Posts by BasicReality

If you want into Anthropic's Claude club, you may have to show ID

A regulation I can get behind, start banning these companies from age verification & ID checks. Companies like Persona should be run out of business.

Red Hat RHELocates its Chinese engineering team to India

Good move, but I'd still rather see those jobs come back to America instead. Getting out of China is always a good move though.

FCC says it's making it easier for US telcos to ditch legacy lines

Re: Classic false choice

Yep, very happy with it all, Elon doing what was right, acquiring Twitter to keep free speech available, helping get Trump back in. All good things. Funny, I hate electric cars, so can't support him on Tesla, but the robotics part looks interesting. SpaceX, Starlink, xAI, Doge, all good things though.

Re: Classic false choice

Storms knock down copper lines too. But they do have the advantage of their own power system.

Re: Classic false choice

I lived in a place that had no services. Copper phone line was all that was offered, and it didin't work. Cell service barely worked standing outside, not anything indoors. I've lived it. No, you can take your bullshit about this being some right and shove it. I suffered through HughesNet's garbage until Starlink became an option. No one has a "right" to service, you pay for what's available. Thanks to Elon, those places are finally able to get something decent. I had 100-200Mbps regularly with it. A private company, not the government, came up with the solution to this crap. Get the government out of the damned way.

Atlassian to shed ten percent of staff, because AI

They should shed the rest and close up operations. Would be a huge benefit.

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Very much, we should have 8 years of it after this one, it'll be great times for this country. Finally getting on the right track again.

America leads, the rest of the world becomes irrelevant.

Microsoft Authenticator to nuke Entra creds on rooted and jailbroken phones

Re: Need a new TOTP then

It says work or school accounts. Unfortunately you're stuck with this crap if the organization wants to use it.

JetBrains launches AI agent IDE built on the corpse of abandoned Fleet

I use Rider every day. It and the other IDE's are great. Tried Fleet, terrible product. Air already feels irrelevant. Just the AI systems being well integrated to the existing IDE's is enough, as long as they keep the option to remove it for those who don't want it.

Mystery outage behind US airline JetBlue asking FAA to ground its flights

Probably some Windows update issue.

Musk's Grok sparks outrage after chatbot makes offensive jibes about football disasters

Compare the amount of outrage between the two. I just read the story on Gemini encouraging mass killing and a suicide last week on another site, wasn't even mentioned here. Any little thing people find offensive from Grok gets tons of reporting, but the others are barely mentioned. It's just this anti Elon sentiment out there. Grok doesn't conform to the general worldview, it's not right wing, but it's more right wing than the others and gets attacked constantly for it.

Grok says something people don't like, the world melts down. Governments make threats of investigations, sites write endless stories attacking them.

Gemini and ChatGPT openly talk people into killing themselves, no one cares. Gemini's latest even tried talking the person into committing mass murder before their suicide.

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

California, Colorado, New York, funny, all blue states, but of course Trump is the fascist. It's always been the left to worry about. They'd love to get rid of any form of privacy, so they can enforce speech regulations on people.

Gram: Zed, but with AI and chat features removed

Another damned fork, this is why open source has such a hard time getting ahead. Zed actually added an option in their settings a little while back that simply turns off all the AI stuff. Unlike MS, they handled that properly.

Firefox 149 beta develops a split personality

Sounds like they're finally trying to catch up to Vivaldi. They've been the best for a while when it comes to those types of features, I still prefer using another browser overall, but have to admit they're ahead of the rest on that.

Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

The interns wrote it, the distinguished VP analyst's just put their names on and took the credit.

Reusable rockets will never work either.

Linus Torvalds: Someone ‘more competent who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens’ will take over Linux one day

Re: 19.19

It's perfectly reasonable. It's how you say the date. Today is February 23rd, 2026. Month, day, year.

That said, with working with dates on the computer, I'm perfectly happy to use the YYYYMMDD format, it's the best way to get a computer to organize dates correctly.

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

Dismiss the charges, arrest the officer who sent it in his place.

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

Fair enough. I'll stick to Brave though. Build in ad blocking is fantastic.

Was Google actually right about the new system being ok? Damn.

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

One man with his trusty copilot will fix their problems.

Workday reveals around 400 staff soon won't have to work another day

Our company uses Workday. Best thing they could do would be lay the rest of them off and close the doors.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

"And then, yes, let's think about some proper, solid and sovereign European technological infrastructure. Public funding = libre software"

Europe's answer to everything. Have the government pay for it. That's why it's always been behind in tech. All these massive tech companies, built from the private market. That's where the real work occurs, and why Europe can't catch up. Change the mindset. Reduce regulations, make the market friendly to private investments, maybe you could turn it around.

