Hmmm. So how long before another AI is able to generate a good enough face to fool the age verification AI (or can it already)? Interesting three-legged race there.

Assuming that the police report is always wrong is just as bad as assuming that it’s always right. I don’t think there’s any question in this case that the suspect was committing arson—the presence or absence of fire damage would have been hard to hide from the public. Arson is a pretty serious crime that might have endangered innocent bystanders if the fires had spread sufficiently. Was he really brandishing a machete at the police? I can’t say for sure, but it isn’t implausible. Was the force used to bring him in disproportionate? Maybe, but I find it difficult to believe that anyone was aiming at this guy’s testicles on purpose. They’re just not a very good target.

This isn’t like the cases of someone being seriously injured or killed during a “wellness check” or for standing on a street corner while Indigenous. In the absence of any other information, I’d say that the injuries that the suspect suffered here really weren’t intentional and a misaimed plastic bullet ricocheted into his crotch. If you want a flagship case for demonstrating police brutality to the public, I wouldn’t pick this one.

I won’t be concerned until the only manufacturers left are Chinese brands no one in the West has ever heard of. We’re not even nearly there yet.

The “trusted execution environment” thing was an attempt to make the system less vulnerable to exploitation through physical access. As we can see, it works about as well as expected.

Not much mystery here: something went very wrong, the dude’s body ended up somewhere it’s going to be difficult to find (possibly in the river), and the dog wasn’t used to being alone in the wilderness and was traumatized, assuming it really is the same dog. It isn’t unusual for the body of someone who dies in the wilderness to take months or years to find, even with intense searching, unfortunately.

The registrar probably treats all their customers shoddily when problems arise, and itch may not be that large a customer—do we know how many domains itch actually had with them? Probably not enough to form a significant percentage of the registrar’s income, and either that or the possibility of Rabid Attack Lawyers (which the big companies like Microsoft have on retainer) would be required to get special treatment from many companies.

I’m not saying that the registrar is in the right. They messed up, and it would serve them right to go under for this (although they probably won’t). I’m just saying that it’s unsurprising that itch was mistreated by a corporate bureaucracy.

They’re not really all that massive, just a medium-large fish in a small pond. If this had been about Microsoft or Sony or some other brand that any random non-gamer you stop in the street will have heard of, they might have gotten special treatment from the registrar, but itch.io? Not even nearly big enough. gog wouldn’t be either. Steam might just pass the minimum threshold.

What it means for traditional banking is pretty much nothing, because the majority of the population don’t in fact think about currency any differently than they did in the pre-Internet era (and the only way they’ve changed how they think about banking is that they expect greater convenience and remote access). Crypto is an unsecured investment vehicle, not a currency, because the set of goods and services it can be directly, legally exchanged for is small.

Thing is, most of the lower-level management have no more power here than the workers. It’s the highest-level people that need to be out slogging, and they wouldn’t be able to deliver enough mail to make a difference.

The only people that win out on inkjet are maybe the rare folks that print like a handful of things every single week.

Also those who regularly print on certain things other than paper—print-on-fabric systems are usually inkjet, which makes sense when you think about it. And as of 10-15 years ago, some of the more expensive and complex inkjets (not the <$100 consumer loss leaders) had better colour fidelity than the average colour laser, which visual artists are willing to pay extra for.

The inkjet printer has a place, but it’s a small niche, and 98% of people buying them really should be buying lasers instead.

They are simple, but they are not easy. Sorting M&Ms according to colour is also a simple task for any human with normal colour vision, but doing it with an Olympic-sized swimming pool full of M&Ms is not easy.

Computers are very good at examining data for patterns, and doing so in exhaustive detail. LLMs can detect patterns of types not visible to previous algorithms (and sometimes screw up royally and detect patterns that aren’t there, or that we want to get rid of even if they exist). That doesn’t make LLMs intelligent, it just makes them good tools for certain purposes. Nearly all of your examples are just applying a pattern that the algorithm has discerned—in bank records, in natural language, in sound samples, or whatever.

As for people being fooled by chatbots, that’s been happening for more than fifty years. The 'bot can be exceedingly primitive, and some people will still believe it’s a person because they want to believe. The fewer obvious mistakes the 'bot makes, the more lonely and vulnerable people will be willing to suspend their disbelief.

My experience with cats: unless you’re willing to reapply the finish every couple of months as the cat removes it (in which case use a food-safe oil and keep in mind that cats notice smells) leave it unfinished. The cat won’t care, and we’ve had several that actually preferred raw wood (the current one is a cardboard junkie, though, so he’s happy with cheap scratching pads from the store).

“Can I have that once you’re finished with it?” Physical newspapers are subject to being given away by the original purchaser (or getting picked up from cafe tables or pulled from trashcans—people used to leave the damned things lying around everywhere), if you can’t afford to pay for them. It’s a bit more difficult to do that with digital content.

You’re the one who brought up the Boomers, not me. And I don’t believe the behaviour of the Catholic Church is justified or should be permitted in a modern society—their priests committed secular crimes and should be doing time in prison for it like the rest of the non-clergy. The Vatican’s shielding them is reprehensible and the people in their hierarchy who did so should be charged with aiding-and-abetting. My point was that you can’t blame their centuries-old misbehaviour on a group of people that haven’t even been around for a single century.

(And you say you can’t hold the dead accountable—the Catholics have actually done that before, too. Look up the Cadaver Synod some day when you’re really bored.)

I think you’ll find that this kind of thing had been going on for thousands of years before the Boomer generation came around.

I think the problem is that it’s difficult to tell whether it’s a joke or a troll, because of this crappy timeline we find ourselves in. I’ll accept that it was intended as a joke, but it read as a troll to me initially.

Alas, my only holiday project is getting the three dining chairs whose crossbars have fallen apart fixed before anyone shows up to sit in them. Not difficult, except that not a single thing I’m going to need to clamp is flat and square.

If you don’t already have fabric you’re intending to use, you might also consider paper as an option. Paper of the type used in Japanese shoji screens, that is, not office bond paper.

If you cannot see the difference between an invasion of privacy that was done without permission and could be curtailed if sensible laws were passed, and one that is mandated by law, then I give up.

Cities should start implementing a “Congestion Charge” for their downtown cores. Every vehicle should have a transponder so once it enters a specific area in a city centre it gets pinged and tolled.

Except that that allows every vehicle to be tracked. Anywhere, not just in the city center, since a transmitter elsewhere would be able to ping transponders too. The privacy hit is way too high a cost in return for a teeny reduction in congestion (because most people will just continue driving, pay the charges, and then complain they can’t afford other stuff. See also: price of gas. The stick approach to public transit does not work).