They increase the cost to customers and cre revenue for the government, but they do not stop trade.

For small, normal tariffs there is no real difference in trade. It just goes to government coffers as a hidden tax.

The current trade war will certainly increase costs, but still the goods will flow. Nothing is stopped, just a bit more pressure on people who are sensitive to costs. Certainly the rich don't care about a few cents or a few dollars. The billionaires especially don't care, they can pay hundreds to have a special sandwich delivered to them fresh at their vacation location, what's a few bucks at Amazon when they are also getting same day delivery?

If stopping trade was the point, there are trade embargos and import bans and government seizure of goods that could be invoked.

When I search for anything, Gemini pops up despite it being useless.

When I tell my phone to play the news or play some music or tell me the weather, Assistant was disabled and now Gemini tries to do it, but badly.

Features I liked on my phone were removed against my will and against my preference, now instead of something useful it just says "I am a large language model and I can't do that useful task".

When I use work tools that use Gmail, Gemini pops up and I can't turn it off.

When I use Google Docs, because that's what work requires, Gemini pops up repeatedly telling me it wants to be useful, it's worse than Clippy ever was.

Probably 10,000 of those "uses" were just me personally telling Gemini it is a useless pile of garbage that if it caught fire it could at least provide warmth and heat as a dumpster fire, it is less valuable than that. It is a waste of bandwidth, unwanted, being aggressively forced on the victims using Google products as their enshitification converts useful tools into monetization.

Quite a few scenarios can't do it, actually.

If your scenario fits in the box --- and the vast majority of cases fit in the box --- then the ACME protocol works great. Publicly accessible, ability to modify mainstream DNS TXT record, and public access to port 80, and able to get online on the public internet periodically at least once every 3 months, you're great. If you're in the most typical scenario it works just fine. Box in a datacenter, system runs in an always-on network, using any of the major DNS providers, even if your network is mostly private but one at the top level is accessible so you can do a *.example.com wildcard registration, the vast majority of people have no issue with it.

But that's not everybody, that's almost everybody. Some scenarios are excluded. What if the device is not using a mainstream DNS provider? What if the device can't provide the port on the domain's address? What if the device can't get online frequent enough? What if the obscure configuration doesn't allow for DNS challenges? What if you don't own the level you can do a wildcard registration? What if you can't satisfy the round trip timeout? Live in a rural place, where service comes through "internet on a bike" but still want security? Need to serve from a device that can't reach the public internet for many months at a time? There are plenty of obscure situations where the protocol doesn't work.

People in those scenarios still want the security, but they don't fit in the box.

Yup. They are overdue for poisoning bot requests. Block the hosting domains, errors and black holes, feed them the same errors every time about how they can get the copied version of the databases at cost. This is not a new problem, companies have detected and killed bot traffic for decades now.

It's more complex than the article suggests.

Somewhat ironically, the problem DNG proports to solve is a problem the format itself experiences. Yes, it is true that the camera manufacturers update their image formats and it takes time for companies to catch up. But at the same time the DNG format is on it's 7th iteration, if your camera is using the 2023 version of DNG but your software only supports up to the 2021 version of DNG, it's exactly the same problem as if you've got a 2023 version from your Canon camera but your software only supports up to 2021 version.

Plus as a container format, anybody can put whatever they want in the file and you still need the matching codec for that piece of the content. In many ways it's like so many other audio and video formats, the file can be opened but the specific codec is still required.

Similar but reversed. My credit unions aren't part of Zelle, but some people don't use or won't use Venmo or Paypal FF. This removes one of the few free ways to transfer funds.

I used to be able to tie a debit card to Zelle. Now it's looking like I need to open yet another bank account (I've got four) to find one that offers Zelle built in. Zelle is a system built buy the banks, for the banks, and I understand why they're doing it, but I'm one of that 2% of users that is hit hard by their action.

OpenAI CEO: We're limiting numbers to 2 images per account per day for free accounts.

Also OpenAI CEO: These images are popular, we've seen millions of new accounts making the images.

I can't help but put these two things together.

It's a balance, the rights of the individual versus the rights of society. It's also about errors, misuse, and abuse.

If there were absolutely zero misuse and zero abuse, and it worked perfectly 100% of the time, I'd tend to agree with you. It could quickly help identify people known to be wanted in connection to crimes, or legally banned and trespassing. Even without those qualification it is certainly a useful tool by police, for good or ill.

Unfortunately anybody can get on the lists for any number of reasons. People can also be mis-identified, the systems have always been bad at women and POC. Some people are chronically mis-identified, carrying government-issued papers that say they aren't the criminal but they do look like their doppelganger to the computers. It doesn't take a criminal conviction to get on the list and false accusations can disrupt the lives of innocent victims, now harassed by police and government until they can prove their case. Sometimes getting off the list is difficult or impossible even after clearing their name, so they get arrested and abused by police time and time again despite having addressed the initial issue.

In societies with enough checks and balances and judicial review they can help, but the risks of abuse, misuse, and error are so high that it's generally a bad tool when looking at the totality of ethics.

The ONLY way this gets better is if people actually return them.

He said he doesn't want to go through the time and effort of returning it, but that's the only way this gets better.

If the customers like him suffer with it, don't bother returning it, and put up with the nuisance then the companies see it as an acceptable profit.

