bayouborne

Somewhat relatedly, I used to do tech support for a very large e-discovery vendor. The number of companies that configure their systems to archive (save, index and make discoverable) the contents of the /drafts folder in email clients is astounding. Surveillance of composition, rather than surveillance of communication, seems wrong.

I have the $8/month ChatGPT 'GO' plan. I generally use it in the traditional 'text query'/'text response' type format, but yesterday I was driving back on the freeway from another state and decided to use the Android app's voice feature and was kind of shocked. I had to look up this morning what I was using (the latest 'Live 1 Instant' mode) but it's surprisingly natural. It's convivial, and responsive in the manner of an interested, enthusiastic sparing partner who never gets offended, in pretty much whatever wild thing you want to discuss, from a moment to moment basis if that's what you want. It's eerie in the way that you can interrupt it and re-point the direction of the discussion, and it just instantly jumps on-board.

re: 'but a crutch for those who rely on them.' - I was telling a friend about yesterday's experience this morning and was saying that I could easily see populations of people who might become overly reliant on (or completely subsumed by) these new classes of tools being released. They are compelling in a way that they weren't 18 months ago.

What about VLC's own built-in versions of decoding libraries (I think, from the FFmpeg project)? Is there a scenario here where we may have to deal with malicious MP4 files?

Opposing counsel is also being called out by the judiciary for not recognizing that multiple citations counsel has put forth are not only not real, but actually counter to existing law.

"As of the end of 2025, Backblaze was monitoring 341,664 drives used to store data."

Three hundred thousand drives. That figure seems insane. Google and AWS must have truly staggering amounts.

Same score. The honesty check for 'Invidious' seemed to not provide a particularly appropriate definition option. I see it mostly used when paired with the word 'comparison' ('Invidious comparison') In the sense that it's kind of intentionally calculated to create an unfair/inaccurate comparison of some sort. 'Unfairly discriminatory' was the choice they apparently were looking for, because I see nothing was scored against me ('Answered word-meaning checks correctly (4/4)').

Unfairly discriminatory | Mostly positive | publicly accepted | Socially Neutral

Expanding on your point, a while ago I read a great book on 747 development (by Joe Sutter, who was the lead engineer for the 747) and one surprising thing for me was that Boeing was very much into the supersonic race at the time. The SST project was Boeing's darling. As such it got the top-ranked technical talent assigned to the project, as well as the best tools, management oversight, etc. In contrast, the 747 dev teams got pretty much less of everything, including being dispersed over a large area of corporate buildings. Despite all of that, it still succeeded beyond anyone's expectations at the time.

It's hard to over-estimate the tectonic impact the idea of spreadsheet had on the microcomputer scene at the time. Overnight 'programming' came to the masses. Someone with a problem (almost any kind of problem, scientific, financial, statistical, etc) could sit down, and easily start describing sequential flow, numerical manipulation and a ton of other things. It was the second coming of the International Business Machine.

I am such a fan of Patrick O'Brian's "Master and Commander" series of books that I could not let myself even consider the possibility of listening to audio book narrated version. I felt O'Brian's prose voice on the page was so powerfully distinctive that any attempt at putting a real voice to his material would be awful. Imagine my surprise when I found Patrick Tull's work shockingly good.

The most shocking thing to me about Blue Origin's New Glenn launch is that it didn't blow up. This isn't commentary on my opinion concerning Blue Origin's engineering expertise, just that I was expecting anything that big and complicated, on its inaugural flight, to fail fairly spectacularly. The historical trajectory of such space things is fail, fail big, fail less big, kinda work, kinda work, work mostly, etc.

If the second launch vehicle performs similarly, I might have to start watching them. We could use a decent alternative.

I'm 66, and when I myself was 10 or 11 my friends on my street and I were completely obsessed with the Estes rocket and Cox .049 U-control scenes. Most of us were lucky enough to have engaged fathers and once the standard craft were assembled and flown, we all browbeat them mercilessly for more information for mods, shortcuts, hacks etc. My dad grew very wary of the 'Why can't we' type questions. I had modified a C-type engine Big Bertha rocket with an extra long transparent payload module which set the stage for various kidnappings of lizards, frogs, praying-mantises, eggs, multiple 1 and a quarter inch sockets, etc (all returned to earth unharmed, if not un-rattled). The nichrome wire igniters were troublesome for most of the kids. Bulky and expensive (for 4th graders) lantern batteries were hard to come by. We found we could steal D-cells from flashlights, hack cardboard tubes from paper towel rolls, reinforce with electrical tape, and make passable energy sources from that, etc. But all of that required questions from the closest available parent about voltage and series/parallel connections, as well as other questions about CG when modding the rockets themselves, etc. I think your STEM comment is very much on-point. None of my friends thought we were learning anything at the time. We were mostly just jazzed about doing fun stuff that had the potential for tearing itself apart in mid-air. I know the advent digital everything makes modeling systems for kids [Kerbal,etc] probably pretty trivial now, but actually crashing things in spectacular fashion IRL had/has it's own visceral rewards.