The country’s ministry in charge of consumer affairs said it blocked the websites as a precautionary measure pending an official investigation. This investigation will determine if the platforms violate Spain’s gambling laws. It’s set to complete within the next four months and could mandate that these companies require specific administrative licenses to operate.
Ride-share drivers for app-based companies such as Uber and Lyft have unionized in Massachusetts, forming what state officials and labor leaders said was the first officially recognized organization in the U.S. to represent such gig workers. The newly formed App Drivers Union received certification from the Massachusetts Department of Labor Relations on Friday to represent nearly 70,000 ride-share drivers operating as independent contractors in the state.
“It changes the game for ride-share workers across this country,” Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat, said at a rally with drivers and labor activists in Boston on Tuesday. The certification occurred after voters in November 2024 approved a ballot measure that created a novel framework to allow drivers for companies like Uber and Lyft to organize and bargain collectively over pay and benefits. That vote followed a years-long, nationwide battle over whether ride-share drivers should be considered independent contractors or employees entitled to benefits and wage protections.
In a letter to the national parliament published on Tuesday, State Secretary for Digital Economy Willemijn Aerdts said the national authority charged with screening investments had advised the government to block the acquisition. The purchase was seen as posing “a possible risk to the public interest.”Kyndryl said in a statement it was “extremely disappointed” about the decision. “The politicization of this process has overshadowed the clear and important benefits this transaction would have brought to Solvinity’s customers and Dutch citizens.”
The government on Monday decided to adopt the advice and block the acquisition, Aerdts said. “The Netherlands attaches great value to the presence of foreign, especially U.S.-based tech companies, and their added value to the Dutch economy and digital infrastructure, but it maintains, at the same time, an independent investment screening framework aimed at protecting the public interest and which applies equally to all investors, independent of their country of origin,” the letter read.
For those who don’t understand what DigiD is, it’s the identity verification system used by the Dutch government for… EVERYTHING. Want to change your health insurance? DigiD login. File your taxes? DigiD login. Register a change of address? DigiD login. Get a new driver’s license? DigiD login (after which you receive your new license and then use the app to link the new license to DigiD. Heck you want to get your local council to come and do a waste pick-up from your street - DigiD login.
The Netherlands is one of the most digitised countries in the world, but that comes of course with risks, they are very inflexible when the digital systems go down. That there wasn’t a legal mandate to keep this company under Dutch control is the most astounding thing that’s come out of this debate.
Looks like there is a review process in place. And it caught this move in time.
Not quite. This was more of an intervention. In fact the discussions over the past 6 months have largely been focused on figuring out how to actually block the sale and on what grounds. The final decision may even be questionable. Initially the competition authority wanted to intervene and couldn’t. The lower house attempted and failed. There was an attempt to move the contract but time didn’t allow so the contract was extended for a short period. That kicked off a legal fight where the courts also ruled that despite how bad of an idea this was there wasn’t really anything they could do to stop it.
The final deciding factor came from the BTI - who investigates business dealings with critical infrastructure providers. Solvinity wasn’t considered one since all they had was a contract to provide services, but it wasn’t really until that contract was extended due to the complexity of moving at short notice that someone convinced them they have jurisdiction to investigate, and now they’ve issued a legal opinion that caused the government to intervene on national security grounds.
There was no real process in this review. It was more of an “oh FAAAARK how can we stop this?” process.
To be clear there is a legal mandate but that is only to maintain the data within the country. The issue of potential foreign ownership didn’t really come into the existing law in any clearly defined way.
And how did they become a “major player” in just five years since they were founded?
You may recognise them under their previous name: IBM.
They were a major player from the day they existed. They birthed onto the New York Stock exchange as a privileged nepobaby with a birthday present of 75% of the Fortune 100 business as “existing” customers, an 90000 IBM employees..
Existing Control Panel installs will remain on users’ systems. NVIDIA says the old panel will only disappear after a clean driver installation. Users who still need it can continue to download it from the Microsoft Store, but NVIDIA will no longer add new features, fixes, or other changes.
