There are specific protections allowed when the goal is to maintain / break compatibility. If Microsoft locks competitors out, competitors are quite often permitted to pick the lock.

I can't comment on this situation since I don't know the details, but it's very likely this is fully legal.

See Oracle / Java API lawsuit, garage door opener suit, etc. To see where the lines sit.

However, I've seen both credible and less than credible allegations even against him.

I have no idea about this specific one, but we live in a disinformation sphere on just about everything these days....

That benefits no one, except for the employee.

It's impractical to check everything, do I tend to do deep dives spot checking a small number of things.

For readers, I'd suggest the same thing here. Disregard claims on the Internet, or even court rulings, and just look at primary evidence. Pick a small number of issues.

I make this statement generically, without prejudice to the outcome here.

I think the people in DOGE have the skills and access to address it.

I have no evidence that they are doing so, and some evidence of widespread loyalty tests which, while not identical, remind me of how Stalin came to power.

However, absence if evidence is not evidence of absence, and some evidence is not the same as proof.

I have dozens of explanations which fit the facts, and I don't have any way to determine which, if any, is correct.

The tendency to reaffirm popular beliefs would make current LLMs almost useless for actual historical work, which often involves sifting fact from fiction.

It depends on your goals.

However, in a great power conflict, they're much less productive than tanks, drones, fighter jets, and guns.

Conversely, money thrown into weapons can't be used for quality-of-life improvements.

Neither of these is "good" or "bad" per se.

Some industries are hybrid. A ship yard is dual purpose.

If two hypothetical countries are playing this game, and one exports movies to buy ships and vice versa, when war breaks out, one country might be stuck without movies and the other without ships.

1. I'd need to be wacko enough to want to harm you

2. I'd need to be sane enough for a major engineering project

3. I'd need to be competent enough to succeed without hurting myself

The set of individuals with all the traits required is small. It's not zero -- we had Ted Kazinsky -- but very small. Most major crimes are also never solved, and many more people can just take a gun and shoot someone. That's probably even harder to track down since a lot more people have guns than labs and PhDs. Esoteric technologies make for easy investigations.

So in the end, I think state actors have these. They also make good plot lines for a novel or video game (I have about a dozen I came up with in the context of a half-baked creative project).

But for real life individuals, I don't see how they'd become prolific. We'll probably see a crazy someday, but nowhere close to gun homicides. They just don't make much practical sense for an individual.

Ukraine is more constrained by weapon supplies, especially drones and artillery, than by manpower.

I'm not sure both sides are playing the same game. In the game I think might be afoot, if your economy is management consultants, therapists, and hair stylists, that's "bad" GDP. Resources and manufacturing are "good" GDP. Resources are complex in that stone are renewable, and some go away when you export them.

I'm not even going to talk about education or, related, R&D capacity.

Next major step up is 48GB and then hundreds of GB. But a lot of ML models target 16-24gb since that's in the grad student price range.

Tha kind of flexibility is the point of a jury. Laws aren't purely mechanical in most countries, for good reason. There's a lot of complexity and nuance, especially when some people have political power.

I don't have enough background here to make a judgement about what a jury should do, but I do have enough background to know that things like jury nullification are important to a well-functioning justice system.

This is even more true in zoning. There are much better ways to build homes possible, but not when a regulation is phrased in terms of distance between wooden stuffs, rather than safety and durability.

Economies of scale continue to mean that entrenched technologies get used.

Pilot licensing is especially onerous, where control systems allow flight to be a lot simpler, and a lot of very hard-to-fly technologies (like autogyros) can't be brought to mass scale not due to technology but simply due to regulation.

"Is it legal" is very different from "Can they."

By "local," I mean municipal and below. I didn't mean "federal elections conducted in my locality." Election security kicks for state, federal, and some municipal elections.

Others are intentionally fraudulent (e.g. local corruption) or unintentionally broken (e.g. using Google Forms for a school-level public body, where people not legally qualified to vote might still do it, unaware they're committing a felony).

And "public body" has a specific meaning under my state law which extends the same laws as e.g. cutting for my state senate. That's bodies like local school boards, but not random school clubs.

That's the level where we have massive illegal voting where I live.

We lost commercial ship yards, and or navy is on a long, slow march to obsolescence. That's messy decades it -- we have a huge lead -- but it's the path we're on.

I don't know the solution here.

Technology is where autonomous flying cars, for example, are mostly constrained by regulatory and major capital.

Less ambitious would be things like sleeper planes for long haul red-eyes.

General aviation is a smaller industry, but also ripe for distribution by someone with capital and regulatory connections. It's stuck in 1970-era technology.

I can name dozen of other things Boeing could pull off, if lead by someone like Jobs -- someone with both vision and the ability to execute.

I think a bankruptcy restructuring would do a world of good for Boeing, the sooner the better. The longer it keeps in this state, the further behind it gets.

Plenty of kids jam together in a garage, have awesome memories from the school band, or otherwise. Great memories are formed. Or sitting around a camp fire playing a harmonica or a guitar.

If you're learning "instead of" rather than "as a means to," well, there's your problem.