CydeWeys

It's on CrowdStrike, but it's also on IT for even allowing installation of critical software like this that has a bypass at all. Updates shouldn't even be allowed to bypass IT's safe rollout procedures, at least not without IT signing off on it anyway.

I don't think "Microsoft should lock down Windows so hard" is the solution we want here. I don't want my desktop OS to be a walled garden like iOS is. I want to be able to install software on it that does anything I need to be able to do -- and yes, having that capability to run software at the lowest possible level in the OS does also mean that that software has extra responsibility to be well-behaved, as the OS can't protect the system from it. But I still would rather have that option than not have it (and also I wouldn't use CrowdStrike).

I thought it was clear from my comment that I was suggesting Apple would do it better. Think of how useful something like apt, npm, or pip is, and then realize that MacOS has no in-house equivalent.

It would be (or at least have) a command-line utility like rpm, npm, apt, or pacman. That's necessary for it to integrate well with various installation scripts. So you wouldn't have to use a UI at all, especially if it's bad.

Apple should have written it themselves. It's embarrassing that they didn't. Nonprofit Linux distros with one-millionth the resources manage to write package managers and run repos, and then with MacOS, Apple gives you diddly-squat.

The right figure to compare against is their annual profit, which is around $45B. A single state in the US in a single enforcement action against them taking off over 3% of their entire profit for the year is a big deal.

$1.4B is serious money though. You can't be paying that out left and right, and there's no way Meta made more than $1.4B on doing facial analysis of photos uploaded by Texans. This was an actual loss by them, and thus an error.

> The problem is auto-linkification.

Who's auto-linkifying .zip domains?

Those are ccTLDs, which don't have any rules to abide by.

And with their luck, those handheld devices will also be sent the OTA update that temporarily bricks them along with everything else.

> That's why there's a sharpie in the first aid kit.

That doesn't help when the system goes down and you lose the record of all medications administered prior to having to switch over to the Sharpie.

It is a critical problem if your entire record of life-saving drugs you've given them in the past 24 hours suddenly goes down. You have to start relying on people's memories, and it's made worse by shift turn-overs so the relevant information may not even be reachable once the previous shift has gone home.

There are plenty of drugs that can only be given in certain quantities over a certain period of time, and if you go beyond that, it makes the patient worse not better. Similarly there are plenty of bad drug interactions where whether you take a given course of action now is directly dependent on which drugs that patient has already been given. And of course you need to monitor the patient's progress over time to know if the treatments have been working and how to adjust them, so if you suddenly lose the record of all dosages given and all records of their vital signs, you've lost all the information you need to treat them well. Imagine being dropped off in the middle of nowhere, randomly, without a GPS.

It doesn't matter what Google did or wanted to do if Squarespace wasn't going to actually support it.

Multiple cameras is cheaper and way more foolproof as it doesn't involve any moving parts. This robot had all sorts of problems. You know how often a Roomba gets stuck? Now imagine it's much taller with more pieces sticking off it.

The only tasks that come to mind that involve a moving robot are tasks that require moving around to perform the task. A Roomba is the obvious and most well-known example, but there are also now robotic lawnmowers that make sense for the same reason (and I even use the city of Halifax using them earlier this year to maintain public grounds!).

Another use case I can think of that physically requires moving around would be watering plants. That would require a more advanced and larger robot, so it's not there yet, but imagine a Roomba-type base station but with a water hook-up, and a robot with a water tank and an extendable hose-arm. For how many house plants I have, how much work it is to water them regularly, and how much better the robot could do the job if it watered plants daily (but only exactly the amount it needed by using a moisture probe), this is definitely something I would consider.

The problem of course is that all of these actually useful robots are purpose-specific; none are general. A Roomba is not a lawnmower is not a plant waterer. The Amazon device tried to be a general purpose robot, but because it doesn't have vacuums or grass cutters or a water hose or anything used to actually accomplish a specific task, it's good for nothing. I can walk aimlessly around my apartment too, but I don't need a robot for that!

These devices are heavily dependent on software running on servers in Amazon's cloud. They're being bricked only because those servers are being turned off because continuing to maintain the server software would be expensive and not to Amazon's gain.

