All browsers using Google’s Blink engine are distasteful. Vivaldi is less bad than most, despite being closed-source, but to echo many here, you’re better off with almost any Firefox derivative. Libre Wolf has a good rep. I use Pale Moon, but its old-fashioned interface isn’t for everyone.

Depends on how much effort the average scammer puts into remembering the prospective victims that don’t bite. My guess is that they don’t waste too many brain cells on that.

The problem isn’t that it didn’t. The problem is that anyone thought that it should have.

It depends on the VM, but some of them have working graphics hardware acceleration. Virtualbox should be relatively easy to set up with modern Windows guests, but isn’t free for commercial use. qemu/kvm is free for all uses, but may require some tinkering to get everything to work. qemu also supports video passthrough—using the VM to drive a second video card installed in your machine—which some gamer types prefer.

Moose are technically deer (taxonomic family Cervidae, which also contains reindeer, red deer, roe deer, etc). And a big bull can weigh almost a (US conventional) ton. I don’t know whether that’s enough to trash a modern semi (based on an old memory of an apparently undamaged semi and a dead moose on the shoulder of an Ontario highway in the 1990s, I’d guess probably not, or at least not always), but I wouldn’t want to be the driver of the semi, either. Hitting them in an ordinary passenger vehicle—like any Tesla product—is something you really don’t want to do.

It’s one of those things that needs careful handling and is unlikely to get it. I can see it having some value in therapy, but only if there is, y’know, an actual therapist involved who can make an informed call as to whether their patient will be helped or harmed by talking to a digital fake of a loved one. Instead, we’re likely to see a ham-fisted “allow all” or “forbid all” call by regulators.

Non-geeky people will generally run things until they actually stop working completely.

Geeky people, on the other hand, may either adopt a new OS while it’s still half-baked, or jump through hoops to keep an old one running long past the point where a non-geeky person would have given up. Some of us do both, just for the lulz. Windows 11 on unsupported systems offers a new and exciting(?) way to scratch the same “can I make this work, just for the hell of it?” itch.

I didn’t mean disable it in software, I meant physically disable it by stuffing the phone in a Faraday cage (you can buy them for phones in the form of pouches with metal worked into them), which blocks electromagnetic radiation and therefore prevents the phone from contacting towers or satellites.

Or you can disable it from time to time at random when you’re doing something innocuous, and obscure the pattern that way. Which is probably easier for the average person than figuring out a second method of tampering with their phone.

Thus, for the time being, if you’re in the US or some other nation that has issues with women’s health, do not take your phone to the abortion clinic with you, or turn it off and stuff it in a Faraday cage until you’re at least a block away.

Even if the storage were strictly local, there would still be some privacy concerns. Hackers can’t steal data that isn’t there.

Edit>> Though if Baidu is investing in AI like all the rest, then maybe they just think they’ll be immune — in which case I’m sad again that I haven’t yet come across a CEO who calls bullshit on this nonsense.

They may just have kept their AI investments responsible—that is, not put more money into it than they can afford to lose. Keep in mind, Baidu is the Chinese equivalent of Google. They have a large, diversified business with many income streams. I expect they’ll still be around after the bubble bursts.

Once the apocalypse comes, you can at least use a gold brick to brain the zombies, whereas your crypto will vanish along with the Internet and electrical grid.

Hmmm. I wonder who is making so much money off this that the project is willing to push them into forking it . . . ?

Seeing the word “smart” in a device description has become a warning flag.

The question is, is Tesla FSD’s record better, worse, or about the same on average as a human driver under the same conditions? If it’s worse than the average human, it needs to be taken off the road. There are some accident statistics available, but you have to practically use a decoder ring to make sure you’re comparing like to like even when whoever’s providing the numbers has no incentive to fudge them. And I trust Tesla about as far as I could throw a Model 3.

On the other hand, the average human driver sucks too.

In my experience, that’s a good way to overextend yourself and end up becoming nothing to no one as a result.

This too shall pass. Granted, it might take a while, though.

I guess he wasn’t naked at the time (camera was hijacked too, according to the article).

And people wonder why I go out of my way to obtain equipment that doesn’t have a bloody app or connect to anything.

Taiwan has urged its citizens to “avoid non-essential travel” to the mainland as well as Hong Kong and Macau after China unveiled guidelines in June detailing criminal punishments for what Beijing described as diehard “Taiwan independence” separatists.

I’m surprised that hasn’t always been the recommendation—it isn’t like Taiwan has had a good relationship with China since the establishment of the two countries’ current governmental setups.

Linux users are hard for using a terminal when they could just open a document in a text editor.

The command line is always there and always has the same basic tools, assuming the system is bootable at all. You can’t guarantee that a given system has a working GUI—it may be broken, inaccessable, or never installed. Having some kind of TUI editor installed is usual on non-embedded systems, but you can’t guarantee which one or that it’s fit for purpose (coaching a newbie through a vi session isn’t something anyone wants to do). That means that the generic instructions that get passed around because they’re fit for most systems (regardless of distro or purpose) use the command line tools.

So there is method to the madness, but if you’re coming from a “GUI or bust!” OS it can take a while to get used to.