Microsoft are currently being sued in Australia by consumer protection (ACCC) over this practice.
760 karma · joined June 12, 2023
The critically important aspect: approach clearances and weather reports for a specific aircraft are still useful and relevant to all nearby aircraft. Narrow-casting them to specific aircraft reduces situational awareness for all other nearby aircraft. The system is also tolerant of noise: digital communications can be lost entirely with some degradation in signal, analog voice communications can still be interpreted with a fair bit of noise present (see video below).
The subtle aspect: multi-tasking by using more than one human sense - looking and hearing. People dealing with risky or dangerous situations absolutely should not be sucked into a screen for more than a minute or two to get critical information. This includes to more than one pilot where tasks are being managed and delegated. Most (if not all) controlled or 'aviator-coordinated' (CTAF) airports have a specific radio frequency to tune into to get weather information from an automated weather-to-voice system (e.g. https://youtu.be/HHbrlUPP-4k?t=339).
Whilst it sounds clunky, aeronautical phraseology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautical_phraseology) keeps communications detailed but brief and concise.
Digital voice communications often completely degrade for several seconds with a few lost packets, combined with the brevity of aeronautical phrasing can mean critical information is missed. All of these 'old' systems add up to the cumulative safety (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model) and doctrine built by the aviation industry over many, many decades though sadly because a lot of them were written in the blood of others who perished.
What event did people compare Enron to, before Enron became 'Enron'?
It's probable we're witnessing an entirely new fraud, we just don't have all of the details yet.
For example: "AFAIK the TLA is NFG for well written prose FWIW, NGL."
It is awkward to parse them and is infuriating when the author can clearly write well otherwise, because they don't use three- or four-letter-acronyms to replace standard sentence structures for the rest of their prose.
For a company that wants to have a massive IPO that would be worth multi-billions, if not trillions, is this the cue to leave the party before the music stops?
I'd definitely use Delphi again, and encourage it to be used, if Embarcadero were actually flexible on their licensing.
It's a damn shame that Embarcadero places so many restrictions[1] on Delphi Community Edition (CE) for even open-source contributions by anyone bigger than a small niche development shop.
If Embarcadero wanted to muscle back into the collective consciousness of software developers, allowing enterprise entities to use Delphi CE on open-source projects is a no-brainer, considering even Microsoft allows this with Visual Studio Community Edition[2], albeit with some other restrictions. Microsoft's enterprise limits on Visual Studio Community (250 PCs or not more than U.S. $1,000,000 or equivalent revenue) are so much more reasonable than Embarcadero's laughable $5,000 (thousand; not a typo) revenue limit.
An explosion of open-source Delphi projects might just revive it, if the CE licensing agreement wasn't so absurdly restrictive.
[1] https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/faq#tab-... [2] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-terms/vs2022-ga-c...
They will need to focus on Microsoft's formats for the foreseeable future because of the sheer amount of archaic, but still vitally important, government processes which depend on them.
Once Euro Office gains a significant foothold in those government processes, then they'll have the market power to influence. And, hopefully, force change in Microsoft's behaviour by forcing them to compete against a cheaper and just as capable open product suite.
I also wonder how much of the population is truly introspective. Maybe that's some of the root cause here?
I am deeply, deeply concerned that LLMs are creating a generation... no... zombifying several successive existing generations into intellectually-devoid vassals completely unable to think for themselves, or approach novel and difficult problems without hallucinated assistance.
I'm also astonished, maybe I shouldn't be at this point, how a significant portion of people I know - some of them I would have expected to know better - don't realise that an LLM is a statistical word generator that is in no way equitable to the intelligence of a human being.
Then again, human intelligence exists on a bell curve; I really start to wonder exactly where the peak of that curve actually lies...
Still do, but merely parrot what the stochastic parrot squarks these days.
I haven't used this, as I didn't know it was a feature I needed until you mentioned it.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/find-in-page-...
Tab Session Manager allows you to dump tabs to groups for restoration later, with auto-save at regular intervals. Works quite well!
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...
What would this future look like? Software developer salaries burrowing into the ground?
Partially disagree. Broad-strokes domain knowledge can be learned quickly, but honing that domain knowledge with nuance and consideration for complexity, particularly for organisations that are unique and are not often thought of as 'software development houses', can take years if not decades.
