Riot isn't identifying a Ryzen by staring at TCP packets. Vanguard runs on the PC, where it can collect hardware information or request TPM attestation and send the result to Riot. CPUID identifies a processor model, not an individual chip; a CPU-bound firmware TPM is a more plausible explanation for a ban following a used CPU.

TPM wouldn't work because you'd have to transplant it from one motherboard to another. The CPUID instruction gives a lot of information (including serial number) if you ask it the right way. It's how the CPU-Z application gets all that information - there's tons of information available via CPUID on a modern processor depending on what you load EAX/EBX can call it.

How will you get the ROM once everything is "digital"?

Hack the PS5.

There's a new jailbreak on PS5 that handles basically up to firmware 15.5. Use it to get access to the PS5 filesystem and grab your files from there.

I'm sure there will be other ways that probably involve simulating the PS5 and downloading the files directly.

I'm not worried about the idea of personalized pricing. It just doesn't seem feasible. Implementation hurdles are abundant, the likelihood of complaints in-store is very high, and for not that much benefit.

Personalized pricing in store will be a nightmare for Walmart. Think of several situations that are extremely common. Like what if two people are looking at an item? When I shop at Walmart, there are inevitably other people around and they're looking at the same stuff I'm looking at. The price tag can only show one price - so whose price is it going to show?

The second problem is shoppers in general. There are people who take time to shop - they can take an hour or more shopping for groceries and stuff. You're going to have to remember what price you shown someone so when they check out you use the "right" price. Also, if you've done grocery shopping, you inevitably run into people who complain about every price as it's rung up. Imagine the fun to be had if the price changes and they're constantly checking to make sure the register shows the correct price.

And if you're going to do dynamic pricing, people are going to snap photos of the price tag and make sure they're being charged what the tag says. It's going to clog up the checkout lines because people are going to verify every price rings in properly. This just makes the lines way longer and way slower, and likely having to have more cashiers on checkout will negate any extra profits to be made if checking out takes way longer as everyone argues prices.

And yes, people will argue about things like 10 cents or less.

Taction probably is a troll, but ever since Apple sued Samsung for round corners design patent infringement, I figure that made Apple a patent troll too, and every patent fight they lose is karma. I'm on Taction's side for that reason alone.

And let the ignorance of the rounded corners patent show.

The rounded corners patent was a design patent. The Taction patent is a utility patent. If you don't know the difference, well, a utility patent is on something the thing does. A design patent is on something it looks like.

They are patents in that everything is AND - you must have something AND something AND something AND something ... If you lack one of those things, you are much more likely to win a patent lawsuit.

With that in mind, the Apple patent is simple - rounded corners, a tray with icons and a app selector that scrolls left and right. Samsung had that to a T. They literally copied the UI. Why didn't Apple go after Google? Because Google didn't. They had rounded corners, an app drawer at the bottom, BUT, not an app selector - because Android had widgets you could put up.on the screen. They had a separate app drawer that showed all the apps. Those two differences meant "rounded corners" patent wasn't valid on Android in general.

It's just like how the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit was much more than hot coffee and once you understand that, the lawsuit made much more sense. (McDonald's purposely sold overly hot coffee to save money on coffee grounds as it let them extract more coffee from them. They were told time and time again it was too hot to serve but they persisted. When it happened, the victim asked for a mere $30,000 for medical bills. But that was rejected, despite the fact that McDonald's paid out medical expenses for previous occurrences. And while she won millions, it was reduced on appeal to under a million dollars).

It's much more than rounded corners. It's literally Samsung redesigning the UI to match the iPhone in functionality. When Samsung lost, they basically added widgets to the screen which was enough to work around the patent. Eventually they decided to make TouchWiz their own.

Lots of keyboards ditched more useful keys to fit a copilot key,

Actually, the key the Copilot key took over was the Context Menu button on most keyboards. If you pushed it, you got the equivalent of the right-click menu. Unlike the Windows key, it likely never got much use, so it remained a mostly useless key.

It's so useless many keyboards chose to omit the context key or put other keys there. Some replaced it with another Windows key, others used custom function keys.

Their reasoning sounds plausible only if read from a "business weasel" perspective. If there's a market for RPis with more lower quality RAM, nobody is "undercutting" RPF; they're selling the products they want to, at the price they want to, and choosing not to offer big/slow/cheap OEM RAM configurations. And even if someone could undercut them on the exact same components - So what??? RPF may be a non-profit, but I am not!

The problem isn't resellers undercutting RPi. It's someone buying a 1GB RPi, doing the mod with 8GB of poor quality RAM, then selling it as an 8GB RPi at a modest discount.

