No, OS X aggressively resists customization or convenience. There’s the Apple way to do pretty much everything and the painful way which is anything but the Apple way. Windows is anti-consumer because they want to harvest your data and cram ads down your throat. OS X just doesn’t care what you want or what you would prefer and will actively punish you if you attempt to deviate from the way it thinks you should be doing things. If something doesn’t work the way you want tough, OS X makes you adapt to it rather than trying to adapt to you.

The correct industry term is white label products.

Since Reagan it has been one of the Republican pillars that businesses should have no regulations, taxes, or standards of any kind. They will of course break from that position when they see an opportunity to screw over a minority or attack a business they don’t like for some reason, but otherwise yes ask your average Republican if some business regulation (or regulatory agency) should be repealed and they almost always say yes.

The biggest surprise at the moment is actually that many of the voters are turning against the data centers, although I suspect the majority of them would still oppose any kind of regulatory attempt to block them.

That’s because it is. Every time this comes up it turns out they prompted it to act out a scenario. LLMs don’t do anything on their own, all they do is respond to the prompts they’re given.

I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.

…

So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?

Can you see how these two statements are not the same thing? The former is not something anyone had said until you did so while the latter is what the entire rest of this conversation has been about until you tried to pivot to the former.

Indirectly yes a customer absolutely has a say in what an employee spends money on if they are aware of it because it’s the customer’s money that’s indirectly paying for the thing. An employee is a part of a business and when an employee engages in some activity even on their own time if people are aware they work for that company, then that reflects on the company and vice versa. That’s one of the reasons companies have very strict rules about representing yourself as an employee or agent of the company.

Furthermore the higher an employee’s position in a company the stronger their actions reflect on the company. For someone like a co-founder, practically the highest position in a company, those actions reflect very strongly on the company. The only actions that reflect stronger are ones done directly by the company itself.

This is why HR departments exist, they protect the business from the actions of its employees (or at least attempt to).

No. I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.

That’s not what you said though. I don’t think anyone is arguing that employees of a company are obligated to disclose their spending habits, that would just be ludicrous. However, if that information was available or if the company itself made donations/purchases it’s perfectly reasonable as a customer to decide not to support that kind of behavior by continuing to do business with that company.

Just as one example Chick-fil-A is rather famously anti-lgbtq and regularly donates part of their profits to anti-lgbtq organizations. As a consumer it’s entirely reasonable and moral to refuse to do business with them in order to reduce the money being funnelled to morally repugnant organizations.

Calling him Thomas Edison is giving him far too much credit. Edison may have been a self aggrandizing asshole, but he also did have a few accomplishments to his name. Musk is a glorified venture capitalist, only instead of just taking a chunk of the profits he buys the whole company so he can steal credit for the company’s achievements. Elon Musk has never created a single thing in his life. He has in fact been a net negative as every company he has ever been involved with would have been better off without Musk’s “help”.

The problem is it has become a catch 22. Some places in the US have tried to do the right thing, increased wages to livable levels and told customers not to tip, but everyone who has tried it ultimately gets forced to undo it. The customers end up hating it because a) prices are higher on paper and b) a lot of them get off on having the power to fuck with the workers income by refusing to tip and you’re taking that away from them. The customers then end up going to other restaurants that still do tipping. Additionally some of the staff hate it as well because they feel like they’re making less money due to the odd tipping whale pushing their average salary up (this is highly variable but they’ll tend to remember that one table that tipped $1000 a lot more than all the ones that only gave them $15).

I honestly think the only way you’re going to be able to eliminate tipping in the US is if it was outlawed at the federal level. Any action by individual restaurants just ends up getting punished by the market and forcing them back in line.

You and everyone else that’s using Firefox. It’s one of the dumbest “features” that’s ever been added to Firefox and that’s quite an accomplishment considering the long history of adding stupid features nobody asked for.

and why old all platforms need consistent server-side validation across APIs, account services, and databases

FTFY.

Regular search engines have feedback mechanisms that limit how effective that is. The click through and bounce rate are used to adjust rankings and as more and more people look at the fake info and then ignore it it will naturally fall out of the top results and get buried. LLMs though don’t have that feedback, once something is ingested and baked into the model it’s there forever. The fake info doesn’t need to look believable enough to fool a human, just self consistent enough to fool an LLM with its tiny context window.

I’ve seen it proposed that cops should have to start carrying essentially malpractice insurance that they pay for out of their own pocket and that would cover payouts in the event that they get sued. This would have the added advantage that all those “bad apples” that somehow always seem to end up transferred to new precincts instead of fired and banned for life wouldn’t be able to get anyone to insure them effectively banning them.

Spam was never done with “burner phones” in the first place, it’s mostly done via VoIP through shady telecoms companies that can’t be bothered to validate their customers. Due to the age of the phone system it’s incredibly easy to spoof phone numbers because it’s essentially a trust system. Phone exchange A talks to exchange B and says phone number 123 is calling number 456. How does exchange B know that it’s actually 123 calling? They don’t at all, they just trust that exchange A is telling the truth. It’s really hard to get into the system, but once you’re there you essentially have unlimited power with virtually no safeguards in place.

Basically from a security perspective the phone system looks a lot like the 1980s internet, there is technically some security in place, but significantly less than there actually should be.

That’s how you know it’s probably a good idea.

Personally I’d go a step further and regulate algorithmic feeds in general. It’s pretty clear at this point that feeding people a steady drip of content picked to maximize “engagement” above all else has done incalculable damage.

I game almost every single day, and haven’t booted Windows in years. In the last 3 years I haven’t actually had any game I wanted to play not be able to run in Linux. I’ve had one that crashed non-stop, but judging by the thousands of complaints from Windows users about the same thing that wasn’t a Linux problem.

So yeah, gaming is no excuse, you can game just fine under Linux as long as the devs don’t intentionally block Linux like what happened with Destiny 2 (which Bungie just summarily executed so they can dump more cash into the trash fire that is Marathon, RIP Bungie I await the bankruptcy announcement).

Doesn’t even need that, the physics of it just doesn’t work. There’s basically no way to cool it and no way to power it. Anyone who thinks a space data center is a good idea has failed high school level physics.

Will it though? I could easily see Trump just writing off the deaths of any service members as a favor to his best buddy Putin or even ordering them to help Russia with the invasion. Best case scenario he just has the entire base stand down and sit on their asses while Russia does what it wants. He’s already indicated he doesn’t give a single flying fuck about NATO, and it’s not like he’s ever let little things like laws or treaties stop him before.

That said his instincts (or rather prejudices) align most closely to the Republicans, mostly due to the Republicans spending every year since Nixon more closely aligning themselves with racists and Christian nationalists (aka Nazis).

Except for the slight problem that those 5 AI agents cost the same as 3 people so you could have skipped the agents, just hired 3 people and gotten 400% output instead of 120%. Yeah it takes longer to scale up and down, but exactly how volatile is your industry that demand is fluctuating that much month to month?

The crux of the case is whether Valve is applying that rule to non-Steam keys or not. Lawsuit says they are, Valve says they aren’t. If Valve is telling the truth, they’ve done nothing wrong. If Valve is lying however that is an anticompetitive practice that should be punished. We won’t really know until the trial concludes though.

Personally I think the most likely answer is that some junior support people at Valve misunderstood the policy and told some people the wrong thing. There’s a decent chance that when those accusations first surfaced a decade or so ago (yes this has been a thing for that long) Valve probably sent some internal memos to clarify what the rule actually covers and what it doesn’t and hopefully that was that.