bijant

It's literally been one month since the last outage. This is getting ridiculous. Past Degradations Provider Status Page 3mo Past 3 Months UTC+01:00 Jan 16, 2026 Duration 55m 4:10 pm - 5:05 pm resolved

While I'd hesitate to call the people behind the project out for fraud, they certainly are great at obtaining funding while delivering negative value and then presenting these experiences in a positive light. The linked site promotes their use in Germany's "aufstehen party" which wasn't actually a party but whatever if it sounds better and as I was intimately involved with that experience (being brought in to consult on recovery) it was a disaster that ended that NGO before it really begun. The Pol.is platform was supposed to be the central decision making interface of that distributed movement supported by figures from different leftwing, social democrat and ecological parties, it wasn't just that they failed to scale but they were completely unwilling to deploy on our infra or even open source critical components while maintaining publicly that their system was completely open source. The question of whether to replace it (remember its use was the key innovation of this movement) and if so with what ended up not only splitting the NGO but making one sub-group create a new party that is "neither left nor right wing" and voting with the right-wing AfD in (state) parliaments helping them secure anti-migration majorities.

So now we know what that was all about. Nothing. Obviously POTUS orders people in his circle to contact foreign leaders and foreign intel all the time. Whether Mossad or SVR there are people in the Trump orbit that talk to them and Trump approves of this in his unusual diplomacy style. Maybe they even think they have leverage and it's going on behind Trumps back. Now thanks to this Whistleblower they know that their contacts happened with knowledge of the WH. Seems like a legitimate discretionary decision by DNI Gabbard to disclose this only to the WH CoS and not along the usual lines. Particularly since the press apparently get briefed immediately by members of the congressional oversight committee.

Knew a mechanical engineer at a place where I interned. Asked him about it and he joked that he didn't trust those transistors before explaining that it's just muscle memory to him and while a calculator would be faster he'd still earn the same per hour. Apparently I was the first to ask him in over a decade as everyone had moved on to do stuff in software and no one was pushing him to use a calculator anymore. Interns didn't inquire because they thought it must be some esoteric/religious practice. Last I heard he was still working there, management asked him to stay on past retirement age for his invaluable skillset. While its probably some other skill I just like to imagine the suits in a meeting where they decided to keep him on for this particular "skill" that no one else in the company had anymore.

No! No one in their right mind would even consider using them for guidance and if they are used for OCR (not too my knowledge but could make sense in certain scenarios) then their output would be treated the way you'd treat any untrusted string.

The Register stooping this low is the only surprise here. I'm quite critical of Teslas approach to level 3+ autonomy but even I wouldn't dare suggest that there vision based approach amounted to bolting GPT-4o or some other VLLM to their cars to orient them in space and make navigation decisions. Fake News like this makes interacting with people who have no domain knowledge and consider The Register, UCLA and Johns Hopkins to be reputable institutions and credible sources more stressful to me as I'll be put into a position to tell people that they have been misled or go along with their delusions...

Sure, just like Aaron Swartz was persecuted for "recklessly damaging a protected computer" and "wire fraud" not for any other reasons at all and btw the State wasn't at all involved in murdering him, he did that to himself, probably because he felt guilty for having damaged so many computers....

When I was a kid people told me I needed no Chess Computer - You can play chess in your head, you know ? I really tried, no luck. Got a mediocre device for Christmas, couldn't beat it for a while, couldn't lose against it soon after. Won some tournaments in my age group and beyond. Thought there must be more interesting problems to solve, got degrees in Math, Law and went into politics for a while. Friends from College call on your birthday, invite you to their weddings, they work on problems in medicine, economics, niches of math you've never heard of - you listen, a couple of days later, you wake up from a weird dream and wonder, ask Opus 4.5/Gemini 3.0 deepthink some questions, call them back: "did you try X ?" they tell you, that they always considered you a genius. You feel good about yourself for a moment before you remember that Von Neumann needed no LLMs and that José Raúl Capablanca died over half a decade before Turing wrote down the first algorithm for a Chess Computer. An Email from a client pops up, he isn't gonna pay your bill unless you make one more modification to that CRUD app. You want to eat and get back to work. Can't help but think about Eratosthenes who needed neither glasses nor telescopes to figure out the earths circumference. Would he have marvelled at the achievements of Newton and his successors at NASA or made fun of those nerds that needed polished pieces of glass not only to figure out the mysteries of the Universe but even for basic literacy.

As if the sight of this dystopian thread wasn't depressing enough, there is your one gold nugget of a comment, downvoted into oblivion, grayed out at the bottom of the comment section. A hundred comments of people reverse-engineering vendor handshakes, writing Python daemons, and debating the finer points of CEC frame injection - and not one of them asking why this is necessary. The answer is in three letters: DRM. Your PlayStation is a computer. Your Xbox is a computer. Your Apple TV is a computer. Your "smart TV" is a computer. You already own a computer. The reason you can't just... use it... is that the entertainment industry spent two decades making sure the bits know who owns them at every step of the pipeline. HDCP, HDMI licensing, CEC's vendor-specific "quirks".I see no interoperability failure, it's interoperability prevention. Meanwhile, a $200 mini-PC running VLC, connected via DisplayPort to a monitor and 3.5mm to powered speakers, plays anything in any format at any bitrate with zero handshake failures. One "remote": a wireless keyboard. This solution has existed since before some commenters here were born. What you're all debugging isn't technology. It's compliance.