An autonomous robot that I program, I update (or don't) as and when I see fit, and does not need to connect to the internet or to anything, for $20k that does dishes, or helps me lift things at the shop, and returning data to it's maker IF AND ONLY IF, AND WHEN, I CHOOSE (or dont)? Great - take my money!

An ambulatory machine with eyes, ears, touch sensors, continually watching, listening, observing, mapping, recording everything it encounters in my home and/or shop and sending all that data back to it's manufacturer "for improved user experience"? HELL, NO!

The latter, supplied by Musk, even if he's paying me $1 million per year to 'host' it? I'll buy the equipment to destroy it as soon as it comes onto my property.

I don't think there is any supplier I could even begin to trust when they require a connection. Can anyone here think of one?

>>Flares, the standard IR countermeasure, are less effective against imaging IR seekers that can distinguish an aircraft shape from point-source decoys.

This, a day or two after a top story about Marc Andreessen refusing to engage in introspection.

Nah, there's not a pattern here among the tech billionaires ... right?

He is wrong about almost everything, and especially about introspection.

But he got lucky and wrote a good-enough-for-the-time browser at just the right time.

Now, he mistakes his luck and his F_U_Money for skill and intelligence. And why wouldn't he? He can simply walk away from any situation that makes it seem he is wrong.

And the broader problem in society is nearly the entire populace has been conditioned to ignore the factors of luck and mistake monetary success with hard work and wisdom, when in fact those people are often no more than massively amplified fools.

The massive follies of most these current robber barons makes the case for taxing them out of existence. Once someone has enough money that they and their family cannot spend it in multiple lifetimes of excessive luxury, the only reason to have more is power. We should ramp up tax rates so those people cannot accumulate that power.

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. A society that fails to manage that fact of human nature dooms itself.

It depends entirely on usage patterns and attitudes.

I just used a piece of material that was sitting on the shelf for at least ten and probably closer to fifteen years. I'd purchased it as an off-cut from a supplier just on a thought of "this might be useful, and it's a good deal". Carried it through two moves and never got around to using it. Suddenly it turned out to be the perfect thickness for this one customer project when the expected material didn't work — never could have predicted it. Not only that, but when I went to check how much it would cost today, I literally cannot find that particular thickness. It literally saved by butt on this job.

OTOH, I do have other materials I've used once or twice, but the needs have shifted so they're going on Craigslist for free.

And yes, we agree that running unconstrained AI agents with --dangerous-skip-confirm flags and seeing nothing wrong with it is insane. Kind of like just advertising for burglars to come open your doors for you before you get home - yeah, it's lots faster to get in (and to move about the house with all your stuff gone).

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is why so few people do it" — attrib Henry Ford

Now we have tools that can appear to automate your thinking for you. (They don't really think, but they do appear to, so...)

You are assuming that a human's particular typing pattern is consistent, when the fact is that any number of ordinary events will render your assumption false (one or more fingers bandaged, sprained, whatever, or one hand occupied ATM).

This is not a hardware or software problem, and no amount of code, hardware, or cleverness will fix it; this is a fundamental mismatch between your assumption vs reality.

>>While you type, the keyboard quietly records how you type — the rhythm, the pauses between keys, where your finger lands, how hard you press.

>>Nobody types the same way. Your pattern is as unique as your handwriting. That's the signal.

This very precisely makes my point:

Yes, the typing pattern of any human is highly and possibly even completely unique to that human — UNTIL any of a myriad of everyday issues makes it falsely deny access because the human's typing pattern has changed in a way the human can't do anything to fix at the moment.

If you are only attempting to distinguish a human from an automated system, it'll be better, until someone just starts recording the same patterns and re-playing them to this upstream process; then its a mere race to who can get their hooks in at a lower level. And someone is always going to say: "Oh, this system can identify the specific human", and we're off to the races again.

So, no. Unless you can account for ALL of the reasonable everyday failure modes, typing with either hand, any finger or combination of fingers out of commission for a minute or a lifetime, this idea will fail.