The retirement currently applies to Game Ready and Studio Drivers. NVIDIA RTX PRO users will continue to receive Control Panel support until the company moves professional features to the NVIDIA app. For GeForce users, NVIDIA says the app now includes the modern functionality previously available through Control Panel. […] The classic panel is therefore not being removed from every system overnight. It is being moved into maintenance mode for GeForce users…
NVidia retires the entire RTX family of cards, citing lack of interest on the consumer markets, thus focusing on their new pet project, AI.
Fast, effective, included the nView Desktop Manager to include transparency and window-shade mode to any window, and it was under 100MB installed.
Why nvidia drivers are now larger than Windows XP itself is a mystery to me, and they’ve always been a concession that has gotten bigger, slower, and more confusing than what they replaced.
Assembly Bill 1856 (AB 1856), currently moving through California’s legislature ahead of committee reviews in June, would amend the state’s earlier age-assurance law by excluding software distributed under licenses that allow users to “copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” The proposed amendment specifically states: “Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.
The amendment follows months of backlash after California passed the original Assembly Bill 1043 (AB 1043), formally known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, in late 2025. The law sought to shift online age verification away from individual websites and apps and down to the operating-system level instead. Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user’s age or birth date during device setup, then expose an “age bracket signal” to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as “under 13,” “13-15,” “16-17,” and “18+,” immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems. […]
AB 1856 does not repeal the original Digital Age Assurance Act. Instead, it narrows the definition of who qualifies as an “operating system provider” under the law. Commercial platforms with proprietary app ecosystems could remain subject to California’s age-assurance requirements even if most open-source Linux distributions are ultimately exempted. California Assembly Member Buffy Wicks introduced the amendment on February 11, 2026. However, the open-source exemption language appeared in later revisions that began drawing attention across Linux and privacy communities. The latest version is dated May 18, 2026, and as of May 19, 2026, the bill was read a second time and ordered to third reading.
Blue state BS
Either the age check is very weak, or you have to provide your identity to the OS in a way that’s verifiable by somebody other than you, and completely disregards privacy. This is truly the dichotomy you’re dealing with here — pick one or the other. If it’s the former, then what’s the point of all of this?
I don’t see any way at all that this is workable. And assuming this happens anyways, does this mean your browser going to tell every website you visit what your age is upon request?
This should not be acceptable. Carve-outs are always temporary. Always. Do not give them an inch.
Wait ‘til they realize that Android is distributed under a license that allows people to copy, redistribute, and modify it.
As usual, a law created by people who didn’t think of the consequences then got modified to fix some of the worst consequences, but because they still did not think of the consequences, the modification created different consequences. And this is why we need better lawmakers.
Pope Leo XIV on Monday set out a sweeping vision for corporate executives, politicians and individuals who will shape and be shaped by the future of artificial intelligence, warning leaders to safeguard humanity from A.I.‘s most disruptive effects. Leo’s declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to “all people of good will” that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.Anthropic’s Christopher Olah said companies like his own need moral guidance to avoid being swayed by “a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.”
While emphasizing that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” Among other things, Leo called for:
- government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I.
- protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened
- education to help students think critically about the technology
- action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I.
- safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons.
Above all he emphasized the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all human beings. “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity,” he wrote. “This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,” he added.
Despite the Pope not being an AI authority, the list seems reasonable.
- We should want appropriate government regulation of AI.
- We should be concerned about people displaced by AI, as we are concerned about people who are displaced by any new technology.
- We should educate our children about AI.
- We should place boundaries around AI use for vice.
- We should draw boundaries around AI use in weapons.
So I don’t see a problem here.
People are treating AIs as God-like.
They are asking all kinds of questions, spiritual and existential.
Commonly assuming that the AI is all-knowing, all-seeing etc.
So there is a shift from the established God to the ones we have created.
