quietly request the READ_GSERVICES permission. This lets them grab your Google Services Framework ID, a persistent device ID that survives app reinstalls and SIM swaps. Translation: perfect for long-term tracking.

Given how critical that permission is, how are they even able to request it quietly? I would think Android would be screaming at the top of its lungs if that permission were requested.

> it's been neither "stable" nor "reliable."

I was going to say the same thing. CenturyLink/Quantum's fiber service has been spotty pretty much since the beginning. Which tracks, since their DSL service wasn't much better.

AT&T may find new and interesting ways to screw things up. But Quantum residential customers have already been getting the short end of the stick for reliability.

Right, just like it's impossible for an English speaking Canadian to communicate with people from Japan or Germany. I mean ... no one has ever solved that problem *rolls eyes*.

To me the fundamental issue at hand is the role of the government and individual freedom and liberty. My operating definition of liberty is an environment in which all interpersonal relations are consensual.

In order for two parties to communicate with each other, there must first be an intent to communicate. When that intent exists, the mechanisms will be negotiated between those parties.

For a 3rd party to enter the picture and dictate the mechanisms under threat of force is morally wrong in my opinion. There is no justification for that.

The only narrow area that I can think of is when government adopts a policy that says "For the purposes of communicating with the government, specifically, these are the languages that we promise to support."

That is no different than private individuals saying "If you want to communicate with me, these are the languages and tools that you can use to reach me."

I don't know what makes business so "special" or different that you would hold them to a standard above that of the government. Food labels? You might as well say that a company is required by law to print food labels in every single language that exists on the planet... as their may be some customer that walks into the store that doesn't speak English or French (to keep this within Canada). That would be absurd.

Government's job is not to "protect" a language. Government's job is to protect the rights of each and every individual that exists within it's operating jurisdiction. Those rights include the right to express yourself freely and to associate freely. Compelling that communication between private individuals take a specific form is to infringe upon the rights of those individuals.

There is no "middle ground" here. Either two parties are able to communicate using whatever means THEY chose, or some other 3rd party is interfering forcibly under threat of punishment. That latter scenario is not "middle ground", it's the illegitimate initiation of force against individuals who are just living their lives and going about their business. The fact that they are choosing to do so using a language or tool set that you don't like or approve of is none of your business and doesn't hurt you in any way. Go read a book or something and stop worrying so much about the private lives of others, you authoritarian nutter.

This whole exchange has me thinking of a filler bit from a DS9 episode.

JACK: The fact is that the universe is going to stop expanding and it is going to collapse in on itself. We've got to do something before it's too late.
PATRICK: How much time do we have left?
JACK: Sixty trillion years, seventy at the most.
JACK: There's too much matter. The universe is too heavy for its own good.
LAUREN: You need to lighten the load.
JACK: Yes, yes, yes, exactly. We have to find some way to decrease the mass.
SARINA: Of the entire universe?
JACK: That's the whole point.

Apparently, we're just going to have to change the cosmological constant...

Polygon had seen better days, that's for sure. But in their early days the site was very, very good.

More than anything else, I feel like the site lost its focus somewhere in the last half-decade. The original focus of the site is all in the name: polygons - as in video games. But Vox slowly morphed it into a general pop culture website. These days it's a mix of video games, movies, TV shows, board games, books, etc.

Those are all fine things in and of themselves. But at best they dilute the brand. And at worst they're taking the place of video game content, to the point where if you're after actual gaming news you're going to want to go elsewhere, because Polygon didn't have the editorial bandwidth to cover it.

So it has been a long time coming, in some respects. Unfortunately, the people who really pay the price are the writers, who are now out of a job.

CodeWeavers is one of the few companies that I believe really do intend to keep their word - and have the means to do it.

The company has been shipping CrossOver Mac for almost 20 years now - basically since Macs transitioned from PPC to x86. They've rejiggered their software lineup a couple of times, essentially consolidating a few different products (Games, Office, Standard) into a single SKU, but they've always provided a continuity of features and an upgrade path. Put another way, they've been offering the same continually-updated CrossOver product for over two decades now.

Which, since it's essentially the commercial release of Wine, that makes sense. Their whole business model is constantly developing improvements to Wine, and then bundling that up into a commercial-grade software package that comes with official support. So their business model is stable (so long as Windows remains important), as well as the need to continue updating the software.

