cornonthecobra

or they left the /s off and it's a remark about how the fine article sounds more like hype-machine emesis than legitimate, substantive research

I'm weary of the broader internet having spofs like AWS and Cloudflare. Can't change routing or DNS horizons to get around it. Things are just broken in ways that are not only opaque, but destructive due to so much relying on fragile sync state.

Will my Spelling Bee QBABM count today, or will it fail and tomorrow I find out that last MA(4) didn't register, ruining my streak? Society cannot function like this! /s

The country is welcome to send me the 300 billion pennies. My bank will happily "dispose" of them with their "deposit to my account" service.

Concerns about financial confidentiality. The new AI features are a form of third-party disclosure that would have to be permanently and irrevocably disabled. I couldn't guarantee those features would never activate (as indicated by Microsoft enabling them with updates even after being disabled), and it rightly spooked the owner.

It doesn't. Intuit does kludgy IPC things related to report generation and accessing the internal database server. It's fragile even on Windows.

Fortunately I can easily run a herd of Windows VMs on a single server without much trouble.

I currently support an accounting business. We're eternally vendor locked on Windows desktop because Intuit products are it for accounting outside of the ERP space.

I'm presently in planning meetings with them to move the desktops from Windows 10 to Linux, and run Intuit over RDP in quarantined Windows 11 VMs.

These are people are the most conservative type of user you can imagine. One of the silent cores of staunch Windows users.

They approached me about migrating to Linux on the desktop.

OnlyOffice is pretty darn good IME. I use it with some function-heavy accounting workbooks, and a gf uses it for her interactice rail network time tables fed via python from RTT et al.

It even has a complete dark mode.

I like Deepseek v3.1's idea of radially-aligning each hour number's y-axis ("1" is rotated 30° from vertical, "2" at 60°, etc.). It would be even better if the numbers were rotated anticlockwise.

I'm not sure what Qwen 2.5 is doing, but I've seen similar in contemporary art galleries.

I'm reminded of efforts in the 1990s to ban strong encryption in email and websites because governments tried to tell us it was used by drug dealers and pedos to do their nefarious activities.

Yes, governments really did want to force us to use HTTPS with only broken/weak crypto.

Same propaganda, different buzzwords.

My phone screen is a bit over 500 ppi. I tried it full screen across the entire range that it's in focus (I'm mildly nearsighted), and I could just see the things spinning across the whole field if the pinwheels were big enough to see motion at all.

Maybe it doesn't work on small/AMOLED screens?

At the default scale of 90, I can't see anything spinning at all even with the video full screen. If I set the scale to 250 or larger I can see the stars spinning, but I just see the whole field spinning. Even if I get so close to the screen it almost fills my field of vision.

So for me either the stars are too small to see any motion, or I can see them all spinning no matter what.

What effect am I supposed to see?

I've spent the last 32 years pushing every employer I've had to contribute back to open source. Because of the sector I work in, more often than not I'm constrained by incredibly tight NDAs.

I can usually stop short of providing code and file a bug that explains the replication case and how to fix it. I've taken patches and upstreamed them pseudonymously on my own time when the employer believed the GPL meant they couldn't own the modifications.

If after all that you still want to label me a moocher at cons, that's your choice.

This touches on what I ended up telling them: maintaining a local patchset is expensive and fragile. Running customized versions of things is a self-inflicted compliance problem.

I still had to upstream anonymously, though.

I've literally had my employer's attorneys tell me I can't upstream patches because it would put my employer's name on the project, and they don't want the liability.

No, it didn't help giving them copies of licenses that have the usual liability clauses.

It seems a lot of corporate lawyers fundamentally misunderstand open source.

that's really the problem. regulatory rules are so impotent violating them is nothing more than an operating expense for large corporations.

We need forfeiture of all revenue earned by violating activities, and C-suite criminal liability. Not that we'd ever get such measures, but it is what it would take, as documented in other countries that have successfully combatted corporate intentional misconduct like this.

This is mine as well, with the addition of books. If someone wanted to train a bot to sound more human, they would select data that is verifiably human-made.

The approachable tone of popular print media also preselects for the casual, highly-readable style I suspect users would want from a bot.

One of my favourite bits (and a fine example of Randall's sublime humour), comes right at the end:

But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.

“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”

I couldn't get past level 3? It never shows any text in the box