion) does that excuse the 10% of the time where the internet mob is wrong?

This is like every company's wet dream. Have some piece of tech that tells them the maximum amount a person will pay for whatever they are selling, and zero transparency and zero price discovery. Hopefully the FTC will not allow this to happen. Not holding my breath.

I don't think this administration has any appetite for doing anything remotely pro-consumer.

You mean solar plus batteries, right? You can't do a cost comparison between pure solar (without storage) and fossil fuels. Since pure solar can't produce power when the sun is not shining. The batteries drive up the cost quite a bit.

Lots of pattern recognition, from quality control to medical diagnosis. Granted that is mostly “machine learning” not large language models, so “so last decade”, but extremely effective.

Basically any problem domain where we can recognize a good solution (and it is unambiguously different from bad solutions), but don’t know any step by step process to get to one have had success stories. Him, no there is more to it then that, it seems like we have spent far far longer not getting to trustable self driving cars then my rule of thumb says. We have made significant progress towards it though, it’s just that “mostly doesn’t drive the car into a lake” isn't a great result...so maybe “& has only a modest failure cost, OR humans don’t do it all that great anyway” is a useful addition.

High by almost a third, Apple’s cheapest laptop is a $650 model of the M1 MacBook Air sold only via Walmart.

CA may have made non-competes illegal, but those are the “you can’t work for our competitors after you leave us” non-competes. It is generally considered valid to prevent someone from working for a competitor while they are actually working for you. Like Apple and Google both say you can’t work for a competitor while employed by them. Both consider each other to be operating in the same markets and thus competitors.

The claim Google/Apple would make isn’t that you can’t work 2 places at once, or even that you can’t in general work for Google and Apple at the same time, but that the employee made an agreement that they would not work for a competitor and lied about doing so. An otherwise legal act which is fraud because you agreed not to do so, claimed not to be doing so, and then did so anyway. So they would certionally have to worry about sabotage, and/or theft of work product. -- Ironically you might be able to wriggle partway out of it by claiming you “weren’t really working, just slacking for both of them at once!”, except neither judge nor jury would really find that acceptable...

Their kids didn't. Treating everyone like an island is ultimately the purest form of the cancer that infects the US.

"those goals seem to be nearly impossible to attain"

Is it impossible to obtain - the national ethos sees absolutely no problem with the unbounded consolidation of wealth and power, so long as it is in the private sector.

The joke is the private sector is so powerful at this point, your public sector is just a sock with the private sector's hand up its ass.

That'll never change as long as the concept of even moderate, reasonable redistribution of wealth is a national non-starter. It's impressive watching the way the US twists itself this way and that, where everybody is just a temporarily embarrassed billionaire voting for less taxes, less spending to make their supposed future rich selves happy for when they finally join the billionaire class.

an area of the system which you can't look at or audit?

You can probbably look at and audit the PCFax area with some sort of enterprise tool, you just can’t write it. Or maybe they will even allow you to erase it and leave behind a “the PCFax report was deleted, so anything could be wrong with this computer! Odometer tampered with! Tampered!!!”

It is not in HP's interest to instigate more trust into a used computer purchase. This serves to help the used computer market, at the expense of the new computer market.

Maybe.

One reason Apple can charge more money then other companies for new iPhones is people believe they can sell a year or two old iPhone for a reasonable amount of money. HP may believe their products will retain more value over time in the used market then competitors even if the sole reason is because “PCFax says it is good” for HPs and non-HPs don’t get a report because they come to the party late and don’t offer the feature for several more years. Once people get in the habit of buying HP “because you can resell it for like half the price of a new one” the prices of new ones can start to creep up. It would make sense to pay $600 for an HP with an identical spec to a $400 Dell if you believe that in two years the HP will sell for $300 and the Dell will sell for maybe $100, or maybe cost you $10 for an eWaste sticker. Even more sense if HP gives you a 2 year repurchase price because they think the used price will be high enough (i.e. you pay $600 today for the laptop, and it includes a $200 coupon for a 2027 purchase of a new HP if you send the old one back...)

Again the actual HP might not be any better then the Dell (or may be somewhat worse), but it has a PCFax listing that says “great shape! SSD 100% ok! Battery 97% original capacity, great for 2 years of use! Never been dropped! Never had the screen replaced! OEM RAM!” while the Dell’s says “no information, anything could have happened to this pile of junk, buyer beware!”

I’m not even talking pre-orders of video games coming out in a few months.

The entire Chicago board of exchange exists to sell products (originally farm products, you know tons of corn, bales of hay, barrels of hog bellies, whole cows) at future points in time. It revolutionized the farm economy. Farmers can sell this fall’s harvest today in order to afford repairs on tractors they need fixed in order to actually get the harvest into the ground, and keep it watered and weeded and fertilized. Oh, plus afford the fertilizer.

CBOE exchanges billions of dollars of futures a day, granted it isn’t all “farm stuff” anymore. Google buying energy that won’t be produced for ~7 years isn’t really any more astounding then someone buying tons of corn from plants that just went into the ground last week and won’t be harvested until October, and that has been happening since 1973.