Age-verification HTTP requests are deeply rooted in this nation’s history.

Based on some similar experience: low millions per year.

Skeleton crew of devs+ITS to keep the lights on, software licensing, hardware costs, customer support, financial oversight, legal oversight and occasional compliance efforts.

Probably a good amount of technical and organizational friction involved, too, for whatever services, knowledge bases, and corporate policies were shared between the Wii U and Switch.

It seems stupid when you compare it to the fact that Pretendo probably pays about 1% as much, but that’s just how businesses work.

The real fence is capital vs labor, and he doesn’t play both sides of that one

Welfare

Edit: Idk how many people realize, but “promote the general Welfare” is literally in the preamble; so when conservatives criticize welfare, they’re opposing the constitution.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I mean sure, but you could definitely conceive a Microsoft/Google/Apple style business model where they try to lock people into an ecosystem where they control both sides — the OS and the software — so that the OS can discourage third-party software and the software offers benefits for using the OS where they have home field advantage.

They don’t really need to, cuz they’re the de facto standard for Windows anyway. Specifically because they never went the Microsoft way. So now their OS is just another nice perk instead of another way to control their customers. And it’s also way cheaper for Valve this way.

That’s pretty much the difference of philosophy in a nutshell.

Microsoft: We gotta kill the competition.

Valve: We gotta make our customers happy.

Same basic idea as the “negative latency” that people made fun of Stadia for.

I suppose you’re right. It’s just another tool for helping you abide by immutable practices without forcing immutability as an unbreakable rule.

NixOS is kinda the best of both worlds, because it does everything in a way that is compatible with an immutable fs, but it doesn’t force you into abiding by immutability yourself.

You can always opt into immutability by using Impermanence, but I’ve never seen any reason to.

Edit: That said, the syntax has a steep learning curve and there are tons of annoying edge cases that spawn out of the measures it takes to properly isolate things. It can be a lot to micromanage, so if you’d rather just use your system more than tinker with it, it may not be a good fit.

Crazy how we’ve never had a “Protecting Taxpayers from Auto Industry Bailouts Act”, or banking industry, or PPP loans, or oil subsidies, or industrial farming subsidies, or military contracts, or pharma R&D grants, or…

Also: Why would taxpayers need to “pay for it” anyway?

We print money for literally everything else in this list, but when it comes to student loan forgiveness putting more money in the hands of ordinary people, now we gotta figure out a tax plan to get that money back out?

I’ve got an idea: How about we tax the folks that tend to end up with that extra money anyway? The ultra wealthy!

Oh hey, good reminder. The one upside to the fact that my FB account continually revived itself while I was using my Quest 2 is that now I can delete my account (for the last time, I hope) as part of a widespread protest instead of a one-off annoyance.

Oh hey, this same quote is relevant yet again:

In other words, an AI-supported radiologist should spend exactly the same amount of time considering your X-ray, and then see if the AI agrees with their judgment, and, if not, they should take a closer look. AI should make radiology more expensive, in order to make it more accurate.

But that’s not the AI business model. AI pitchmen are explicit on this score: The purpose of AI, the source of its value, is its capacity to increase productivity, which is to say, it should allow workers to do more, which will allow their bosses to fire some of them, or get each one to do more work in the same time, or both. The entire investor case for AI is “companies will buy our products so they can do more with less.” It’s not “business custom­ers will buy our products so their products will cost more to make, but will be of higher quality.”

Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?

Gee, I wonder why the ministry has been so conservative with their estimates?

Tim Harford mentioned this in his 2016 book “Messy”.

They just wanna call it AI and make it sound like some mysterious intelligence we can’t comprehend.

“Here comes an S!”

Damn, lots of propaganda-swallowers in the comments.

Can I suggest yall listen to some pods about the Luddites and make up your own mind?

• Cool people who did cool stuff
• Cautionary tales

You may come to the conclusion it’s time to bring Ludd’s hammer to a data center near you.

Oh shit. New Freya dropped?! On AI?!?!?!

Anything she uploads is well worth an hour or two of my time.

Meh. TechDirt is great for privacy stuff, but market analysis isn’t their wheelhouse.

I think Vision Pro pretty much accomplished what Apple wanted from it.

Tech press kept comparing it to “the iPhone moment”, but that’s ridiculous. It’s a dev kit.

A dev kit with the best hardware, at a lower price than the second-best, and a more mature OS than anything else out there.

We’ll have to see how it evolves from here, but it’s a perfectly fine first step. Not everything is for you.

ITT:

People saying “They already use every other bit of data they can access, why do you naive optimists think they wouldn’t use the most obvious one?”

vs.

People saying “They already use every other bit of data they can access, why do you naive optimists think they would need to use the most expensive one?”