To intimidate. They're probably quite aware they'll lose in court. But in the mean time they might discourage some folks from turning out on the street.
We’ve seen it documented before that they do indeed have a facial recognition database. Good news is it doesn’t seem all that reliable so who knows who is being labelled.
Author is the CEO of an SEO company and their submission history is almost exclusively political posts. Can only assume is bait to get some good incoming link juice. Flagged and moving on.
Minidiscs had a data capacity of around 150MB, IIRC. By that point Zip drives were already very common so you'd need a compelling reason for MD and I just don't think one was there.
I know it’s just a joke but the “ll” in Welsh is a completely distinct character in the Welsh alphabet and doesn’t sound anything like “l”, nor is it used as a substitute for l. It’s rarely used but it has its own Middle-Welsh character: ỻ
I was processing “precise location data” a decade ago at work - nothing to do with the article at all. the OP comment was made as general “what is there left” and it ain’t precise location data
Not only that, they did it with the intention of overturning elections:
> The unnamed employees secretly conferred with a political advocacy group about a request to match Social Security data with state voter rolls to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States,"
>they did it with the intention of overturning elections:
>[...] to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States,"
The actual election fraud allegations are probably spurious, but regardless we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself. The badness comes from inappropriate access to the data, not trying to find evidence of fraud.
In the legal realm, journalist and legal analyst Emily Bazelon analyzes the legal "presumption of regularity" which has been trashed by the current administration.
How many allegations of fraud need to be taken to court and dismissed before it’s no longer conceivable that this is a good faith non-partisan search for evidence of fraud?
Sure, and my point is that we shouldn't apologize for people deliberately "investigating" bogus allegations on the grounds that investigating legitimate allegations is a good thing.
>Sure, and my point is that we shouldn't apologize for people deliberately "investigating" bogus allegations
But I'm not "apologizing" for them? I'm pushing back on OP's phrasing of "they did it with the intention of overturning elections". It's possible to push back on some person's criticism of [bad guy] without being accused of "apologizing" for [bad guy].
From my original comment:
>we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself
You said "The badness comes from inappropriate access to the data, not trying to find evidence of fraud." I disagree. I think that a blatantly bad faith partisan investigation demanded by a politician who stands for gain and executed by public servants would be bad even if they didn't inappropriately access this data. Both things are bad and would be still be bad independent of one another.
>I think that a blatantly bad faith partisan investigation
Sounds like you agree with me, because you're still not objecting to my original premise of "we shouldn't be trying imply that intending to overturn elections in cases of fraud is bad in and of itself". You might think "bad faith partisan investigation" is bad, but not the act of trying to overturn elections itself.
You explicitly applied it to this investigation, saying the investigation itself was not bad. If you intend to weaken your claim to "not all conceivable investigations of election fraud are bad," then yes, I agree, but that's such an extraneous comment that I would question the intent of including it.
We don't have to examine every situation in the theoretical. We can pay attention to context. These are not good faith actors, they are not seeking the truth.
Right, I'm not trying to argue that the actions in this case are praiseworthy, only that the OP is misidentifying the source of the badness. That's important, because if we establish a pattern of "overturning elections are bad", then that will come back to bite us when there actually is a legitimate reason for overturning elections.
Let me guess. You're the kind of guy who looks at the videos of unoccupied daycare centers and then trundles out words like 'bad faith" to rationalize ignoring it. Because no one in my tribe would ever do something wrong.
Sorry, if I'm so partisan that I don't trust the guy spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars to elect one party to be an impartial jury on voter fraud.
But yes, yes we should have an impartial jury look for evidence of voter fraud.
IIRC ReactOS uses and contributes heavily to WINE. So in many ways your #3 isn't far from using ReactOS, and if done correctly it'll be friendlier for the average person than Linux itself.
No, the Wine developers refuse to accept contributions from ReactOS developers or even people who have seen ReactOS code[0]. So any improvements go one way only.
Of course not. You would be surprised how many developers don't even consider using an LLM in their workflow, myself included. Can't wait for this hype to end.
Firstly, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is profitable, by a wide margin — investors are going to get impatient at some point.
Secondly, people that aren't enthusiastic about this whole thing are already experiencing something of an AI fatigue with all the AI features violently shoved into them by most software products they use. Being involuntarily subjected to slop in various online spaces can't be good either.
Thirdly, remember NFTs? So many people swore they were The Future™... until they weren't. But at least in that case it was much more obvious how stupid the whole idea is. The scale of the hype was also several orders of magnitude less.
Even if all major provides close down, it doesn't remove what's already out there. Glm / minimax / deepseek / gpt-oss may not be at the same level as current frontier, but you can download them and they're still very capable.