No wonder he is worried.
People aren’t fearful of AI itself, they are fearful of the consequences, which really boils down to poverty.
Fear is AI is going to put people out of work and in America if you don’t have a job then you don’t have money and not having money really sucks.
We’re stressed out already with multiple recessions in the last 20 years, rising costs, a job market that’s gone loco (also partly a result of AI) and other factors. If people were secure in their homes, healthcare and livelihood I would imagine the fear of AI would be reduced and more philosophical.
All seems really short sighted. It’s like squeezing a balloon… doesn’t work unless it’s universally applied.
If you think the Pope should refrain from offering moral advice because some people may not follow it, I think you may have misunderstood how the Catholic Church works.
Kick back.
You can thank your life that many people took some of those incoherent ramblings of yours and did not actually kick back. That has to be the biggest mix of incoherent unconnected rubbish I’ve seen used to justify apathy and doing nothing. While I agree AI won’t end us let me address your points:
- No one beyond a few deranged lunatics thought the LHC was capable of generating a black hole.
- The Y2K bug was a real problem and thank christ no one took your advice to kick back and instead opted to spend countless night shifts making sure you slack lifestyle continues.
- No one beyond a few deranged lunatics through mobile phones cause cancer.
- Human cloning is a thing that isn’t done because it was regulated out of existence, not because we have difficulty with the tech. People didn’t kick back and addressed the issue.
- Microwaves did leak radiation. Early microwaves were a problem. They had poor door seals and no electrical interlocks. You could hurt yourself - and in the early 1970s there were documented cases of pacemakers sensing loops being disrupted by microwaves. Engineers didn’t kick back and addressed the issue.
- TV *HAS* rotted your brain - evidence: your post. The modern TV equivalent is social media, and that is actually causing people to do stupid things with fatal results.
- In the 1830s people did the experiment and quickly realised it wasn’t an issue and society moved on. We were *much* smarter back then. We looked at something, experimented and accepted the results. Comparatively we now live in a world where you’re quoting people thinking mobile phones cause cancer, despite literally every expert and every study showing it doesn’t.
- Nano machines ??? WTF?
- Nuclear reactors: Yeah they do, people listened to them and we no longer let for profit companies run wild doing whatever they want with nuclear reactors.
By all means I fully support your right to give no fucks about anything, but for the love of god man, don’t tell other people to do the same, they are keeping you alive!
This was SpaceX’s 60th orbital flight of the year, consisting of 59 Falcon 9 rockets and one Falcon Heavy rocket…On X.com SpaceX shared footage of the booster rocket landing, and a longer video showing Starship’s 12th test flight Friday.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, [Falcon 9 first stage] B1078 landed on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. This was the 151st landing for this vessel and the 614th booster landing to date for SpaceX.
Meanwhile, the second stage shut down eight minutes and 39 seconds into flight and entered a coast phase, before short second burn at T+52 minutes. The stack of Starlink satellites deployed 61 minutes and 26 seconds after launch.
What launch service could he even offer? Russia is so far beyond bankrupt that resuscitating roscosmos doesn’t belong anywhere on its radar right now. That’s also ignoring the fact that its technology is horridly out of date, and more importantly, its government funded business can’t even compete price wise with the American private sector.
Right now their only priority should be begging Ukraine for forgiveness. They can’t even afford to defend themselves anymore, let alone project power. After that they’ll have to figure out what to do about the demographic collapse they’ve already created. With any luck, they might be able to narrowly avoid famine after the war economy stops functioning, though it could very well take a miracle to do so.
Maybe they want us to believe that they will be a vertically integrated AI provider with data centers in space. I am highly doubtful about the latter; there certainly are business cases for having AI datacenters in space, but they are edge cases.
I have yet to hear of a remotely plausible business case for putting data centers into space. The only benefit is 24/7 solar power, but that benefit is more than offset by the cost of launching everything into orbit, plus the cost of keeping everything properly cooled, plus the cost of radiation-hardening everything, and finally the cost of maintaining hardware in space (or, more likely, the cost of periodically having to write off the entire investment and build and launch new replacement hardware).
