Even some of Intel’s Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake chips are being fabbed at TSMC.

For the news articles themselves, each of the major companies is using a major CMS system, many of them developed in house or licensed from another major media organization.

But for things like journalist microblogging, Mastodon seems like a stand-in replacement for Twitter or Threads or Bluesky, that could theoretically integrate with their existing authentication/identity/account management system that they use to provide logins, email, intranet access, publishing rights on whatever CMS they do have, etc.

Same with universities. Sure, each department might have official webpages, but why not provide faculty and students with the ability to engage on a university-hosted service like Mastodon or Lemmy?

Governments (federal, state, local) could do the same thing with official communications.

It could be like the old days of email, where people got their public facing addresses from their employer or university, and then were able to use that address relatively freely, including for personal use in many instances. In a sense, the domain/instance could show your association with that domain owner (a university or government or newspaper or company), but you were still speaking as yourself when using that service.

iCloud doesn’t have Linux, Android, or Windows clients. It’s basically a non-starter for file sharing between users not on an Apple platform.

I don’t like the way Google Drive integrates into the OS file browsing on MacOS, and it doesn’t support Linux officially. Plus it does weird stuff with the Google Photos files, which count against your space but aren’t visible in the file system.

OneDrive doesn’t support Linux either.

I just wish Dropbox had a competitive pricing tier somewhere below their 2TB for $12/month. I’d 100% be using them at $5/month for like 250 GB.

When I was last comparing laptops a few years back I was seriously leaning towards the Framework AMD. It was clearly a tradeoff between Apple’s displays, trackpad, lid hinges, CPU/GPU benchmarks, and battery life, versus much more built in memory and storage, a tall display form factor, and better Linux support. Price was kinda a wash, as I was just comparing what I could get for $1500 at the time. I ended up with an Apple again, in the end. I’m keeping an eye on progress with the Asahi project, though, and might switch OSes soon.

Safari support means there’s benefit to web server support. Server support means there’s benefit to browser support in other browsers. Apple can kick start the network effects necessary to get this standard adopted.

Webp and heic are fine for web, but JPEG XL is special in that it actually has use for print-based and other ultra high resolution workflows, while also having the best path forward for migration from JPEG.

The problem is that we’re not getting rid of the other stuff

We are, though. Coal use in the United States has cut in half in the last 15 years, and it’s still on a steep downward slope. Even as natural gas (which emits roughly half the CO2 per unit energy as coal) increased over the same time period, our total emissions from energy consumption has dropped from about 6 billion tons to 4.8 billion tons.

The progress we’re making might be slower than many of us would like, but we’re also at a tipping point where we’re making many fossil fuels simply uneconomical. And that’s the key: to make polluting costly enough that big businesses won’t want to.

I don’t think this question really makes sense.

DNS is centralized in that there is a root zone that determines who is the canonical authority for each top level domain like .com or .world (and the registrar for each top level domain controls who controls each domain under them). But it’s also decentralized in the sense that everyone who controls a domain can assign any subdomains below that, and that anyone can choose to override the name resolving with their own local DNS server (or even a hosts file saved on the device).

The court case here is trying to override the official domain ownership records at specific DNS providers. The problem is that the intermediaries are being ordered by the courts not to follow the central authority.

Federation wouldn’t fit this model: we still want DNS to be canonical where everyone in the world agrees which domain resolves to which IP addresses.

Voyager 2 went with a different trajectory specifically to fly by the outer planets. Voyager 1 went with a more aggressive gravity assist from both Jupiter and Saturn to gain the speed necessary to leave the solar system. So it’s not only that it takes decades to get that far, but also the launch window of when different planets are aligned to make the mission feasible.

How do they even still have energy to send and receive signals? That’s one heck of a durable power source.

It’s literally decaying plutonium-238. And because it decays, it’s putting out less power than when it started. They’ve shut down certain operations to conserve power, and obviously prioritize things like communication back to earth.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on this (I worked in cybersecurity in 2000’s but was only entry level, and changed careers before cloud/mobile made things way more complicated), but the general point still seems true: security requires conscious design that discourages poor configuration by client IT, and makes bad practices unviable by not only end users, but also the sysadmins who manage the actual IT resources. Then, things should be limited in impact.

In other words, the manufacturer doesn’t get to wash their whole hands of this thing if their design makes it easy for clients to screw up. In this case, it does sound like these systems were deployed by clients that didn’t have a solid understanding of the relationships between on-prem AD and ADFS and didn’t know how to configure them securely, that’s also a significant documentation/education issue that Microsoft owns some responsibility for.