Yet I still see (and code review) 'professional' software developers that don't follow good software engineering practice.
> Engineers whose main competitive advantage is domain knowledge are probably not that brilliant at engineering.
The same is also true of engineers without domain knowledge, certainly in my experience. Maybe we just got unlucky...
Because of Microsoft's dominant position considering near ubiquitous penetration of Microsoft Office in government, one part of government will slap Microsoft on the wrist for anti-consumer practices, whilst other parts will still continue to purchase Office (and other products) because there simply isn't another product that competes directly feature-by-feature and compatibility (and usability in part), which matters in (often archaic) government processes.
It would cost far too much money to try to migrate away, at least at this point. Euro-Office[1] seems poised, if not likely, to dramatically shift that balance once it becomes a key part of EU government machinery.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to Euro-Office. If it takes off, it could invigorate other government efforts to fork Euro-Office and replace Microsoft's suite of tools. Someone just needs to put the business case to the relevant federal government stakeholders comparing the cost of (on-going) licensing vs. the cost of building an internal development team to maintain a fork for their whole-of-government machinery.
Given that there is a fair bit of EU and NATO overlap population-wise, if a significant portion of EU-based NATO countries adopt Euro-Office exclusively, I would suggest Euro-Office then poses an existential threat to Microsoft Office, and perhaps Microsoft's business productivity pursuits.
The moat that software companies had back in the 90s and 2000s before the Internet really took off, was distributing software by physical media. The Internet (as much as I have nostalgia for physical media) completely obliterated that model for mass-distribution productivity software, and indeed many others.
I'm certainly keen to give Euro-Office a test run, since the code is freely available (on GitHub too, ironically[2]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro-Office [2] https://github.com/Euro-Office
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/microsoft-in-court-for...
The ACCC is going to love this.
> 'AB 1921' is one of the first instances of bringing these demands into the institutional fold. Under the bill, companies selling digital games released or resold after January 1, 2027, must provide at least 60 days' notice before terminating service. Furthermore, they must ensure that purchasers can continue to access the game—such as by providing an alternative version or a patch—and must offer refunds if doing so is not possible.
I get that some developers are going to be irked by this, and I get that there will now be some perverse incentive to move to a 'subscription-only' model.
Now that the Stop Killing Games movement has overcome the major hurdle of landing actual legislative change from zero, its not much of a step from this point to extend these protections to anti-consumer practices around subscription-based games too, if they prove abusive.
It's not just about consumer rights, it is also about preserving and promoting arts and culture that can and are passed down through the next generation, which, ironically, helps keep growing and sustaining the industry.
Imagine what arts and culture might be like, seemingly everlasting copyright lifetimes notwithstanding, if Nintendo yanked Super Mario World from everyone because the online services to keep running the game simply costed too much or because the Mario franchise wasn't 'meeting profit expectations'. [Yes, I realise Super Mario World didn't have an 'online' component in the 90s, but imagine if it did...]
Remember that not too long ago it was very common place to self-host servers for games, and for quite a few this is still possible (such as DayZ and Minecraft). Thanks to community efforts, it is also still possible to play long abandoned online games that were once locked behind authentication and server listing providers, such as Battlefield 2 (previously fronted by GameSpy) that has been revived with BF2Hub (bf2hub.com).
Some games[1][2] even have a resurgence after long being forgotten. The revival of Dark Ages wouldn't have happened, and old friendships rekindled, if it was switched off because 'profit'.
Yes, Battlefield 2 had an offline component and could be still played sans GameSpy and BF2Hub, though a big part of the experience and culture around the game was the online community and gameplay against other real humans that made it so successful.
Relatively speaking (and legal/licencing complications aside) it is really not that difficult, especially for games publishers that cash in multiple millions of dollars in raw profits, to patch out authentication server mechanisms controlled by the publisher, and/or release the authentication/game server software binaries or source freely but unsupported after their deprecation date.
The legislation is designed to make these pro-consumer ethics at the forefront of game design. Video games are a big contributor to culture and human connection, and permitting companies to both freely yank a product that someone rightly paid for without compensation - you will own nothing and be happy about it - and kill off parts of our culture, is a horrible place to be as a society.