Unless Musk is trying to corner the market for AI-generated kiddie-porn (or something similarly illegal that needs to be operated beyond the reach of Earthly authorities), his ground-based competitors will undercut his pricing by a factor of 100, and he therefore won’t have a viable product to sell.
Not to mention the pollution from the launches. Counting down the years until Kessler kicks in.
That’s nothing compared to ignorance on the topic. Starlink satellites re-enter the atmosphere within about 5-6 years. They leave zero space junk and don’t contribute to Kessler Syndrome. They are in too low of an orbit.
Also give the low orbit, the relative efficiency of spacex launches, and the number of satellites in a payload per launch it turns out each Starlink satellite produces 340/25/5 = 2.72 Tonnes CO2 / year, or about half as much as your car. The entire Starlink program produces less emissions than a tiny tiny country town near bumfuck nowhere, Wisconsin.
There’s so many problems with Starlink, how did you pick the two things that are completely irrelevant to complain about?
All true, but there is a measurable increase in pollution in the upper atmosphere now, some from launches, and most from all the satellite constellations burning up all the time. It’s not as if these satellites just burn up to nothing. They leave behind all sorts of metals in the upper atmosphere, especially aluminum and magnesium compounds. It’s a bit reckless. From what I read some of these particles might act as cooling agents, so hey it’s all good. Nevermind the kerosene soot that lingers for years in the upper atmosphere after every spaceX launch. And other compounds damage ozone. We really have no idea how these effects will play out.
Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000… By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success — topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions — more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success…
The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren’t constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy.
Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a “tech layoff tracker” that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. “I was on Blind five days a week,” said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. “I was trying to get prepared mentally,” she said.
Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers’ reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.
If, if we get our heads straight about money, I predict that by ad 2000, or sooner, no one will pay taxes, no one will carry cash, utilities will be free, and everyone will carry a general credit card. This card will be valid up to each individual’s share in a guaranteed basic income or national dividend, issued free, beyond which he may still earn anything more that he desires by an art or craft, profession or trade that has not been displaced by automation. (For detailed information on the mechanics of such an economy, the reader should refer to Robert Theobald’s Challenge of Abundance and Free Men and Free Markets, and also to a series of essays that he has edited, The Guaranteed Income. Theobald is an avant–garde economist on the faculty of Columbia University.)
read the whole thing here in Playboy of all places: https://galacticjourney.org/st…
This same shit has been going on all along and some people are just now discovering it. Even the scale isn’t really different. We’re in a very specific tech bubble, so very specific sectors are hiring, and the others are firing as the air is sucked out of the room. When the bubble collapses, the sector which has done the crazy hiring will have mass layoffs, and the other sectors will hire again.
The truth is that no one in tech should ever feel secure, because some new development which can just be highly marketable bullshit can come along and fuck up all of the markets because nobody has to come up with a sustainable good idea to get rich any more because of the nature of the stock market. It’s a game for rich people played with our money as the counters and they give zero fucks about the impact to anyone but themselves. That was always true, but as the stock market has become ever more divorced from reality, it does more damage to people who still have to live there, i.e. those of us who work for a living.
The referenced Washington Post article is based on US government statistics, and if you believe those statistics, I have a bridge to sell you. The
Civil servants have been fired for delivering “bad” numbers. You think the remaining staffers are going to look for things that might make the numbers look bad?
One more thing this administration has corrupted: economic statistics.
You clearly haven’t used AI for complex tasks.
My company thinks AI can be used to single-handedly implement Jira tickets.
On the first attempt, Claude Code spit out a bunch of stuff, built a screen and some APIs, and when the developer ran the code, the screen did nothing. After only a week of dozens of revisions, he got it to work.