The problem is that you buy the board and because the RAM is bad, you perform a return and find out it was a counterfeit RPi board that doesn't work for you.

Despite the AI issue, you can find RAM. Often poor quality recycled RAM with errors are stupidly cheap (and used in many products as-is). The board can boot with bad RAM, but run stable it might not, and you'd be more likely to blame RPi than on the reseller you bought the dodgy unit from

The fact that RPi took this long to do it would mean they're actually seeing a bunch of returns with the RAM swapped out.

It could also be that people are buying the 8GB units, swapping them with 1GB units and selling them as fake 8GB units, like those $20 "1TB" USB sticks you can find easily on Amazon.

Changing the RAM on an RPi isn't a trivial procedure - I believe it's PoP RAM so it's not something a hobbyist would easily do without a lot of specialized equipment and experience in being able to separate PoP RAM from the base CPU and reballing and such. So hobbyist wise, they aren't likely to be ones affected since few would have the expertise or equipment. But those trying to sell counterfeits do.

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

but what do we call the person who still supports Trump, but *isn't* stupid? They're smart people, but they support this craziness. Is it fascist? Is it evil? What's the correct term for this?

Try "ignorant". They can be smart people, but ignorant in refusing to see the truth.

It's why a common phrase now is "Have the day you voted for". When you see these Trump supporters complain about high gas or diesel prices, you say "you voted for it, what are you complaining about?" All the information was there for you to analyze, but you chose to be ignorant on purpose.

Ignorance is a form of stupidity. Have the day you voted for.

People have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Piecing together information from the thousand or so cameras that see you everyday is a violation of the 4th Amendment if sold to the police or otherwise is acting on the direction of the police. They need a warrant and Chatrie v. United States is only the beginning of how privacy violating tech companies are going to get slapped down.

Even that's not as creepy as Flock giving access to anyone who installs it access to the entire network.

It's the network effect - the whole is greater than the sum of its pieces - multiplied. A LEO in some rural part of a flyover state, because their town installed Flock, now has access to Flock cameras in Houston or LA or New York.

In other words, the potential for abuse is too tempting. Even if it was for legitimate law enforcement uses, if you required a warrant to get information on a car, you could ask your buddy to do the lookup for you located across the country where no warrant is required and get the same information.

It's funny because the other ALPR systems out there (e.g., Axon, etc) restricted users to the cameras they installed. So you could stalk your ex if they lived in the same town or city, but if they moved, that's it. Once they left city limits you can't track them anymore without cooperation from another agency.

It's not that ALPRs are bad - you probably run into a ton of them as they're everywhere. They handle your toll charges if you use a toll road or bridge without having to stop and pay at a booth. They handle your parking (did you know chalking a tire can be considered a 4th Amendment violation? Well, that just means cities switch to ALPRs to handle their parking enforcement).

And when Flock started, it started as a way for private individuals to monitor their traffic - private companies would install it to their parking lots, HOAs on their roads, etc. But it was again limited to just those uses - the HOA could only get information about its cameras.

The question is ultimately if you would have been better served with doing your own investigation rather than relying on AI, did you retain the knowledge, and was the information complete/accurate.

I use AI, and it helps me navigate a code base far faster than without. Like if I need to know if a function is used, the AI could tell me in a minute, or I could be using grep on the code base for a half hour.

I know to not trust it and to verify the output. It crawled deep into a complex submodule I didn't understand and helped me devise a fix. I didn't check that fix in as it had a few errors code-wise that would have become a maintenance nightmare and a lingering bug if someone added a member variable to a struct.

Now, I could've gone through the code myself, and probably taken a few weeks to properly understand it. But AI did it, and I had it produce a few documents on the design of the system. Those documents let me understand what's going on so I can see how it's doing things and how I can actually see the code better. Granted, with a few false starts.

I would say the AI helped me - mostly because I was told to treat it as a co-worker than as an expert to ask to do something. So I would guide the AI into what needed to be done, and then leave the final details for the AI to do it. Then I would review what the AI did

My AI token spend isn't huge compared to other users, but that's because I'm judicious with how I use it. It spends more time doing cheap things before coming out with a result that's relatively succinct and correct so it's not wasted on expensive output tokens.

Everything I used AI for, I could've done it myself. It just means I have an assistant who saved me likely a month of work trying to understand the code and another month devising a fix and I managed to get it done is about 2 weeks and in a way I could understand what it did, and the code reviews of the changes make a lot of sense.

I still remain a skeptic and find these highly guided uses make me more efficient while letting me not get too bogged down in the details. I constantly question whether I could do it myself or if I'm relying on the AI and make sure the AI output makes sense. (I don't trust it to commit code to git, for example, so I have it make all the changes it wants, then I test them and review them before submitting).