(Plus in the case of the Solarwinds hack, there were a few other Microsoft vulnerabilities exploited to get to the point where the hackers could traverse the system looking for keys/certificates.)

So I don’t think this particular dude was warning about a non-vulnerability, and it sounds like the “security boundary” response he met with internally is similar to how you’re responding to this report.

I read the article as criticism of the lack of defense in depth, where compromise of a specific server gives access to keys that give near-untraceable access to all servers. Yes, Solarwinds fucked up by putting their keys in a place where someone could access it, but Golden SAML is the technique that makes a breach worse.

I can see an argument for artists choosing to use chaotic processes they can’t really control.

Setting up a canvas and paints and brushes in a particular arrangement in the woods, and letting migratory animals and weather put their mark on the work, and then see what results. That could be art.

And if that can be art, then I guess chaotic, unpredictable AI models can output something that can be art, too.

“Biblically accurate models”

Traditionally they’ve been banned because they don’t do well in crash testing, as they don’t have crumple zones or airbags. Here’s some testing from 2010 by the insurance industry arguing that they shouldn’t be on highways.

They don’t pass US federal crash tests, probably because of the lack of crumple zone, so they can’t be imported until they’re 25 years old. Which doesn’t make them any safer, but I guess rules are rules:

Because the trucks don’t meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, they’re legal to import only 25 years after having been manufactured. Then, it’s up to each state to decide whether to allow them on public roads.

Targeting the preindustrial level of atmospheric CO2 is such an ambitious target, trying to undo 300 years of emissions. Then again, it’s not like we’ve stopped emitting.

If we instead try to calculate the energy requirements to simply offset the average emissions of that particular year, using this formula of 652 kJ/kg CO2, and average annual CO2 emissions, against the current numbers of about 37 billion tonnes, or 37,000,000,000,000 kg, we have 2.4 x 10^16 kJ, or 2.4 x 10^19 joules. Which converts to 6.7 x 10^12 kWh, or 6,700 TWh.

Total annual US electricity generation is about 4700 TWh per year.

Global electricity generation is about 25000 TWh per year, about 40% of which is from low or zero carbon sources.

So basically if we’ve got 6700 TWh of clean energy to spare, it would be more effective to steer that into replacing fossil fuels first, and then once we hit a point of diminishing returns there, explore the much less efficient options of direct capture for excess energy we can’t store or transport. Maybe we’ll get there in a decade or two, but for now it doesn’t make any sense.

I’m mostly going off of this article and a few others I’ve read. This article notes:

Celebrities have previously won cases over similar-sounding voices in commercials. In 1988, Bette Midler sued Ford for hiring one of her backup singers for an ad and instructing the singer to “sound as much as possible like the Bette Midler record.” Midler had refused to be in the commercial. That same year, Tom Waits sued Frito-Lay for voice misappropriation after the company’s ad agency got someone to imitate Waits for a parody of his song in a Doritos commercial. Both cases, filed in California courts, were decided in the celebrities’ favor. The wins by Midler and Waits “have clear implications for AI voice clones,” says Christian Mammen, a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson who specializes in intellectual property law.

There’s some more in there:

To win in these cases, celebrities generally have to prove that their voice or other identifying features are unregistered trademarks and that, by imitating them, consumers could connect them to the product being sold, even if they’re not involved. That means identifying what is “distinctive” about her voice — something that may be easier for a celebrity who played an AI assistant in an Oscar-winning movie.

I think taken with the fact that the CEO made a direct reference to the movie she voiced an AI assistant when announcing the product, that’s enough that a normal person would “connect them to the product being sold.”

I’m having a hard time seeing why one is fine but the other isn’t.

I think the law says that neither is fine, in the context here. The law allows celebrity impersonators to engage in parody and commentary, but not to actually use their impersonation skills to endorse products, engage in fraud, and pretend to be that person being impersonated.

Chess has roughly 10^44 positions. Checkers has roughly 10^20.

That means under that metric, chess is roughly 24 orders of magnitude more complex as checkers.

Tic tac toe has roughly 10^3 positions, or 17 orders of magnitude simpler than checkers.

In other words, the complexity gap between chess and checkers is larger than the gap between checkers and tic tac toe.

The agency’s manager sent me a background memo about the woman I’d be playing, a purported 21-year-old university student blessed with physical proportions that are in vogue these days.

In vogue these days? That just reminds me of how every generation thinks they invented sex. Or the Simpsons quote where Mr. Burns describes a past encounter: “We expressed our love physically, as was the style at the time.”