So then he went to ticket #2, to implement a simple API. Claude spit out 14,000 lines of code, modifying 5 components that had nothing to do with the request.
Each AI run took from half an hour, to hours, not just 3 minutes.
Your teenager might need hand-holding, but not to that extent. If they did, you should find a different job for the teenager. And for the AI.
AI is good at being spoon-fed coding tasks by a developer. It’s not good for wholesale changes, not even close.
Some $25m (£18.6m) in prize money is up for grabs — with cash prizes for winners… The drugs they use must be legal, and approved by the Federal Drug Administration. But substances like testosterone and human growth hormone — banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency — are not only celebrated here, they’re encouraged and for sale…“The project was founded by entrepreneurs Aron D’Souza and Maximilian Martin in 2023,” the artidcle points out, “and has attracted backing from prominent investors including billionaire Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.”
Health experts warn that anabolic steroids and growth hormones can cause strokes and cardiovascular damage, among other risks. Event organisers claim Enhanced will push the limits of human performance while critics, especially in the Olympic movement, dismiss it as an affront to the spirit and founding principles of competitive sport…
Earlier this month, the Enhanced Group — the company behind the competition — began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. And the competition is seemingly being treated as an opportunity for Enhanced to sell performance-enhancing medicine and supplements online.
Enhanced did not break down what specific athletes used which drugs, but they announced on Wednesday in the lead-up to the event that 91% of the athletes competing used testosterone or testosterone esters, 79% used human growth hormone, and 62% used stimulants, such as adderall…
The games have been largely panned by outside medical experts and sports governing bodies. Multiple recent studies assess the harm surrounding the Enhanced Games. Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, called the games a “dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle” in a statement. The International Olympic Committee said the games are a “betrayal of everything that we stand for.” The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) last year urged U.S. authorities to stop the games. The International Federation of Sports Medicine said in 2024 that they see the medical oversight as “insufficient” to support the athletes.
.... Darwin award!
You will only be able to break them with “enhancement” IN COMBINATION WITH TALENT and TRAINING / you need to be already in the upper echelon.
So I think the enhancement games will quickly die off pure boredom.
The opening ceremonies to be hosted by Lance Armtrong, Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Sammy Sosa. Entertainment provided by the East German Women’s Shotput team.
The order mandates agencies to explore a range of policy options, including severance standards, expanded unemployment insurance, job retraining programs aimed specifically at white-collar workers, worker ownership models and a concept the governor called “universal basic capital,” giving all residents a stake in assets such as corporate stocks, bonds or wealth funds…The article notes that after signing the bill the governor shared this comment on X.com. “California will pursue new policies that make sure working Californians — not just Big Tech — benefit from the wealth and breakthroughs coming out of this space.”
Tom Kemp, executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency, applauded the fact that the order named data privacy as a consumer protection concern and highlighted the CPPA’s automated decision-making technology regulations, which he called “the nation’s most comprehensive.” Others are more skeptical. “Catastrophic job loss from AI is not inevitable, it’s a political choice,” Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO, wrote in a statement. However, Gonzalez noted one area of genuine agreement: the order’s emphasis on collective bargaining as a tool for protecting workers from AI displacement…
According to Stanford HAI’s 2026 AI Index, software developers ages 22 to 25 are among those most likely to see their skills made redundant earliest. This year, U.S. employment fell nearly 20% from 2024, even as headcount for older developers continued to grow. Following the job cuts announced at Meta, a union of Alphabet workers in the U.S. and Canada released a statement that suggests Silicon Valley’s own labor force may seek to organize… “It’s undeniable that our whole industry is being transformed by the corporate push to adopt new AI tools,” [Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Local 9009 said in a statement]. “It’s hard not to feel anxiety and fear when we can see more and more tech companies cutting huge portions of their workforce both in anticipation of replacing them with AI, and to fund their multi-billion-dollar bets on AI as the future of the industry…”
In February, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Gonzalez delivered what amounted to an ultimatum to Newsom: regulate AI or lose labor’s support for any future presidential run. Shuler called a potential AI-driven economic collapse a coming “crisis.” In August 2025, Newsom announced a partnership with Google, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe to expand AI education in California schools and community colleges, a workforce preparation push that now looks like a precursor to Thursday’s more sweeping order.