Crazy stupid ideas like cars with only touchscreens have still taken a decade to come in and then to get considered ill-advised even though anyone driving a car could tell how bad of an interface it is. We are still not fully out through the other side.
So while OpenAI or Anthropic are maybe not profitable today, they've got at least 5 years to figure it out. And there is already talk of inserting ads into the "chat", but hopefully that does not work!
But really, LLMs are useful (yes, sometimes only in appearance, but sometimes for real), and with that, there will continue to be investment into them until they are made profitable.
I'm saying nothing, i posted the link of the Wine developers claim for why not accepting contributions by ReactOS developers since the post i replied to wrote that ReactOS contributed to Wine.
I believe the integrity of ReactOS's clean room reverse engineering has been called into question in the past when it was found that there were some header or code files with sections that matched leaked Windows Server 2003 code or something like that. Can't recall for sure though.
"In January 2006, concerns grew about contributors having access to leaked Windows source code and possibly using this leaked source code in their contributions. In response, Steven Edwards strengthened the project’s intellectual property policy and the project made the difficult decision to audit the existing source code and temporarily freeze contributions."
The allegations have been taken seriously and since then the procedure for accepting contributions include measures to prevent such further events from occurring. If you or anyone else happen to have any plausible suspicion, then please report it to the ReactOS team, otherwise keeping alive this kind of vague and uncertain connection between some Windows code leakage and ReactOS fits the very definition of FUD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt Please stop.
>it'll be friendlier for the average person than Linux itself.
I think the myth that Windows is easier needs to die. The builds targeted at Windows users are very easy to use; You would likely go into the Command Prompt as much as you would with Windows, and the "average person" spends more time on their non-windows phone than they do in Windows.
I am a 30+ years Windows developer, who thought he would never move, but who migrated literally a week ago, the migration was surprisingly painless and the new system feels much more friendly, and surprisingly, more stable. I wrote it up on my blog, and was going to follow it up with another post about all the annoyances in my first full week, but they were so petty I didn't bother.
You are still in the honeymoon phase. I see a lot of those blogpost in the last months.
In a few weeks you will bump into something that isn't simple and friendly and you will curse that stupid linux. Something that trivially works in windows and is impossible or insanely hard in linux. That is often the time people go back. Old habits die hard.
But still you are 100% right. Windows is not easier. I know because I went from dos to linux and only occasionally dabbled in windows. And I have exactly the same sort of trouble as soon as I try to do something non trivial in windows. Including bumping into stuff that should be trivial but suddenly is impossible or insanely hard.
For years I have seen people say that windows is easier, while actually windows is just more familiar.
My (completely non computer savvy) parents and in-laws are on ubuntu/mint since 2009 and it was the best decision ever to switch them over. And they don't understand why people say linux is hard either (though my father in law still calls it 'Ubantu Linox' for some reason :-P )
At the start I had a small doubt if I should push them to macOS (OSX at the time) as then apple's fanatical dedication to userfriendlyness paid off. But I decided against it because I didn't feel like paying apple prices for my own hardware and it seemed ill advised to manage their systems while not using it myself. I'm very glad about that because apple has gone downhill immensely since ~2009 (imo)
I agree. One can just install Linux Mint or Fedora or anything and then Linux is just as friendly to use. You got a desktop, you can use your mouse to start up the browser, install applications with a mouse click, and so forth. You could do without opening up the terminal. Functionally the same as using Windows.
My parents, and my wife's parents, have been doing just that without any trouble whatsoever.
Just browse to netflix.com and log in. Not any different than in windows.
My parents use mail, firefox and libreoffice writer. That's about all they need and it works fine and is way more stable and hasslefree on linux than when it was when they were still using windows (admittedly quite long ago).
And if you are talking about seeing people install the OS, people can't do that for windows either.
It certainly is, because I still don't see GNU/Linux desktops on sale, other than the short lived netbooks movement.
So normal people have stores with other people that they can talk to when they have problems, or just drag their computer into the store.
With Linux it is always the relative that happens to be around, or drive in on purpose, and had to manually install the <insert favourite distro> of the day.
> With Linux it is always the relative that happens to be around
That's certainly true. And it's a chicken-vs-egg problem that's hard to solve. But it doesn't really have anything to do with which system is easier to use. It has much more to do with Microsoft's past unfair business practices (asking shops more for windows licenses if they happened to sell computers with something else than windows on it comes to mind) and the slowness of retail in adapting. Selling computers is way down (most people don't need more than a tablet/phone), selling in physical stores is way down (has moved online). Shops are not going to spend money on training their salespeople in linux. Most of the time they won't even really know windows.