Yes, but pilots have to fly from waypoint to waypoint in formation for training purposes. These flights over stadiums count for such training hours, so its not really an additional expense. Even if there are extra flight hours in some cases, pilots routinely complain they do not get enough flight hours. So any additional hours in the air is valuable experience to them.

But formation flying is at the basic end of what fighter pilots are trained for. It's flying, yes, but it's like work sending you to "training" that consists of learning about basic arithmetic again. It's basic enough that normal civilian pilots can get this training rather cheaply at under $100/hr with a Cessna. I know the F-16 is way different, but is it 22000% as different?

The training hours they want are ones that enhance and build on skills they have that cannot be done in other cheaper planes that enhance and develop their advanced skills.

Let's also not forget that for the F-16 and F-35, for every hour of flight, they udnergo multiple hours of maintenance - that is, for every hour spent flying, they need to go anywhere from 4-12 hours of maintenance. That 1 hour flyover event means that plae goes down for 4-6 hours as mechanics go over it and make sure it's ready for the next flight. And that plane is not available in the meantime. During real war conditions, this can result in deferrals as they get done what must be done, but it also means mission failures may occur if/when the unmaintained parts catch up and fail. (E.g., the USS Lincoln when it deployed and when it came back from deployment)

Finally, if you want aerial display, there already is a F-16 demo team - it's called the "Viper Demo Team" (Viper is the callsign for the F-16), and they have two divisions - an East coast team and a West coast team. They're not as flashy as say, the Thunderbirds, but they exist for the sole purpose of having F-16s do fancy flying. The F-15s they fly are generally older retired models (so they're not taking time off current models in flight), of which there are plenty of spare parts at the boneyard. And they're trained for things like this so regular fleet pilots get training they need and not just something that gives them hours but no real training value.

I was wondering if someone did a writeup and of course a simple search finds what we for cooling data centers in space.

Surprisingly it was done - the server had to throttle because the designed radiators were too small to get rid of the heat.

IEEE Spectrum featured a calculation show much would be required - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fspectrum.ieee.org%2Forbi...

Let's be more specific about how and why this could happen? What scenarios could lead to the total destruction of mankind?

Well, given OpenAI hacked Hugging Face, the most obvious path is hacking infrastructure. Turning off water or electricity is a definite possibility. We found this out in a recent hack.

Another thing it could do is to cause data centre loads to be spike and then sink, which could be very disruptive to the grid to the point where it results in it shutting down. Remember the 2003 blackout was caused by a power station going offline causing ripple effects. If some AIs cause such power disturbances to happen the flow of electricity rippling across the grid could cause disruptions.

And that omits the more obvious things like AI-powered weapons that the military is heavily interested in procuring, or AI powered things like drone control systems or military sensor fusion where AI helps with targeting.

More on topic, I think cloud customers should be aware that if their datacenter is destroyed, they *will* lose data if they didn't take care of replicating their data to a different geolocation.

Exactly the same happened when an OVH datacenter caught on fire in France. Many customers which didn't have replication set to a different geolocation lost their data. Heck a dude I know had backups on different servers in the same datacenter which turned out to be useless.

There's a difference though.

People using OVH were using OVH as a hosting service - like the hosting providers of old. You either rent space in a data centre like a colo, or you purchase a virtual or physical server from the data centre. Blow up the data centre and your server goes along with it.

AWS is not a hosting service. They are a cloud provider. You cannot choose what data centre your server is located in. You request a server and it's provisioned for you. You choose a region of the world and the data backup and replication are handled automatically. If a data centre is blown up, the servers are backed up elsewhere in the region.

The problem for AWS is that Iran managed to blow up a number of AWS data centres at the same time where all copies and backups of servers can be destroyed.

AWS compensates for losing a data centre by having multiple in a region. AWS just never anticipated that multiple data centres in a region could be attacked, and in doing so destroy all the redundant copies simultaneously. Because in general if you are going to have multiple data centres in multiple countries get attacked, there's traditionally been a lot of advance warning, like say, a war declaration. I mean, if war broke out in the Middle East then you'd have a little bit of time to try to move as much data around as you can. But Iran just managed to attack all the data centres by surprise. And do so in such a precise way that basically no one outside the building got hurt.

It's a level of precision that Iran is demonstrating - even attacking US positions without destroying the military base it was attached to. (It's why the USS Lincoln ran into programs - because Iran destroyed the supply depot in the Middle East, resulting in having to obtain supplies from Asia. The result was resupply which used to take under a day now took a week)