Newsom telegraphed Thursday’s order earlier this week, when he appeared at the Center for American Progress IDEAS Conference in Washington. “Businesses are going to make a fortune, and that’s why you cannot continue to have a payroll tax system that taxes jobs and then subsidizes automation.”
Have to love the left, always wanting to seize and give away someone else’s stuff.
Absolutely, much better for everyone if they just got rid of the peasants
And he is a careerist wife cheater
Unlike that tower of morality Trump who has cheated on all three of his wives, assaulted multiple women, and is a pedo.
Check your beliefs, it is the right wingnuts that are grabbing everyone else stuff and giving it away to themselves. What do you think the Big Stupid Bill was all about? Girl Scout cookies? Look at what el Bunko is going with his Monuments to his Ego. Or his stealing $1.76 Billion to pay off his thugs. Or his turning bits and bobs of the Fed. Government over to his rich friends for tidy little kickback under the table. Or protecting the Oil and Gas industry to keep a lock on U.S. energy markets and those big fat contributions to Republicans flowing, minus bit off the top for his own bank account.
I’m sure the poor will belly right up the corporate stocks, bonds, and wealth funds will all the money the rich haven’t yet taken from them. Tell you what, quit your job, move to Smalltown, U.S.A., try to find a job, and attempt to make ends meet. Oh, and you’ll be wanting to pay for your health insurance by yourself.
A humanoid robot spotted marching up and down the Croisette seemed to sum up the worst AI fears of the film industry — the machines have arrived and they are taking your place. But inside the Palais and the market tents, the conversation over artificial intelligence had moved beyond fear into something more like uneasy acceptance. Fighting AI “is a battle we will lose,” said Demi Moore, a Cannes jury member this year, at the festival’s opening press conference, suggesting the film industry needs to “find ways in which we can work with it.”
That’s not the official Cannes line. The festival has banned films using generative artificial intelligence from its competition lineup. But at the Cannes film market, and in discussions at industry events over the past two weeks, the tone has shifted. AI-friendly tech giant Meta signed on as an official partner to the festival in a multiyear deal. Its AI tools were used to help produce an [out of competition] festival entry: Steven Soderbergh’s documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview. [Meta’s press release announcing the partnership touts “our creator partnerships,” their Meta AI assistant, and “our latest AI and wearable technologies” including Ray-Ban Meta AI features for smartglasses like “AI-powered translations that break down language barriers in real-time”.] At the Marché du Film [film market], there was an “AI for Talent Summit” that took the AI revolution as given, focusing instead on ethical AI use, data sovereignty and on the ways the technology can be used to enhance, rather than replace, creativity.
For the indie film industry, it felt like a turning point.
AI video technology is still nowhere even remotely near just “click a button and take what it spits out”. I don’t know how to break this to anyone here, but you’re not just going to go to some video generation site and turn out Woodnuts without extensive skill about AI video tools themselves and a wide range of traditional video production tools, and without spending weeks to months and significant financial expense on the project.
Even if / when this changes, video production is still always going to be limited by the human at hand. Most people’s movie ideas, plotting, scripting, directing, etc frankly will be terrible. The slop in this case is the human, not the tool.
With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBSD, FreeBSD Foundation’s Executive Director has been trying to daily drive FreeBSD on laptops…
With the Framework Laptop, the touchscreen “just worked” as did other basic functionality from the KDE desktop on FreeBSD, including peripherals like a wireless mouse. Among the challenges were Zoom failing for video calls but eventually working, the web camera took steps to enable, and Microsoft Teams only partially worked. With the help of online resources, ultimately she was able to succeed in her journey of running FreeBSD daily on a laptop.