And of course retail GNU/Linux machines that cost 1/4 of a cheap Apple Mac and yet have outsold them by revenue not number of units for nearly a decade now:
Yes this is absolutely happening. This is a real international market with sales in the hundreds of millions of units. This is not some tiny obscure niche that can be skipped over.
You are so eager to reply that you haven't even read the whole comment.
> So normal people have stores with other people that they can talk to when they have problems, or just drag their computer into the store.
Which of those online stores have a physical address for the normal people to do as per my comment?
Linux forums have enough complaints about those fairly prominent Linux-only vendors, even though they are suppose to control the whole stack.
And they also fall into each having their own <favourite distro>, the other part of the comment that you missed as well.
Normal people aren't using SteamDecks for their daily computing activities.
I use Linux in various forms since 1995, and yet I am tired from trying out such alternatives, the only things that makes me consider it again is breaking the dependency on US tech, and even that isn't really happening, given how much from Linux contributions are on the pockets from US Big Tech.
> You are so eager to reply that you haven't even read the whole comment.
Of course I did. I didn't address your objections because I think they don't hold up, that is why.
> Which of those online stores have a physical address for the normal people to do as per my comment?
Leaving out Apple as computers are not its primary product line any more... that leaves Lenovo, the biggest PC vendor in the world, followed by HP, Dell, Asus, Acer.
Only Apple has retail shops worldwide. I do not know of physical stores for any of the others. Maybe some did once, years ago, but that stuff is fading away and dying now. It's all going online.
You can certainly buy Chromebooks in physical stores. Do they fix them? Only warranty repairs, but the point of Chromebooks is that you don't keep your stuff on them, and you don't upgrade them. Rightly or wrongly (that is, mostly wrongly) they are disposable tech.
It is perfectly possible to buy a computer with Linux on it: a choice of Linuxes, from a choice of vendors, in almost any country. No you can't walk into a shop and try it, but you mostly can't from any vendor. Online sales are the default for many things now. No you can't walk into the vendor's shop and get it fixed, but you can't for any of global PC brands either.
If you want that, go to a local small business. If you want Linux, go to a local small business. Same thing.
Sure there are different flavours and distros. That is _not_ a weakness of Linux. Choice is a good thing, even if sometimes it is scary. You can choose your toothpaste and your clothes and your car as well. We manage.
> I wrote it up on my blog, and was going to follow it up with another post about all the annoyances in my first full week, but they were so petty I didn't bother.
This isn't really my arena, but I did happen to recently compare the implementation of ReactOS's RTL (Run Time Library) path routines [0] with Wine's implementation [1].
ReactOS covers a lot more of the Windows API than Wine does (3x the line count and defines a lot more routines like 'RtlDoesFileExists_UstrEx'). Now, this is not supposed to be a public API and should only be used by Windows internally, as I understand it.
But it is an example of where ReactOS covers a lot more API than Wine does or probably ever will, by design. To whom (if anyone) this matters, I'm not sure.
That's an interesting data point. I wonder if there is a hard technical reason why that logic could not be added to WINE, or if the WINE maintainers made a decision not to implement similar functionality.
There is not a hard technical reason, just different goals. WINE is a compatibility layer to run Windows apps, and thus most improvements end up fixing an issue with a particular Windows application. It turns out that most Windows applications are somewhat well-behaved and restrict themselves to calling public win32 APIs and public DLL functions, so implementing 100% coverage of internal APIs wouldn't accomplish much beyond exposing the project to accusations of copyright infringement.
IIRC, there is also US court precedent (maybe Sony v. Connectix?) that protects the practice of reverse-engineering external hardware/software systems that programs use in order to facilitate compatibility. WINE risks losing this protection if they stray outside of APIs known to be used (or are otherwise required) by applications.
There's also another partial Win32 reimplementation in retrowin32, with the different goal of being a Windows emulator for the web, not for Linux or as alternate OS, at https://evmar.github.io/retrowin32/ It thus has an even more sparse path/fileapi.h implementation [2] than WINE and ReactOS. Written in Rust.
That's (part of) my point. A project like ReactOS which clones Windows down to the kernel level solves for a very small set of practical use cases which are not covered by real Windows, or Linux+WINE.
It's worth noting that 30 years ago, there was a definite advantage to an open source operating system which could reuse proprietary Windows drivers - even Linux had a mechanism for using Windows drivers for certain types of hardware. Nowadays, Linux provides excellent support for modern PC hardware with little to no tinkering required in most cases. I have seen many cases where Linux provided full support out-of-the-box for a computer, whereas Windows required drivers to be downloaded and installed.
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