Your honor, my script was a "rogue," so therefore it is responsible and I am not.

If the cops receive an anonymous tip that CowboyNeal is an insensitive clod, and then decide to arrest him without checking out any of the evidence, I blame the cops. There's plenty to bitch about with Flock but "the cops don't care about doing their job" isn't one of them. That's a cop problem.

Don't treat any stupid robots as somehow "better" than an anonymous tip called in from a payphone. It's just, like, something's opinion, man.

I'm quite a bit older than Gen Z and even I think AM radio is a waste of spectrum. We've got cell phones now and supposedly Starlink is even capable of providing cell coverage from space. The cell networks are also quite a bit more resilient than people give them credit for, too. Last major hurricane we had here (Irma), I watched the weather radar on my phone throughout the entire storm. Power went out, Spectrum was down, but the cell service stayed up the whole time.

Also, AM radio just sounds like absolute ass. I don't understand how anyone would willingly subject themselves to that when you can get a crystal clear audio feed via modern online streaming. I get it, it was an amazing achievement in its day and a necessary stepping stone to better technologies, but please just let it finally die.

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.

burn down institutions that actually work; they are too stupid to understand how they work.

Khrushchev would love that our government is full of people who disagree with the principle of Chesterton's Fence. It's appalling that "conservatives" have become so far to the left of "The Left."

Vote conservative: vote Democrat.

What's next? If we accept this, then the next thing will be that public officials won't be allowed to sell Amway/Herbalife, heroin, or fake patents? This is viciously partisan, clearly intended to keep a certain major political party from running for office.

Brainrot social media probably is bad for kids. Lots of stuff out in the real world is bad for kids, too. That's why parents are supposed to do this thing called "parenting" and not let their spawn have access to things that aren't age appropriate.

It absolutely baffles the fuck out of me that so many parents just said to their kids "here's a smartphone, don't do anything stupid with it" and then went all surprised Pikachu faced when their kids went and did the stupid anyway - exactly as anyone with a half functioning brain could've predicted.

Use them?! First: why would I want to be locked into Meta's proprietary APIs? And second: it doesn't even include a near-infrared swimsuits mode. I can't believe they omitted such a basic feature. (Zuck, you call these perv glasses!?!)

Besides, from a style perspective, they just aren't nearly gargoylie enough. Whatever perv glasses I buy will have erect antenna(s) (not integrated into the frame), much larger aperture cameras for astronomy, and lots of blinkenlights (including a cool-looking Locutus-style laser). It doesn't surprise me at all, that the more style-conscious sex isn't buying them.

Meta's specific product is ridiculous. But I nevertheless defend the overall tech.

its advocates have already gotten so much of what they could have possibly hoped for

Except the one thing that actually matters: being able to really use it. I still (in 2026!) can't use Bitcoin to pay for things at my local grocery store, car mechanic, or even Amazon.

Bitcoin didn't take off. Unless it suddenly gets more popular by a few orders of magnitude, it remains a useless dead end.

Blaming Wharton School of Business for what Trump tried to do with the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario is absurd. By all accounts, he didn't learn anything in his time there and his professors didn't think highly of him. There's no way his university had anything to do with that.

Besides, lots of people graduated from Wharton. Which others, who graduated from there, suffer from Trump's derangement syndrome and a need to rename geography?

If Trump thinks AI is so "super intelligent", why doesn't he ask his favorite LLM for a plan to lower gas prices?

The problem with a flat tax scheme is that it's based on consumption rather than how well the whole capitalism thing is working out for you. I usually like to mention how many iPhones Elon Musk would have to buy in order for him to have paid the same the same percentage of his income towards sales tax as someone making the average median income (it's somewhere around 10.4 million iPhones), but a more down-to-Earth example would be if you happen to know anyone who is of limited means and spends a ton of money in gas because their vehicle is a bit of a gas guzzler. That person is paying more of their income towards road taxes to travel the same distance as someone who conceivably is paying nothing in road taxes, because the person paying nothing was able to afford an EV (assuming they're in one of the states that hasn't implemented a separate EV tax).

Of course, I wouldn't fault you for assuming that the reason the road taxes in my example aren't implemented fairly is because we don't just make everyone pay by the mile. That seems all well and good until you realize that some people are using the roads to commute to their minimum wage job flipping burgers, and others are using the roads to pull down a nice high 6 figure income. Shouldn't the folks who are getting more benefit from the upkeep of the roads have a greater obligation to pay some of that forward (since they're deriving more benefit from the infrastructure and also have more to lose if it isn't properly maintained)?

Lately, that means dumping money into more films for a franchise where the horse hasn't entirely been beaten into an unrecognizable bloody pulp yet.