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How about this, then: It fills a niche, but it is full of bad decisions (and fragmentation), and survives mainly by its existing momentum. It's crap in the same sense that Unix is crap: the founder effect has made its flaws impossible to dislodge or rethink.

A popular solution to a problem is not necessarily a good solution to that problem.

If you send data to a remote service... regardless of the guarantees given... you have to assume that that remote service had, processed and most likely stored your data in some fashion.

Literally things like the data protection acts and GDPR just assume this to be the case. If you gave data to a third party - that data is still your responsibility. If they have the potential to access it, you have to assume that they are/could be accessing it. If you give them permission to process it, they are required to process it in accordance with the law, which includes giving things up to legal requests.

Why anyone would EVER think that the data they lob or the chat they have with an AI bot, of all things, would remain anonymous, private, confidential and NEVER be presented in court? I can't even begin to fathom.

Now factor in that if you've been using AI and it processes your data in a foreign country - you could well be screwed from a data protection viewpoint.

People are discovering that laws established long prior to the invention of this particular round of AI apply regardless of what AI companies think or tell you. Same for Whatsapp's push that "even they don't know what you said" on Whatsapp... it's absolute nonsense. If a court requires them to intercept communications and produce records and not inform you or arouse your suspicion - in jurisdictions around the world - that's what Whatsapp has to do. As does any other service.

I don't understand why anyone with a brain would ever think any different.

I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.

Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.

My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.

There's nothing much to doubt. The evidence is always the same: "our web server logs show scrapers originating from IP addresses owned by someone who didn't pay us."

The Verge article is a little clearer. 100,000 threads pilfered over the past year with scraping! Oh no!

(See also: the actual legal filing. I have to admit the headings sound a little unstable.)

I think it's pretty similar in Canada, although I can't speak to the comparative levels of complexity. One reason is that, like the U.S., many powers are held by the federal government, while others are exclusive to the various provincial governments. A notable example is the provinces' ability to levy taxes in addition to federal ones. There may also be other provincial records that the federal government does not have direct access to, such as marriage records.

So it "dissolves"... into what? Last I heard, microplastics in our water (and later, our food) are raising ever more concerns about human health.

This is common in all English (he says, as a Brit).

It's called a five-speed gearbox. But you often apply that to the whole car.

Don't just trust me. Jeremy Clarkson (famed UK "car-expert") and team say it all the time on Top Gear if you want to go look.

"If you're cooking lamb, make sure it's 5-speed, preferably 6-speed"

So where's your offline airgapped backup?

And I mean... it's being developed via git, right? So you have all your local copies of all your repos including full history. So you haven't lost ANY code, right?

The AWS data that's critical to the operation of the app would obviously be being backed up elsewhere occasionally, right?

There's a reason that I buy my parents tech to occupy them and make them think and encourage them to do things.

They've basically never read a book. But they love puzzles. They hate tech, but love casual video games (anything more complex is too much for them as they can't strategise, plan, learn, etc.).

I don't want to be dealing with their dementia, and the best way to do that is to keep their minds active.

It's to do with screen time too.

Keeping your mind busy is important to prevent dementia.

Dumbly starting at a TV screen for 8 hours every night and letting it wash over you is awful for your brain (and your opinions!).

But if you're actively doing something, researching, clicking around, seeking out specific content, etc. then it turns from just consuming media to interacting with it.

If you're switching to a game, watching a video, reading an article, going down a link-clicking rabbit-hole, shopping, browsing, talking to friends, multitasking and doing all that for a long (collective) time, then the interaction is actually positive for your mental cognivity.

Sure, you can go too far and just watching YouTube is the same as just watching TV, but I would strongly suggest that being able to have international, 24 hour social interactions, lessons, entertainment, and reading material right there, all the time - that's likely to show benefits not present in generations that eschew such things.

Everything in moderation, obviously, but my life is lived out through my phone and laptop, and I'm always using it to learn all the time.

And I don't have a TV and if I do watch TV/movies, it's literally turn it on, watch exactly what I intended to (no ads) and then turn it off and go do something else.

Part of this is, undoubtedly, a generation like my parents rotting away watching 24 hours news channels, contrived soap operas and the like, who detest technology and can barely answer a text, versus a generation that are messaging each other from bed even in different countries to discuss the gossip / topics of the day that they learned about online, and delving into whatever part of that interests them in an independent manner, and interacting with people with disparate social backgrounds, languages, opinions, politics, etc.

We talk about echo chambers and walled gardens.... and it's the older generations that have confined themselves to those, mostly.

Hint to Microsoft:

The more you insist that Edge is better and that I must use it, even interfering in searches for Chrome on a fresh Windows machine telling me and other users that I "don't need it"... the more I will use any non-Edge browser purely out of spite forever, and deploy, by default, a non-Edge browser for every one of the thousands of users I deal with, including encoding that into our policies.

Windows already has / had EU versions without IE etc. (N?), versions especially for Korea with crippled encryption (K?) etc.

Ironically N was because they were legally required to after a lawsuit about the browser-choice function, and the IE bundled with Windows, and they were forced to offer it.

It seems 20+ years later we're doing the same damn thing again and they've been getting away with it because it's *technically* not immediately illegal for them to just badger the hell out of the user until most ordinary people go "Fine, whatever, I'm sick of clicking the same dialog and redoing the defaults every time".

As it is, many Microsoft Admin functions still only work in Edge (e.g. downloading email reports from Exchange Online, etc.).

Just you wait—they're way more over-represented they are in subreddit moderators... and in the accelerationist movement.

"Actually" read them? Are there a lot of people running around purporting to have read TSR novels, or to have credentials that require doing so?