[1] https://youtu.be/FIFty-O4rOE [2] https://youtu.be/0zNtATsb5eg
I've had multiple surgeries under general anaesthesia. Twilight sedation was pretty much the same experience (at least for me): eyes slowly get heavy, then all of a sudden 'it's too damn bright in here, someone turn the damn lights off!.... Oh, that was quick...'
Many parts of the world still rely on horse and cart today, even modern societies.
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-p...
Given xAI is struggling and seemingly that Musk has sold compute capacity to Anthropic, what's the play here? To screw with OpenAI's IPO?
> Let me speak directly and with more empathy than usual: if you want Anthropic to win, you should be just as skeptical of these numbers as I am. You should want to smash my face in the tarmac with the most crystal-clear, impossible-to-argue with numbers, bereft of asterisks or discounts from suppliers or obfuscated accounting metrics.
Love Ed or Hate Ed, he has a point.
If someone sends me an AI generated email, chat message, or message substantially influenced by AI[1], one of two not mutually exclusive things will happen:
1. I ask them not to use AI as I want to hear from a human colleague about their human thoughts, not a robot;
2. The message gets deleted.
I try as best I can to teach and mentor others. I am more than happy to work through spelling mistakes, poor grammar, and misused words because at the end of the day I'm talking to a human colleague.
Sometimes my messages get pretty long and detailed I will admit, though it's for a reason: context, nuance and technical details are important. If you're just going to offload your brain to a robot, I'm not going to waste my time feeding that robot with you in the middle as a conduit.
[1] It is very easy to tell in in-person conversations: the authority with which a person talks about a particular topic via text communication, does not propagate into a verbal in-person conversation.
Just went to the website directly: says "Get Started Free". "Always Free" is only present at the bottom of the pricing page for personal customers.
What concerns me more is that they've started using the same language that Adobe had been panned for: "$price a month, billed yearly".
To me, thats weird language for a product that (now) costs $20.00 a year. Not hundreds or thousands. Twenty dollars. For non-enterprise users.
The lack of transparency and quietly changing things around makes me wary.
Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, that also walks out the door laying off those 1,100 people 'late in their career'...
It's not possible to cram 25 years of experience into two.
The cheat contains an infostealer.
> March 2026. The attacker uses Context.ai's compromised infrastructure to pivot into a Vercel employee's Google Workspace account. This Vercel employee had signed up for Context.ai's "AI Office Suite" using their enterprise credentials and granted "Allow All" permissions. Let that sink in for a second. A Vercel engineer gave a third-party AI tool full access to their corporate Google account.
I swear this AI 'boom' is melting people's brains and zombifying them like Toxoplasma gondii[1] does to rodents, making them do risky things that ultimately get them eaten (or hacked...).
I have been very happy with Affinity Designer (equivalent to Adobe Illustrator) which I purchased some time ago before the acquisition.
I haven't used Affinity Publisher much, and found a few minor things frustrating (paragraph formatting specifically in the older V2 version), but other than that Photo, Designer and Publisher have been solid.
I still have the V2 apps, from before the Canva acquisition; I'm finding new 'unibody' Affinity app nice as I slowly migrate to it.
One also can't argue with free, even if it isn't open source. Designer does work better in some aspects than Inkscape, as some downstream software I use extensively doesn't like exported SVGs from Inkscape for some reason, but I like Inkscape's open-ness.
It is also not Adobe software, which has plenty of upsides in my book.
Before Serif was acquired by Canva, the equivalent functionality was in Affinity Publisher.
Uncle Bob had a bit to say about this a while ago[1], and is largely what his Clean Code philosophy is trying to achieve, despite the detractors.
To the detractors and down-voters...
If you're complaining about over-abstraction, arguing about the 'better language' to use, or that 'Clean Code' doesn't work - you're missing the point by a few hundred miles.
The whole point of 'Clean Code' is to establish a body of ethics software 'engineers' collectively agree to, and rigorously follow to avoid "killing 10,000 people with a little software failure".
If you think you can make a better 'Clean Code', do so! That's the whole point about ethics debates. But! You need to proffer an alternative and prosecute why your version is better than Clean Code.
[1] (19:47-24:33) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EmboKQH8lM&t=1187s
So this is awesomely timed.