I’m not sure what you mean by “poorly” and “constant handholding”? Its full blown KDE on a very capable base operating system. Its at the point where Steam gaming is working, it has all the great server/developer tools needed for productivity, and pretty much any F/OSS app you can name on Linux is also on FreeBSD, but without most of the headaches of modern Linux.
Having more options for end-users is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I think it’s great we have FreeBSD as a more “unix-like” operating system that is freely available and of solid quality. I remember playing with FBSD 20 years ago and even then, it felt pretty solid and would of very likely made a great server platform, depending on your particular service needs.
Trying to use it on a laptop or as my main desktop driver seems like a step to far but then again, that entirely depends on what you need it to do. If you can get it to work with your hardware and it has the apps you need for your work flow, then why not!
If I used my laptop regularly, I might very well try out BSD just to feed them some data. I sort of feel one year, possibly The Year Of The Linux Desktop, I’ll be moving over to BSD to escape the enshitification of Linux. I could probably do that now if I didn’t want to play games. It’s rather ironic, 20 years ago, I could not move over to Linux because “games” and now I can’t move over to BSD because of “games”.
“Microsoft Teams only partially worked”.
No surprise. Teams only partly works on Windows.
The differences b/w the 3 BSDs are due to their different goals. NetBSD tries to be there on the widest assortment of hardware, from 1970s computers, and so it deliberately doesn’t include features that can’t be easily ported to all of them. OpenBSD is security obsessed, so disables any features that could be potential attack vectors. FreeBSD is the one most people might gravitate towards, since it’s the one that tries to be competitive w/ Linux
Apt? Is that the only package manager in Linux? RedHat has rpm/yumm last I checked, Arch has pacman and Gentoo or Slackware has something else I forget. Are you sure that your favorite Linux package is supported by the package manager of your distro?
I’ve always had a Unix desktop. I’ve had SunOS, Ultrix, OSF/1, Irix, Solaris, Linux, MacOSX, Windows w/ cygwin. I had email, word processing, spreadsheets. Internet arrived with Mosaic while I was on SunOS.
The announcement only appeared this week, giving the Linux community barely any warning before a service that has been tied to Ubuntu support culture for years suddenly disappears.
Ubuntu Pastebin has long been used for sharing logs, crash reports, config files, and terminal output across IRC, Ask Ubuntu, forums, bug reports, Reddit, and countless troubleshooting guides scattered around the internet. The bigger concern is link rot. Once the shutdown happens, years of old support discussions could lose critical debugging information overnight. Community members have already pointed out that some Ubuntu packages and scripts still reference paste.ubuntu.com directly.
While it is understandable that aging services eventually get retired, the extremely short transition period is rubbing many Linux users the wrong way, especially in a community where old documentation and archived troubleshooting threads still regularly help people solve problems a decade later.
I mean, aren’t there plenty of sites which offer pretty much the same thing?
The new admins don’t know how to maintain a simple file server anymore.
They can vibe code something else to use the power though.
And funny that this coincides with my starting to move my servers from Ubuntu Server to Debian. I don’t want to trust a company that, on May 22, announces the shutdown of a service on May 31 that was supposed to store data for up to one year (guaranteed or not)…
With Firefox’s browser engine, Gecko, now supporting Web Serial, users can now connect, code, configure, and control compatible hardware directly from the browser in many workflows, often without additional software or complicated setup…Mozilla’s "Hacks” blog demonstrates with an Adafruit ESP32-S2 based board “where messages sent from web code can be directly displayed on the device over Web Serial.”
As part of this week’s launch, Adafruit, one of the internet’s most beloved open-source hardware communities, is collaborating with us to test and validate what browser-based hardware development can look like in Firefox with Web Serial support… With Web Serial support in Firefox 151, Adafruit’s browser-based hardware workflows now work directly in Firefox as well, with no additional software or complicated setup required for many projects. We invite you to give it a try…
We want the web to be open, flexible, and shaped by the diversity of people building on it. If you’re wiring up your first board, experimenting with hardware projects, or dusting off an old electronics kit, give Adafruit and Web Serial in Firefox a try. Build something amazing. Make something useful. Tell us what works. Tell us what breaks. Most of all, make it your own.
