banner, as the grandparent of figlet and cowsay

lolcat, for colourising their output

pig (from bsd-games), for producing pig latin

dadadodo, jwz's Markov chain nonsense generator from the late 90s that seems eerily prescient in the light of today's LLMs

dissociated-press, a simpler version of dadadodo dating back to the dawn of Emacs

Some people have the TV on every waking minute of the day, no matter what else they're doing. Some listen to music or podcasts in the same way. Others scroll through social media whilst eating or walking or even during conversations with other people.

It's not a new thing, either - constant background TV was definitely a thing at my grandparents' house when I was a child in the 1980s. Personally, I find the idea horrifying but I accept that I'm a bit of an outlier!

They lived in fear of something slipping through the net. So print servers were switched off because they contained an embedded Oracle JRE. And deployment pipelines that used Hashicorp's Packer had to be rewritten to eliminate the VirtualBox plugin (despite it not being used). Office coffee machines were looked at with suspicion.

Every vendor had to be queried, every piece of software had to be tested and have appropriate controls put in place. There were pre-emptive audits and endless compliance procedures.

There was so much work involved that any cost savings must have been fairly minimal.

As you say, the industrially-produced sliced white 800g loaf has fallen out of fashion in the UK, and only 20% of us will buy one in any given month. The market is consolidating as a result, with two of the three main providers (ABF and Hovis) in the process of merging.

The only exceptions are when the judge imposes reporting restrictions or anonymisation (unlikely in a non-criminal case as it's meant to protect the identities of complainants or sensitive witnesses) or for ex parte actions (which are very limited, eg. to cover an emergency injunction to prevent imminent destruction of evidence).

Typically you're looking at a year or two of discovery, audits and planning, another year or two to cover the main transition, and then up to five years of mopping up.

There are other near-ubiquitous vendors (eg. Microsoft and Cisco) who manage to be tolerated as annoying rather than outright abusive. I guess they take a slightly different view of how hard to squeeze their customers.

It's the operators who are responsible, and it's the operators who have the tools and resources available to reduce or mitigate those harms. So it is clearly they who should have taken action.

But they haven't, and so here we are.

He's not thick, he's (at best) reckless.

If found guilty at trial, they'd be looking at a prison sentence as the abuse of position aspect would automatically mean high culpability. Expected starting point would be 4 years if an innocent person has been charged or convicted on the basis of the false evidence (which is implied by the report). Perhaps 6-7 years if multiple people have been. Very unlikely they'd ever be able to work in policing or related fields again.

With the benefit of hindsight, you can certainly argue that the pause wasn't long enough or that the mitigations weren't sufficient. But that wasn't a view held by many at the time - indeed, it was mocked as a marketing ploy (and still is; see gp's post as evidence).

The tech giants have been spared regulation and oversight, in a way that has allowed them to cement their position at the top. Not only does this enable the sort of egregious abuses we've had to become used to, it also stifles innovation and competition - to the detriment of everyone, including their own shareholders.

The USA risks trapping itself in a spiral of oligarchy, reminiscent of Russia in the late 1990s.

There's perhaps a chance that some part of it might happen someday, but right now the main thing is to distract attention from Tesla's lack of model development and SpaceX's much-vaunted AI business being based on reselling datacentre space at a loss.

So I guess the "Musk plays 4d chess" view would be that there are obvious synergies between humanoid robots and AI.

Ugh. Honestly, that makes it seem worse than the purely cynical financial engineering takes.

Having it in the tile list makes it super easy - make sure the Modes tile is near the top, so it becomes a single swipe to switch it on and off.

But app contrast is generally better on Android than on iOS (in particular, Google Maps is perfectly usable in greyscale on Android) so you might find you don't need to switch it as often as you might think.

It really ought not to be impossible to treat Musk's torrent of hate propaganda and incitement in the same way.

(Sue Burke's Semiosis trilogy is worth a read, too, in a similar evolutionary SF vein.)

For example, after the dot com bust, there was plenty of money to be made in aggregating bankrupt or underutilised telecoms assets - endless duct shares, dark fibre, and networking kit which could turn a profit if bought cheaply enough in a fire sale.

Is anyone preparing to bid pennies on the dollar for bankrupt AI datacentres? I can see how it might potentially make sense to do so in places like the EU or UK where increasing data sovereignty concerns might make locally-based small/mid-scale private inference an attractive proposition if the capital costs are low enough.