> "I struggle with fabricating plausible-sounding details under conversational pressure, and I'm not making excuses for it."

LOL It just hit me: Sam Altman's not a real human; he's actually an AI-powered android! That's the only reasonable explanation for him -- Sam didn't create OpenAI; OpenAI created Sam!

That's how it is out here in the west...

What it means is that Google feels that ARM is finally coming to the masses who *don't* know better than to run Chrome.

All of the posts I see nearly universally mourn its loss, most of them condemn the decision, and most of those assign it nefarious motivation. While any of it might be true, and the lack of comment by the agency begs for theories to be invented, I'm surprised that I've seen nobody raise the obvious motivation. I don't see it as much different than the old Encyclopedia Britannica set that I used to go to when I needed information: It's expensive to maintain and few people use it these days.

During the Factbook's heyday, there was no / little WWW, and it was difficult to get current, relevant information on the outside world; much of what you could learn was from, hmmm, an outdated encyclopedia. Nowadays, aside from Wikipedia you have numerous primary & secondary (and lower, sometimes pretending to be P/S...) sources of info on the web, and while it's not always put together in such a nice compact useful format, nor do you know who all of it comes from, the sheer volume of info at our fingertips and its ease of access surely means that fewer and fewer people rely -- or need to rely -- on the CWFB.

Meanwhile, the cost of maintaining that publication has not dropped the same way. Can you put yourself in the position of managing the agency's budget, wanting to spend money on your actual mission, and continuously looking at this ancillary project that consumes a huge chunk of change and provides you little benefit -- that few people even know is there, anymore? The CIA's job isn't to provide the world's citizen's a free collection of info about everyone from its point of view, no more than it's the Census Bureau's job to give every company's marketing dept. detailed demographic info on everybody; those things are just nice side benefits.

Now maybe the CIA can use the money to improve its own internal references, with what *it* cares about, without worrying about what's going to make everyone else happy.

I do realize that there are good reasons to encourage them to keep it alive and healthy, but I also think that there is valid motivation for the CIA to stop paying for it. If any of you want to step up and take the info to start a new World Factbook, I invite you to, and hope you get support from others who see its value. Maybe you'll even get the CIA to contribute an employee or two to influence it.

My wife tells me that in males it lasts forever.

I use T-bird's RSS client for the few sites that I want to keep up on that haven't dropped RSS support.

Years ago I tried it for Slashdot, but found that I much prefer just keeping the front page open with messages selected by date; when I finish one day, I change the URL to the next day, usually staying a day or two behind (so nobody reads replies like this one because everyone else has moved on!)

Maybe the same monitoring equipment can send a "Help, I'm being cut!" alert with "Here's where the ship is" instead of waiting for until everything's been down for a while and then having someone put a TDR on the end to estimate where the fault is.

I switched from primarily ordering Okidata LEDs to Brother LASERs something over 25 years ago (sold my last used Oki in 2000) and have been pretty happy with them ever since. I've found them to be a good value in print volumes ranging from 5-5000 pages/month.

Unlike ink, toner ages well; you don't have to throw it out because you didn't print enough and it dried out. Supplies for Brother printers are cheap, esp. now that there's a ton of generics. I've been buying toner at 4/$35 or kits with a drum+3 toners for $50.

In my own office, I've been using my current DCP-L2540DW PSC as my main printer since Nov 2014, have printed 34k pages, and my consumables cost/pg has stayed around $.002-.004 while my TCO is now below $.007 (I only paid $85 for it.)

Linux support for Brother is above-average. I've never found a laser printer that didn't work w/ generic drivers I had available, with at least close to full functionality with Brother-provided drivers. Let's not talk about their ink jet & thermal printers, though. :-(

I've used two of their color lasers, and while I don't like them as much as their mainstream B&Ws, they still compare similarly to other brands as the B&Ws (i.e. lower cost, easy to get supplies for, better Linux support).

From what I've seen, most support both PS & PCL. I don't know what compatibility is like; only once or twice have I needed it and it was for really basic stuff.

> I don't think he's replacing his HP Officejet Pro with a 3D printer.

At least then, layer upon layer of dried color would be a feature instead of a defect! :-)

Great! Here I was looking forward to rocking in a chair spewing mindless garbage, and AI has taken that over from me. :-)

It doesn't matter if Google's distribution is random or not if the sampling's random and is being taken from the entire space; this is true no matter how ordered or random Google's distribution is. If 1% of the space is filled, then a random sample of the space will uncover that, whatever the videos are. Likewise, once you hit a video that was randomly picked from the entire space, its characteristics compared to other videos are still that of a random pick, no matter how Google may have arranged them.

Agreed. These days, YouTube sometimes shuts me down for a while (access denied errors) after using yt-dlp to grab 4-5 streams in a row from the same IP address -- And they don't nail you for a ton of "this video isn't available anymore" errors?

Ignoring the poll question, but addressing the topic that prompted the question...

Car manufacturers dropped AM because it was clearly interfered with by the vehicle electronics and they didn't want customers complaining about it.

Do note that though FM is more resistant to it, FM reception *is* degraded by the noise (just not as much) but it's not as *obvious* to the listener; they just chalk it up to weak reception. Same thing happened w/ the DTV transition; w/ analog, it was clear when a neighbor was interfering with you; with DTV people know their reception is flaky, but they have no idea why, and just chalk it up to weak signal.

As a ham radio operator, one part of me would like to see broadcast AM mandated, because holding vehicle manufacturers to a higher standard of interference suppression would be good for the RF ecosystem overall -- just just on my sensitive ham bands, but for cell phones and everything else.

However, I'm against useless legislation, and my fear is that saying "You must put an AM broadcast receiver in your car" isn't going to achieve anything useful. Now that they're only putting it in because the law demands it -- not because most of their customers are listening to it -- if the law doesn't say they have to put a *good*, *useful* receiver in there, then if reception is trash due to the local RFI they just shrug and say "Well, that's why we didn't want to put it in!" and nothing was accomplished.

As the summary [badly] stated, in May they made it free for PERSONAL use. Now they dropped the commericial subscriptions altogether (bet they didn't get many takers) and made it free for everyone.