True but they can’t rely on the US alone. They have to do business elsewhere. Funding Firefox is a ridiculously cheap way of making sure they can operate with impunity everywhere. It’s brilliant, really.

In the future it will probably come out there was a massive backroom deal. Neither this nor dropping Windows Phone have made any sense.

It also opens the possibility of a manifest v4 which restricts even further what ad blockers can do. But if they do in small steps they hope people will just accept it. They’re basically trying to boil the frog.

But this is a best case scenario: bugs accumulated over the years are being spotted automatically and reviewed by experienced devs. It was normal to have a few updates that are very large due to all the accumulated cruft.

The bigger deal that will be an issue going forward is the bogus bug reports, not the good ones. The legit reports will dwindle eventually, bullshit reports will keep coming.

udev rules is a bit of a deep end dive tbf. There are enough Linux distros where you can stick to the desktop most of the time.

No Chris Titus?

People that can rub two neurons together have figured out they can get their 10yr old nephew to install something for them… so the included OS means nothing besides how it affects the final price. They’ll buy a laptop with Windows/Linux/no OS or whatever on it. In markets that don’t allow computing devices to be sold without an OS it doesn’t even have to be Linux, the vendors and manufacturers will happily slap FreeDOS on it to bypass the regulation.

No need, you can just use an IR spotlight to blind the camera. Unlike the military you’re not trying to hide the vehicle.

But either way you’re actively trying to avoid being picked up by speed cameras so you get a fine.

Let’s be honest… people who can’t figure out how to deal with Windows licenses wouldn’t be able to deal with a switch to Linux either.

Yeah but as long as the manufacturers keep selling all their production for real money, everybody else is screwed and prices are going up.

I see. I’m in Europe and it’s not very common there so that’s why.

Not sure about american plates, but in most jurisdictions licence plates are optimized for easy OCR:

Are they? Off the top of my head Germany is the only country I can think of that uses such a font (FE-Schrift).

Unfortunately most companies don’t have a software culture or even understand it. Heck there are entire nations (like Japan) that are culturally at odds with software. It doesn’t stop them from making software (you can’t NOT make software in today’s day and age), they just go about it in furtive, roundabout and ultimately very inefficient ways.

It’s weird because modern software development borrows heavily from industrial process optimizations (some of which were invented and perfected in Japan, ironically) and there are clear, proven benefits to cooperation upstream in projects like Linux… and yet they still fight it every step of the way in the name of “IP”.

It doesn’t help either that there are countries (US, Japan, what do you know) that nurture the concept of software patents that have a chilling effect on sharing.

Literally all knowledge and understanding requires memorization of some sort and the understanding of reality and prior information.

But is that what schools are teaching? When’s the last time you heard of a school that prioritizes the way its students think and focuses on improving their reasoning and cognitive skills?

I’m not knocking memorization but it shouldn’t be the main or only token by which learning is evaluated.

I would say try Manjaro with the KDE desktop. It’s based on Arch so it will update indefinitely, it’s one of the few distros out there that has system recovery snapshots enabled by default, and it was designed to work best the less you tinker with it (it really wants you to leave it alone so it can manage things for you).

Why go to school if you’re just going to use AI? What are you paying for?

You could also ask what good is a school that only teaches you things that can be reliably answered by AI.

Or, if you prefer, why is the school curriculum defining and evaluating progress in a way that can be passed by an AI.

IMHO it shows that certain subjects rely way too much on rote memorization and loose cognitive associations and should maybe take this moment to rethink their approach.

Sharing code makes sense for everybody. It lets them spend a lot less resources on fixing shit if everyone else is also doing that somewhere upstream. With FOSS you can have your cake and eat it too. At some point Google calculated that committing one developer upstream for the Linux kernel can save a company the equivalent of a couple dozen specialist developers downstream in bug prevention and feature alignment across vendors alone.

Unfortunately many companies continue to think about code as if it were potatoes. It doesn’t fucking matter who owns the code, it’s a functional spec. But hey, look at all the trouble we have explaining why standards are good – nevermind opening code.

I mean, US is the country that classified encryption as munition in the '50s and tried to ban its export in the '50s and then limit it again in the '90s and then on and off since then. 🤷

I think the product that speaks the most about the camera was the Snapchat Spectacles. Snapchat did everything they could to position it strictly as a fun, party-oriented camera that didn’t try to hide what it was but leaned into the fun ways to use it.

And they still died out after the initial hype. Which I think is most telling because, like, here’s this product with the most positive take you could possibly have on “glasses with cameras” and people still didn’t want it. So wth makes Google think the creepy no-fun version will catch on?

Whatever they need. Alphabet Inc. is made up of a dozen companies with thousands of products. There’s always something that can benefit from such insight.

The location data that Google collects through Android phones, alone, is mind-blowing. Just from your daily movement they can figure out where you live, where you work, shop, eat, drink, vacation. Indirectly they can figure out who your friends and relatives are, your partners, extra interests and hobbies etc. They sell all that to advertisers, there’s a reason why so much of Alphabet revenue comes from ads. Then there’s more complex patterns like traffic for example that they can sell to city planners and so on. And that’s just location data.