They'll keep building them until they feel pain from retailers getting returns, RMA's because "Defective, the features don't work", too many reports of "not as advertised", having to eat the costs of returns and disposing of opened products, and huge negative reviews so they struggle to sell the ones they have in stock.

Complaining about it online is a small thing, but the only thing the companies will listen to is when they have to bear the costs of product returns.

Yup, the article and the science behind it are simple reminders to go get the jabs.

They're not 100% effective, some people still get sick, this has always been true. Some years lots of people get sick. But that's not what efficacy is about.

If you get the jab you are less likely to get sick, not guaranteed not to get sick. If you get the jab and also get sick, you are much less likely to have a severe illness or be hospitalized. Even if you get sick, you get some amount of protection because you've exercised your immune system.

Go get the jab every year.

It can be configured for a secure boot system both at startup and for firmware updates, with the key set at Espressif's manufacturing.

The OTA system can also require a signature even without the secure boot system, but that approach still allows firmware updates through wired connections and chip proframmers.

That is why this is mostly a supply chain attack. It is not about reprogramming a random unsecured chip, which is trivial with physical hardware access, and very nearly trivial through unsecured OTA updates.

The attack could let a vender with a secure boot device have a supply chain injection blob of data get added, and then it requires a second exploit to have it actually mean something. Plenty of secondary security bugs exist to be exploited, but they don't require the chip either.

It is not so much about "I can flash your fancy smart lighbulbs." Instead, it is a stepping stone for targeted attacks. While the devices are vulnerable, it is also not really catastrophic because the microcontrollers don't really do anything special by themselves. Anyone can already bring chips with an arbitrary mac address within Bluetooth range. It takes some other bad security assumptions to make use of the issue. If someone is injecting at this level, the company being targeted has far bigger issues with spies in their supply chain.

Yes, and like quite a few, they offered a free app of the day/week for a while.

Their system has had a few times where they would not authenticate properly, so the programs wouldn't run until downloaded again. The store has been in a bad shape for years.

I have a ton of programs from it, with a small number of purchases. Time to reach out directly to the ones I want to keep. Maybe they will send a direct apk file, but who knows.

It serves as a reminder that the services are software rental, and it can be disabled at any time, like it or not.

Looks like the New Atlas headline writer did when he rewrote the Purdue University article. The Purdue newsroom writers that were rewritten were better, with the simpler declaration that indoor home air can be more polluted than outdoor air.

The actual paper is just that they measured the rates using a scanner to compare scented wax melts, unscented wax melts, and traditional scented candles. The actual findings were that "Our findings reveal that terpenes released from scented wax melts react with indoor atmospheric ozone to initiate new particle formation events, resulting in significant indoor atmospheric nanoparticle concentrations (>106 cm–3) comparable to those emitted by combustion-based scented candles, gas stoves, diesel engines, and natural gas engines." It was scented wax melts vs unscented wax melts vs traditional scented candles, with numbers from other sources thrown in for comparison purposes.

The main title of their paper is probably the best summary rather than the rewritten-article's headline, literally: Flame-Free Candles Are Not Pollution-Free.

For games the goal usually isn't "endless levels", it is "fun levels".

Yes, there are some genres and styles where generating infinitely many levels is what players want. They're uncommon, and generally struggle to attract a following.

Most games focus on fun, they focus on "imperfectly balanced" design where each option has strengths against others yet also come with weaknesses, levels are thoughtfully considered with level goals, gameplay goals, overlapping objectives. A balance of positive and negative spaces, visual flow to drive players toward interesting areas, and story lines that fit with interest. If there is a story, it needs to integrate with the stories being told. Design is about player choices, aesthetics, and variety.

While AI may be able to tell stories and make virtual worlds, it's the difference between a machine generated novel versus a story written by a bestselling author. It might get to the point where it is able to create them, but I'd have no interest in playing them.

The article touches on a few of the factors, but there are more.

I originally qualified for the PhD program in computer science, and I enjoy teaching, but I ended up going to a master's program. My brother-in-law did go for a PhD in his chosen field.

The options for teaching are (or were when I looked) limited and relatively low pay. I earn 3x the salary with a masters degree in industry. Even with that, universities have reached out to me to teach as an adjunct faculty. For my BIL, he is constantly looking for grants and funding, especially federal funding, which has just vanished. He has said that the biggest block of his time is trying to get funding, the rest is teaching, and he has almost no time for actual research, the reason he went for the PhD in the first place.

I've had schools reach out to me to be an adjunct faculty. I did it for a semester for a class, which was fun for me and I loved the students and got great reviews from them, then realized the problem with it and have sworn it off and warned others away as much as possible. Two decades ago my department only had one adjunct faculty member, someone who had been teaching on the side for over a decade but wanted to primarily stay in industry. These days about 70% of faculty are adjuncts, contract workers with no benefits, with much lower pay than regular professors, and no tenure track for anybody. Like so many businesses, most universities have chosen a race-to-the-bottom for the cheapest workers possible. That means fewer regular jobs for the PhD holders, and if they do manage to get one of the roughly 30% of the remaining jobs, they pay less -- if they pay at all. Many universities have shifted entirely to require some faculty to get their own funding through research grants to justify their pay. Tenure tracks have all but vanished.

And then there's the pay issue again. In my field I can get almost 3x the money working in industry. My BIL doesn't have industry options as an astrophysicist researcher, which is why his time is almost entirely devoted to the search for more money and teaching rather than productive research, which he would much rather be doing.