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.

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.

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.

It almost entirely comes down to porn preferences. Women tend to prefer pornographic stories while men tend to prefer pornographic images and videos. There’s a reason “romance” novels are one of the absolute largest genres for books and that their demographic skews heavily towards women. I would not at all be surprised to find a certain number of women using LLMs to generate erotic stories possibly featuring acquaintances or celebrities in them. Same impulse, different medium.

Primarily their review system which is hands down the best in the industry, as well as the laundry list of shady practices they’ve banned companies from employing. They’re not perfect by any means but they’re still head and shoulders above the competition. They’re also at least somewhat responsive to the community with them either implementing new policies to protect consumers when major scandals happen and even occasionally being proactive and banning bad practices when companies start talking about implementing them.

As for GOG they’re a bit of a mixed bag recently. They started carrying games with DRM at some point so they’re no longer the DRM free zone they once were, although the majority of their catalog is still DRM free. I believe they do warn you when a game has DRM though. On the plus side though they recently committed to improving their support for Linux which many people will be happy to see.

Multiple companies have tried to become the de facto games store and every last one of them has failed not because Steam uses its dominant position to crush them, but because not a single one of them has been willing to invest in the features, capabilities, and pro consumer policies that Steam has. Every single one of them thought that doing the bare minimum and then throwing cash at ads and publishers would be the path to victory. It wasn’t. Yeah, Steam may be effectively a monopoly, but it’s because nobody else really wants to compete with them at their level. The closest anyone has ever come is GOG.

It’s not a question of how good or bad the LLM is, it’s a question of watt hours and bandwidth. It takes a certain amount of electricity to run so your prices and profit margins are directly correlated with the price of electricity.

LLMs run out of data centers with cheap electricity and cheap bandwidth are going to be the cheapest ones on the market. For electricity this would typically be places with cheap renewables nearby like large hydroelectric plants. Bandwidth is a little trickier as there’s not as obvious an indicator of where bandwidth is cheap and plentiful but typically it’s going to be near major population centers. Putting those together there’s probably only a small handful of locations in the world where it’s economically viable to run these data centers.

Which is of course impossible, so what this bill is really about is stopping people from owning 3D printers.

The biggest problem I have with Kobo isn’t even really something that’s their fault or that they can do anything about. Amazon through their Amazon Unlimited program has locked a bunch of major authors into exclusivity contracts where they’re contractually barred from distributing their ebooks on other platforms. That in turn means a bunch of major authors are just completely unavailable anywhere but Amazon, and of course Amazon ebooks exclusively only work on Kindle devices. It’s a vicious feedback loop where authors refuse to leave Amazon because it’s the market dominator by a large margin and consumers refuse to use anything else because all the authors are only on Amazon.

If you can make do with non-Amazon sources of ebooks it’s great to do so and we really need more people doing exactly that in order to convince authors that the Amazon shackles aren’t worth it, but it’s definitely a struggle sometimes.

Every day we get a little closer to Idiocracy being real.

Nah, it’s just velcro backwards. Or if you’re british hook and loop fasteners but Srenetsafpooldnakooh doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well.

Unfortunately Republicans have spent the better part of a century brainwashing morons into believing that all government is inherently bad and the only things that can be trusted are corporations and billionaires. Somewhere around 30% of the population over here can be reliably counted on to vote in favor of Republicans that run on a campaign of literally destroying the government and allowing corporations to do whatever the hell they want and the morons think that will fix all our problems.

Even more unfortunately our only other viable party the Democrats are by and large bought and paid for by corporate interests so they also tend to do a crap job writing sensible legislation. Generally if they do manage to get something passed without Republicans gutting it there are almost always giant gaping loopholes in it that were inserted by corporate lobbyists to ensure the legislation is either completely toothless or increasingly commonly actually enshrines the destructive policies of the major market leaders.

Or a few big open standards and many competing implementations.

No, he has a point. Linux phones are not an alternative at this point because they aren’t even remotely close to feature parity. It’s like arguing MS Paint is a viable alternative to Photoshop. Currently there are few if any actual alternatives to either iPhones or flagship Android phones. The best you can do at the moment is one of the de-Googled flavors of Android but that only buys you so much and even then you’re losing a fair amount of functionality.

I actually bought a Linux phone a few years ago but the experience then was so terrible it wasn’t much better than a pre-smartphone like an old Nokia. It seems like things have improved a lot since then, but even now it’s not to a standard that a Linux phone is a viable alternative for anyone that needs more than just a web browser and basic calling and texting. Hopefully it will get there soon, but it’s definitely not there yet.

Libredirect, that is all.

Yeah and whoever designed that system needs to be fired. 40 years ago you could maybe call it a reasonable mistake (although it wasn’t really acceptable even back then), but these days anyone storing plaintext passwords anywhere is bordering on criminal negligence. Unless you have a damned good reason passwords should be hashed, but at a minimum at least encrypted with something reasonably secure.

The fines should go towards paying for road repair and upkeep as well as public transit. Better and well maintained roads will cut down on accidents and better public transit would cut down on the number of cars in the road which is a win for everyone.

Technically? No. The problem is that the existing laws legally speaking all apply to the driver, and tickets likewise are all issued to the driver, which doesn’t actually exist in this case. Cops were writing tickets and the company was paying them, but legally speaking it was a grey area and waymo could have disputed the tickets and there’s a decent chance they would have won. This legislation removes the ambiguity.