kingcharles

Boss mode activated.

As someone that just lost everything I own to fire I think this is a bad idea. The fire is a problem, certainly, but a secondary problem that killed all my paperwork was the fire service putting out the fire. That high pressure water is getting into literally everything, even things that seem like they are totally and fully water resistant.

I understand the technical part: they are unlocking the extra power electronically.

What I don't understand is what is different between the headline saying that you can pay $60 for your car to go faster (true) and parent poster saying "pay an extra $60 monthly your already-expensive vehicle will not give the full outstanding performance that your particular hardware was engineered to do"?

Those two statements seem to say the same thing? What am I missing?

I'm confused as to how those two statements are different?

You might never get a chance to wipe it. I had a cop whip out a loaded gun and point it at my head to take my phone out of my hand. I didn't even have a lock code as there was nothing to hide, but if I had been a criminal I would not have had time or opportunity to do anything without my brains leaving my skull.

Ah, I too had to settle for Tomy after drooling over the Hero range as a child.

In theory that is how it should work. I promise in practice that you will get absolutely nowhere. Most prosecutors seem local, either municipal or county, but in actuality are State workers, and the State is generally completely disinterested in investigating its own staff.

The feds are even less interested in investigating matters that should be handled by the State.

I say this from practical experience of trying to move the State Attorney General's office and the FBI to investigate and getting absolutely nowhere at all.

My next plan is to simply take a local friendly reporter with a video camera and perform a sit-in at the prosecutors office until they promise to do something or they have me arrested for trespass.

It will eventually become one of the most significant technologies in history, alongside AI, in my opinion.

People are confusing bulky headsets with the general concept of VR. If I showed you a working holodeck today you would think it significant.

Mark made the right choice to go balls deep on VR when he did. I don't think he should dial back. When going through hell, keep going.

Just want to say thank you. Great article and really enjoyed your other about flexbox vs. grid.

I've been a web designer since 1993. It was nice in 1993 because you didn't even have a background color. The color of your page was the default color of the window on your OS. Usually grey.

Then we went through 25 years of dark ages where there were plenty of really great ideas for layout which were completely lost to horrible and competing and half-assed executions.

We are now finally in the golden age of layout where I can make something that looks great on all displays if I have the time and talent to do it. Sadly that is in short supply.

I think we have Chrome to thank for modern web design. Once the browser competition was completely and utterly crushed and everyone was forced to sign on to The One True Layout Engine the benevolent dictators at Google set things on the right path.

There are still edges cases (which JPEG replacement will win?!), but they are now blessedly few and far between.

If you discover law enforcement or prosecutors committing crimes, who do you report it to?

This is a serious question.

You can only report it to their peers, and I promise you, from personal experience, that you will get absolutely nowhere except, like Snowden, have an entire world of hurt come down on you instead.

I can not recommend whistleblowing to anyone. If you see the government going wrong, ignore it. Walk away. You only have one life. How many years of it do you want to write off?

What we actually need is better and better procedures for anonymously reporting misconduct to a body that will actually hold people accountable. Many investigative bodies end up being staffed by those somewhat related or associated with the persons under investigation and therefore guaranteed to produce no meaningful results.

I don't know how to construct a body that actually works effectively, but I would love links to any good studies or articles on this.

Lol the water from the fire service did more damage. Fire proof, but not high pressure water proof.

The examples on the README are extremely compelling; the state of the art has been raised yet again.

My entire storage building just burned to the ground with my safe in it, all my paper codes, my laptop with all my auth on it.

Luckily by sheer fluke my phone was saved which has my TOTP apps on it or I would never get into anything again.

As someone who worked in transcription last year I would say the biggest reason for transcription job losses in the West is competition from India where English speakers are willing to do transcription for a fraction of the cost.

Fully automatic transcription by AI is a very, very hard problem, based on my experience of many of the jobs I got*. The automatic transcription makes the work 10X easier now though by applying a first pass that gets you 90% of the way and then humans like me come in and fix it all up.

* One hard example was a motorcross race commentary where it was necessary to know which riders the commentators were referring to based on their amusing and sarcastic comments, the nicknames of the riders, and deal with the fact the audio was 99% revving engines.