Given how intertwined CodeWeavers is with Wine, it would be a disaster if they did renege on lifetime updates for anyone who has paid for them. The corollary to that being that if it were to happen, then something very bad must have already happened to the broader Wine ecosystem, as this is how they primarilly fund the whole project.

Good high schools have offered stats courses for ages. And for college-bound students, AP Statistics has been offered for almost 30 years now.

Not even jokingly, no. Denuevo is self-contained at the executable level: it runs entirely in ring 3. It's not like, say, StarForce, which needed a ring 0 driver installed.

Similar but reversed. My credit unions aren't part of Zelle, but some people don't use or won't use Venmo or Paypal FF. This removes one of the few free ways to transfer funds.

Ditto. This change means I won't be able to pay Zelle users. There are other services, so it's not the end of the world, but it makes Zelle all but impossible for me to use.

[Citation Needed]

I'm Canadian. Private practice is ILLEGAL here. I don't even want to jump in to the argument about whether single-payer or multi-tier or the Canadian vs the US system is better or worse. I'm just stating the facts as I know them to be as a Canadian. At least it is in Ontario, it might differ for other provinces, there are no private options. I get to choose the public one or the public one. If I wanted to pay out of pocket to go visit a private clinic somewhere, that doesn't exist.

Stop spreading misinformation.

I agree with both of you.

I grew up below the poverty line. My brother and I were raised by a single mother who collected welfare as often, if not more, than she held low paying jobs. It's cliche to say "we stole ketchup packets from fast food restaurants and ate ketchup on crackers" but I literally have memories of that. I remember when my mother put utility bills in my brother's name because she had been delinquent on bills and owed them money and we had gotten shut off.

This poverty led to teenage "rebellion" and delinquency. I conceived my first daughter when I was 16 years-old. I married her mother, so I feel very fortunate to have found my soul mate in high school and we are still going strong almost 30 years later. But those early years when we were teenage and young adult parents was more poverty to a level that I doubt most people who are struggling today would be able to comprehend unless they are also young parents without great employment prospects.

It wasn't easy, and I would never dismiss the real struggles that people are facing. But I did manage to pull myself and my family out of poverty through intelligent decision making and hard work. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" might sound cold and callous, and gets used as a straw-man by people who think it is intended as being dismissive. But my own personal lived experiences serve as a proof of concept. Chance is a factor, but it is not one that you can control so I've always chosen to focus on what I CAN control. And it's not like I had rich parents or family. My entire family was below the poverty line and my father was absent.

I came out of those struggles not believing, but having observed empirically, that even when you are screwed six ways to Sunday, there ARE choices you can make. Some of those decisions can leave you slightly better off, and if you consistently make those you can gradually climb yourself out. It takes time and it's hard, but you can do it. Other decisions, like reaching for a credit card out of desperation, will leave you worse off. I would argue that a decision that leaves you worse off is worse than just doing nothing. Worse than not reaching for it as a last resort. I think that's where a lot of people fall into the trap. They have bills, their utilities are about to get shut off, they're going to get evicted (I've been in ALL of those positions with kids to think about!) ... and so they reach for a credit card not knowing what else to do and they justify it as "this was for emergencies anyway".

And it only makes things worse.

I don't share your pessimism.

The Achilles Heel of LLMs is that they are trained on human generated content. If that human generated content disappears, then so does the LLMs. People, in general, don't just crave "content", as if the concept is something ephemeral that exists in a vacuum. They crave specific content that meets specific requirements.

Maybe someone will be content watching entertainment, for example, that is completely artificial in every way (AI generated with nothing novel). But have you noticed how fashion, trends and subcultures tend to form around loathing cookie cutter, bland and artificial? Have you heard the term "Corporate Memphis" ? It is a recognized art style that has caught on amongst marketing teams and departments. It has it's advantages but it also has entire groups of people who deride, make fun of and hate it.

Now, even if you then argue that an AI's super power is that it can produce content in any kind of style or aesthetic... it can't do things that are truly novel or original. Of course now we open the door to a philosophical discussion about whether humans can generate *truly* novel content either. But what an AI will always lack is that "human touch." The authenticity. The culturally relevant commentary. The empathy and touching on something that people "feel" is "real." The "human touch" that most everyone, except on tech news sites :P, seems to be craving more of in the social media era.