I do love it when malware advert javascripts can upload random new firmware updates into my mouse and keyboard turning them into stealth keyloggers. This is great.
This feels like when Flash sandbox breaks became a thing, but worse. At least in those days we got smooth fullscreen vector animations and games to enjoy. I’d rather Flash had just been bloody fixed instead of browsers themselves becoming Shit Flash But Holy Cow It Runs Worse And Gets Worse.
…a way to freeze Internet explorer was by inserting a < img src=lpt1: > tag in the html code.
All keyboards are serial. In fact, almost every keyboard ever is a giant parallel to serial convertor.
[B]ox office analysts are mixed on the results. On one hand, it’s significant for any film to debut above $100 million in post-pandemic times. On the other, “Star Wars” is one of Hollywood’s preeminent film properties, so there’s an expectation of a certain level of box office. And this start is the worst for “Star Wars” since Disney bought the franchise in 2012.CNBC cites reports 41% of tickets were sold for more expensive large-format screenings like IMAX and DolbyCinema.
The new film is … fine. It’s an average Star Wars outing, and it will give families a solid Memorial Day Weekend entertainment option. It’s just not the spectacular home run that might have helped launch the flagging franchise into an exciting new era, and diehard Star Wars fans hoping for more are probably going to be disappointed.Of course, not everyone agrees. “How many nails can we realistically drive into Star Wars’s coffin before it’s time to give up hope of resuscitation?” writes Clarisse Loughrey for The Independent, calling it "the dullest and most inconsequential ‘Star Wars’ ever made.” (She argues that the movie “stitches together what is clearly three episodes of the previously planned fourth season of The Mandalorian and calls it a day. There’s not a whiff of effort here.”)
I’m on record as despising the word “content,” which was pushed by early tech moguls to devalue art as interchangeable goo in a virtual pipeline, but this washed-out, video-game-looking movie, with its murky night scenes and lack of visual depth, deserves the word. You’ve seen everything in it before, from the equipment, spacecraft, armor, and tactical maneuvers to the species and various types of terrain (earthlike, but cartoony)…
Even Grogu taxes our patience. Some of his cute bits could’ve ended with him facing the camera and doing jazz hands.
subject box. It’s called the subject box, not the start-of-comment box.
Disney’s studios produce content that gets people to visit their theme parks. The theme parks are still packed, at least from what I’ve seen. So, mission accomplished.
You pretty much have to produce content that follows an established formula or audiences won’t like it.
Nonsense. Rogue One killed everyone off and was pretty dark, but the numerous Star Wars fans I personally know think it’s one of the very best movies in the whole franchise. RT has it at #5 of 12 movies:
https://editorial.rottentomato…
I’m not even that big of a fan and think Rogue One is one of the best in the franchise. It took a throw away line and told the story of the cost the rebellion paid to get the files.
I watched The Mandalorian season 1 and enjoyed it.
I watched The Mandalorian season 2 and … yeah, it was good but I was mildly disappointed in the whole “you should know these characters from other Star Wars media, otherwise they are mildly uninteresting side characters that everyone else is raving about for some reason” thing.
Then .... The Mandalorian season 3 - holy fuck. You had to actually watch an entirely different season of something else first in order to pick this one up, otherwise the ending to season 2 and the start of season 3 do not join up at all. Im out. Im not bouncing between different things just to maintain a hope in hell of understanding whats going on.
Smart move
The Dutch have always been smart and pragmatic, and that tradition continues here.
benefits this transaction would have brought to Solvinity’s customers and Dutch citizens.
The Dutch have always been plain-spoken and excellent at detecting bullshit, and that tradition continues here.