Now I have to compete against AI for my username:

https://chirper.ai/kingcharles

I heard the pirate shipbuilding unions are celebrating.

This is far more important than it initially appears. Current AI image generators let you create pictures of your wildest dreams and desires. The logical conclusion of this is the ability to create perfect VR worlds of your fantasies and enter and explore them. This is truly the beginning of The Matrix.

If anyone wonders what it is like to be born British, this is the answer. We can't help ourselves. This is the burden we live with on a daily basis.

I ran a web site and our e-commerce all ran through PayPal, about $2m a year. One competitor would email PayPal on a weekly basis to tell them we were selling CSAM which was a really great way to get PayPal to instantly block all payments while they investigated.

In fairness to PayPal, and the reason for my reply, is that PayPal's tech staff would go to town and do a very thorough investigation of our entire site, including the back end, to make sure it wasn't true, and then would restore the account. So, some companies do have the staff and willingness to actually make the effort to investigate. I had no problem with PayPal doing it, I just wish they didn't block first, but they were simply covering themselves and I totally understand their business position.

Last night I needed a really hard regex and I'm terrible at reflex so I would have spent literally hours browsing the web and testing expressions, wasting energy in the process. Instead I asked ChatGPT and it spat out the entire regex on the first prompt and it worked perfectly.

So, the flip side is that AI can clearly save enormous resources.

And how long will it be now before AI solves intractable problems like fusion energy, room temperature superconductors and perhaps even finds sci-fi tech like zero point energy?

Thanks, that's a great resource.

Lol. My friend and I did the same with a local DVD vending machine. If you brought the disc back within a few hours the price was ridiculously low, so we had the laptop in the car with a cigarette adapter and ripped 700+ ISOs.

The irony is this was around 2002 to demo a video on demand over the Internet system to some execs at Microsoft. It was a really, really nice UI and nothing like it would be replicated for years, really until Netflix launched their own product.

The idea was summarily rejected as "people like having things on their shelves." A weird response because the same folks were paying me to destroy the CD market.

Microsoft broke the ground. Their DRM that opened the door for legal music sales came out in 1998 I think. Certainly by 1999 I was using it commercially and had the first labels already onboard.

I remember the controversy - it was CD Baby for sure.

That was after. That was closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

LOL. I coded all of those. It was horrible. Not one of those companies gave a damn about the product, they just wanted a revenue share for putting a link in their stores or on their web sites.

The startup that I was working for was OD2, half-owned by Peter Gabriel, who is a very nice guy. He got us meetings with every label guy we needed to speak to. He gave me his iBook, bless him. OD2 eventually got swallowed by Nokia which of course got swallowed by Microsoft. The snake ate its tail.

This had never crossed my mind before but seems reasonable in retrospect.

Essentially you are saying that bug zappers actually exasperate the problem they are trying to solve and it would be better to not use one?

I had to buy a prepaid cell subscription the other day. I went with the one that stated "Truly Unlimited"* as the headline, clearly to differentiate it from all the other "Not Truly Unlimited" plans.

* Truly Limited for heavy users.

As a serial FOIA litigator you have to sue. It's not too hard.

Having battled jails and prisons on similarly vague local comparison pricing for their commissary items, my bet is that none of the comparison procedures are being followed. They probably just expected the stores to be good and regulate themselves. Which never happens.

I really like these "leaked" emails because a couple of times I've gotten to see behind the curtain of projects, like this one, that I was involved in.

I remember one issue here was trying to demo Microsoft's DRM to music execs. At the time Microsoft's software was unusable on Mac, but the music industry was Mac all the way through. Microsoft was first through the door, through outside agencies, they would do the grunt work of turning the labels on to selling their music, then Apple would turn up, sometimes literally the next day, with a much slicker promotion and win the deal.

Microsoft's biggest problem through all of this was its absolute certainty that it should only provide the pick axes and not build this thing itself. It was certain the end user wanted a choice of 50 weak music players and a dozen different badly-developed music stores.

If you want a job done properly do it yourself. Apple won because they did that and owned the whole vertical.