This idea of capturing the timing of people's keystrokes to identify them, ensure it is them typing their passwords, or even using the timing itself as a password has been recurring every few years for at least three decades.

It is always just as bad. Because there are so many cases where it completely fails.

The first case is a minor injury to either hand — just put a fat bandage on one finger from a minor kitchen accident, and you'll be typing completely differently for a few days.

Or, because I just walked into my office eating a juicy apple with one hand and I'm in a hurry typing my PW with my other hand because someone just called with an urgent issue I've got to fix, aaaaannnd, your software balks because I'm typing with a completely different cadence.

The list of valid reasons for failure is endless wherein a person's usual solid patterns are good 90%+ of the time, but will hard fail the other 10% of the time. And the acceptable error rate would be 2-4 orders of magnitude less.

It's a mystery how people go all the way to building software based on an idea that seems good but is actually bad, without thinking it through, or even checking how often it has been done before and failed?

But might it just be easier to develop and apply similar sugar adhesives, or other compatible or soluble adhesives (in quantities that will not affect the recycling process)?

OFC, if you never introduce anything new, it is easier to feel like it is a "pure" process. Yet, what says the heat treatment isn't actually creating new molecules that could be recycling-incompatible, even though they never "add" any new material?

>>I look at memory profiles of rnomal apps and often think "what is burning that memory".

Because companies starting with Microsoft approach it as an infinite resource, and have done so literally for generations of programmers — it is now ancient tradition.

Back in the x86 days when both memory and memory handles were constrained (64k of them, iirc) I went to a MS developer conference. One problem starting to plague everyone was users' computers running out of memory when actual memory in use was less than half, and the problem was not that memory was used, but all available handles were consumed.

I randomly ended up talking to the (at the time) leader of the Excel team, so I thought I'd ask him about good practices, asking "Does it make sense to have the software look at the task and make an estimate of the full amount of RAM required and allocate it off one handle and track our usage ourselves within that block?" I was speechless when he answered: "Sure, if you wanted to optimize the snot out of it — we just allocate another handle."

That two-line answer just blew my mind and instantly explained so much about problems I saw at the time, and since.

It also made sense in the context of another talk they gave at a previous conference where the message was they anticipate the increased power of the next generation of hardware and write their new version for that hardware, not the then-current hardware. It makes sense, but in the new light, it seems almost like a cousin of planned obsolescence — "How can we squander all the new power Intel is giving us?". And the result was decades after word processing and spreadsheets had usable performance on 640K DOS machines, new machines with orders of magnitude more power and RAM, actually run slower from a user perspective.

I'm hoping this memory crunch (having postponed a memory upgrade for my daily driver and now noticing it is 10x the price) will at least have the benefit of driving developers to maybe get back some craft of designing in optimization.

What prevents you from saying "Yes, and Xyz!!" and another poster "Yup, and Pdq, and Foo too!"

Or, maybe OP is just being a bit lazy, but again, it seems the context is conversation, not formal scientific inquiry where everything must be falsifiable?

If so, it is customarily permissible to use rhetoric and sarcasm to more strongly emphasize a point. Or, to leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.

If you consider how the reading, audio, and video you consume either builds or degrades your capabilities and character, as the food or poison you consume either builds or degrades your physical health, then [looking at US top videos on YouTube any given day] literally IS taking poison for your mind.

Depending on the poison and the dosage, eating the poison for your body instead may be the lesser of the two evils.

This is the critical data —» how many people hang up on the AI chatbot vs how many people hang up on the voice message prompt.

If it is even close, well, the AI needs to be improved.

If the AI is way ahead, but still loses/drops more than a live receptionist (outsourced or in-house), the AI either needs improvement, or to be dumped for a live receptionist, and that's kind of a spreadsheet problem (how many jobs lost in each case, vs costs).

This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location.

The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs.

Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone.

Yes OPSEC is hard, and they should be trained to not do this, but it seems to be getting ridiculous. If I were in command of such units, I'd certainly be calling for packet inspection and a large blacklist restriction of apps like that (and the research to back it up).

Local first is not just a cute quirk of geeks, it is a serious requirement.