It's also not necessarily super easy to refund money to a business. I know that accounts receivable at my company is a serious pain in the ass, and it's not a given that refunds on anything purchased via PO are gonna be easy or quick. And of course there are restrictions on how you can purchase things that might easily have required these to be bought via PO (rather than corporate CC).

I've actually seen one of these in person (the guy had it for free because he knew someone at Amazon working on the personal dogfood version).

I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was actually for, and neither could he, as it was basically solely a party trick for him. They don't even vacuum floors like a Roomba does!

The linked article talks about security patrols or whatever, but simply installing security cameras is cheaper and better. A robot obviously rolling along the floor is easy to avoid or to disable.

> This decision says that shouldn't happen because it was an official act as president.

And of course, if it's something that the Supreme Court wants a president to face consequences for for partisan reasons, they can simply use their majority to say that whatever they didn't like was not an official act.

Impeachment doesn't actually deal with it at all. It's basically impossible to impeach anyone with the way politics is polarized these days, plus the only result is that the president is removed. They don't actually face any consequences for their actions as the Supreme Court is saying they can't be prosecuted even after leaving office.

Not having online access to any of his financial institutions is actually causing real problems though, as is being unable to get a response from him on texts/emails.

It seems like it's just a part of aging, sadly. My dad was using computers at MIT back in the 60s before hardly anyone else had ever seen one. I had access to a computer at home my entire life even though the most basic monochrome green PC compatible was $10k in today's money [1], and I remember him using an acoustic coupler modem to connect to some network (a BBS?) at triple digit baud through the actual telephone handset, long before the World Wide Web even existed.

And yet now ... he barely does anything with computers besides play freemium mobile games on his phone. Doesn't email too much anymore, doesn't have online logins to just about anything (like his bank accounts), and can't handle basic debugging of tech issues anymore. I think people just give up at some point and stop trying to stay current with this stuff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable

Enterprise customers aren't dealing with this BS. They get good Windows, not available to the rest of us :(

Some loads like this one are so heavy that you just can't defeat their inertia, hence why you go slowly and have a large escort. It couldn't be stopped that quickly just due to the nature of the load.

At some point if you're getting behind the wheel of a vehicle on the road, you have some responsibility yourself. If you're not looking where you're going at all and drive into the path of a heavily-escorted million-plus-pound load and it ends up crushing you because of the sheer physics of the situation, that's on you. There's a hundred other more likely ways to kill yourself on the road if you're not looking where you're going, that don't involve such unusual cargo.

And also, from looking at the photos of the scene, it looks like the driver may have turned quickly to attempt to avoid the crash, and the load continued on of its own inertia and overturned the entire rig, which is an issue caused by top-heavy torque that doesn't care how tightly the load is tied down at all.

Yeah makes sense. A fractional distillation column is super heavy, up to a million pounds or more.

If it wasn't obviously a wind turbine blade (or a rocket!), maybe it was a petroleum distillation column? Those are a common extra-oversized highway load.

Well, an observational-only study proves even less.

That's not a randomized controlled trial though. You might find a correlation, but you couldn't actually establish causation, or eliminate hidden variables.

They certainly are hard, because dementia is something that develops over years if not decades. Anytime it takes that long to do a single iteration of your experiment, it's hard!

For me it's not even that, it's simply that The Brothers Karamazov and other novels like it have historicity and depth to them in a way that modern-style light popcorn novels never do. The hardness therefore is more incidental than the means to an end in itself.

And for what it's worth, there's plenty of modern-style "hard" novels that I've enjoyed immensely as well, including House of Leaves, Infinite Jest, Shogun, The Pillars of the Earth, and [pick any Neal Stephenson novel published this millennium].

Off the top of my head, every book I can think of that provides deep insight into the human condition does require putting in some work. Let's take as an example "Night" by Elie Wiesel, a book that is written so simply it is typically assigned in middle school (that's when I read it). Well, it was assigned in school for a reason -- there's a lot of work to put in to learn more about the history of the Holocaust, concentration camps, and specifically the death marches, as well as the actual full biography of the author (the novel is an autobiography but it only covers one early part of his life).