The VPN software he had to use to talk to Mossad was only available for Windows.

That’s true. I’ve watched Fight Club.

1980s: You have to walk to the arcade, you have to stand to play, and you are charged for every minute of play time.

1990s: Computer technology has improved to the point that anyone can have the arcade in their home, you sit to play, and you are charged once for the game and can play for as long as you want.

2010s and onward: Home internet connections are now ubiquitous, enabling instant digital money transactions from anywhere, so the games industry can now nickel and dime you for everything. Video games are casinos. The coin machines are back.

There’s a golden age of gaming starting with the introduction of home consoles and ending when they started needing an internet connection.

I swear bro, just let me add one more gigabyte. I swear, we’re gonna get to AGI. Just add one more gigabyte. Just let me add one more gigabyte. Just let me add one more gigabyte. I swear. I swear. I swear. I swear, we’re gonna get to AGI. Just one more gigabyte and just make it bigger. Just make it bigger. We’re gonna get to AGI. We’ll get there. We’ll get there. We’ll get there. Just make the model bigger. I swear.

https://xkcd.com/1102/

KDE’s Plasma Desktop has a web search plugin that I use all the time. Typing the Win (Super) key followed by wp:Sistine Chapel and then the Enter key brings me straight to the Wikipedia entry on the Sistine Chapel. imdb:Jurassic Park brings me to the IMDb page for Jurassic Park. yt: will search YouTube, and so on. There are around 200 keywords pre-programmed into it, including for searching programming language documentation. Unlike the Windows feature displayed here, it doesn’t use the network unless you specify a prefix and it accesses only the service you specify by the keyword. Whoever added this feature had to do so very little work compared to the payoff. It just takes the part after the colon and inserts it into a search URL for the corresponding service and opens that URL in the browser. It’s very convenient. None of this web search stuff comes up when you’re just searching for apps and there are no surprises.

https://archiveprogram.github.com/partners/

In remembrance of the fallen

Pure rent seeking. It’s not the only example. So many products have artificial defects deliberately added by the manufacturer so that they can then charge you to disable the defect.

It’s a catch 22. If everyone uses it, game companies get it shut down, and then it doesn’t exist, and then nobody uses it. The only existing methods of piracy are little known. That you’ve never heard of it is expected.

Borrow the book of it’s available and then pirate a digital copy. The physical book is available for someone else to use when you’re done with it, but you can still refer back to the book whenever you want or just sit around staring at it in adoration.

If you’re ever caught downloading knowledge, just say you’re training a neural network and point at your head.

They turned Windows into an IoT device. It’s your refrigerator with a TCP/IP stack and a touch screen bolted on the front. How many watts does the fridge use? Oh, I don’t know, but look, it has a digital calendar! How long does it take to cool items down? Who cares! You can use it to set reminders! When will I need to replace the gasket? What? I don’t know. But it can scan barcodes and send it all to the cloud. Isn’t that neat?! Cool, cool, but why does my fridge need to do that?

https://www.theregister.com/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/

Ah, yes, the unofficial anthem for the state of Michigan.

Off by one error

The administration didn’t threaten to take down the IA or investigate it or anything like that, so it’s not similar at all.

It’s conspiratorial to think the FBI is doing this to censor or hide something. archive.is is primarily used to get around paywalls. The most likely explanation is news sites complained to the FBI that their copyrights are being violated (which is true), so the FBI is investigating. They’ve had a problem with falling revenue for a decade or more at this point as everything went online and people expected to get instant access for free in contrast to print media.

Debian Science

I think they might be anticipating LLMs possibly being able to do a decent job at deobfuscation in the near future. This is an opportunity for Mojang to earn friend points. They might as well take credit for something that is going to happen anyway.