I realize that part of your thesis is that novel content will continue to be produced by "altruists." To this I offer that the second commercial interests start to sense that their competitive advantage will come through distancing themselves from AI content and embracing branding and messaging that feels authentic and novel and is not artificial .,.. suddenly human artists are going to find themselves in big demand. And then maybe that new content will train new LLMs and we will cycle when the economy does poorly and people embrace LLMs to cut costs again.

And I give that like ... a year at most.

We need to remember that the consumers of content are human beings. And human beings are picky and judgy and finicky and trendy af. And businesses are there to sell shit to those humans.

I don't know.

I'm all for making education as accessible as possible, and something is definitely broken.

But education can never be "free" in an absolute sense. It requires educators & administrators. Someone has to put in the work of creating the curriculum and teaching the students... not to mention acquiring the skills and experience to be able to do so effectively. And if it is a physical school that we're talking about, there are a lot of maintenance costs associated with the property as well.

All of that said, something contributed to tuition costs getting absurdly out of hand, and of a cultural shift towards more and more skepticism regarding the value of a degree and the return on an individual's investment. So tuition prices definitely seem skewed.

In most areas of the economy, the path to low prices is abundance. And I don't think that an education qua education is necessarily expensive. But some specific tuition at specific universities have gotten outlandish.

My question, and I don't pretend to know all the answers, is "why"?

I'm skeptical that free tuition is an answer to any problem. To begin, at best it casts doubt on a university's ability to make common sense financial decisions. At worse it supports the suspicion that their business model is so skewed towards political favours and handouts that they believe that it won't make any difference to their bottom line. Both scenarios spell bad news to me.

Secondly, while I have been focusing on the business side of education, there is an individual element as well. I'm a firm believer that ALL education is independent. You can have the best teachers in the entire world, but if the student doesn't put in the individual effort and hard work to understand and integrate the knowledge being shared, they won't be "educated." It will just be a complete waste of time and money. I'm sure that a good amount of students benefiting from "free of charge" education will put in the work, but you also risk turning universities into the joke that is primary and secondary public education.

I don't have the answers. But my knowledge of economics tells me that if you want maximum quality education at rock bottom prices then the best route is to encourage as much competition in the space as possible. You do that by removing barriers to establishing new schools, and making sure that incentive structures are sane. Instead of trying to restrict the amount of money that can be made in the space, you reward success and punish failure by creating an environment where it is very easy to start a new school, and if you succeed you get to reap all the rewards, but you're also taking all the risks so if you fail you go out of business.

You used an operant word there: "force."

I don't have a problem with people who want to drive less. I don't have a problem with advocating for more bike-friendly and pedestrian friendly cities. I don't even have a problem if vehicles become less prevalent and people choose to use different means of transportation.

But tell someone they can't. Pass a law. Force them to change their lifestyle because you think it's better for x, y and z and now there's a conflict by necessity. It is an act of aggression. You've left someone without choice. They didn't do that. The ones doing the forcing did.

A lot of people use government as the hammer and see every single problem as a nail. We don't need to apply the strong arm of the law to every single "problem." Sometimes, it is nice to get into a car and grab a whole bunch of things in one trip so you don't have to leave the house as much and you can get those chores done faster and more efficiently. That's a valid reason to want to drive a car. We can and should have conversations about environmental impacts, noise pollution and all other problems that vehicles can and do introduce. But the second you try and force people in some way, the conversation is over. That's just the way that force works. It is the opposite of dialogue, diplomacy and consensual interaction.

It often strikes me as odd how often people frame it as some kind of morally superior or preferable way to organize society. I'm personally of the opinion that force should be reserved for retaliation and that we should try to live and let live as much as possible and not use laws and the strong arm of the government to bend people to our way of thinking as long as all relations are consensual. But that's just me.

I remember when the Beeb was still experimenting with various forms of radio streaming. They were one of the first groups to try out OGG Vorbis, and even though they didn't stick with it, their R&D efforts contributed a lot to the development and success of Vorbis overall.

More importantly, I didn't think there would be a day where you wouldn't be able to stream BBC Radio online. Even 25 years later, I still enjoy poking the Radio 1 stream now and then just to see what weird and hip stuff they're running overnight. It's still an insightful look into what's going on nearly half-way around the world.

So that sucks.