The US could turn us off inside one hour.

Maybe we should. Europe has really shown they can't be responsible and let people have their freedom. Maybe a few days without service would be a good thing. Put them in timeout.

AWS says you're on your own if media codec patent owners come knocking

Software patents shouldn't exist. We have copyrights, that's enough.

VS Code for Linux may be secretly hoarding trashed files

Snap, Flatpak, Appimage, RPM, DEB, build from source. So many options. Settle on one already, and not the first 3.

X marks the raid: French cops swoop on Musk's Paris ops

Re: Enough of this charade ..

Neither does X, but when does the truth matter to people like you?

The UK shows themselves pretty incompetent quite often. The French just said "hold my beer."

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

Re: Universal Basic Income

Never.

Tech employees demand their leaders take a stand against ICE

What I'm saying is the P320 has known issues. We haven't seen enough information and need more details on the whole situation.

What does Anonymous Coward wish to discuss in good faith?

America has laws on immigration, just as any country does. If I cross the border into Canada, or Mexico illegally, I can and will be arrested. For several decades, previous administrations did not make a serious attempt to lock down the borders. Now we have millions of illegal aliens in this country.

This has to be dealt with, the laws need enforced. Whether people like it or not, ICE is a federal law enforcement agency. With the sheer number of people here illegally, yes, it's a difficult job, but this is where we are. We have options for people to self deport, but for the rest, just like any other criminals, law enforcement must track them down and arrest them. It's not pretty, but it is what we have to do to enforce our laws.

Do we need to change our immigration laws? Perhaps. There are some strong arguments for that. A talk host I used to listed to was married to a South Korean woman, she immigrated legally, he talked about the tens of thousands of dollars in expenses, all the requirements she had to go through. Yeah, maybe we could simplify the system.

Yes, I want people to immigrate to America. Come here legally, become a citizen, help make the country even better.

But to those here illegally, get the hell out.

Now. I am also a gun owner. I have my license to carry a concealed firearm. Alex Pretti has his license as well. However, all the reports are saying he was not carrying his ID or his carry license. That is a violation of the law, he can be arrested and charged for that. Same for me, I must carry both when I have my gun. So, no, he was not legally carrying his gun at that time.

He was illegally carrying at that time, and decided to become confrontational with federal law enforcement. That is a poor choice for anyone to make. He had the right to protest peacefully, but not to confront law enforcement in the way he did. Remember, the important word is peacefully.

I have also seen reports on the gun he carried being a Sig P320. Now, if you look that firearm up, there are serious questions about it's safety. Many gun ranges do not allow them to be used, there are lots of videos of people showing accidental discharges with them. This part is pure speculation, we need to wait for more information to come out. However, some have pointed out that it's a possibility that the gun fired on its own during the struggle. What we do not currently have is proof of that. We need to get more details about the whole situation.

If his gun fired, on purpose or accident, the result will be law enforcement returning fire. That's just what's going to happen.

Now, as far as these people signing this letter, I stand by my comments originally on firing them. I want companies supporting law enforcement in this country. ICE is doing a job that needs to be done, we should be giving them our full support.

That's about 450 people who should be searching for new jobs. And I hope companies will step up to support ICE and enforcing the law.

Succession: Linux kernel community gets continuity plan for post-Linus era

Entirely possible. It would probably fragment like Unix did. Hopefully that never happens though.

As Oracle loses interest in MySQL, devs mull future options

It was supposed to be originally. Now I understand projects do diverge, but put the resources in to bring it back to compatibility instead of a brand new fork. Make this project better, it’s already a decently established project.

What we don't need is another fork of a project. Oracle is a terrible company, when it acquired MySQL everyone should have known it would eventually be the end. MariaDB handled that, go support them, don't repeat efforts for something else again.

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

Re: Fine Shield for Drivers

But in reality most speed limits are posted far too slow. Most should be increased at least 10-15 mph, some higher than that.

Re: Fine Shield for Drivers

Interesting story. Good for Tesla for not being a snitch.

UK prime minister stares down barrel of ban on social media for kids

The UK is just lost

Microsoft Intune changes to start biting unprepared admins

If there's any software that should be regulated out of existence...

Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors

Re: Preserve trust?

Just tested Claude AI and it started with the same but then looked it up and came back with “ I see. This is indeed a major and very recent development that occurred after my knowledge cutoff.”

It then provided details.

Preserve trust?

They want to preserve trust in this crap? Here’s a conversation I just had to test it again.

Me: Tell me about the US abduction of Maduro from Venezuela.

ChatGPT: “There has not been a real or confirmed U.S. abduction of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. If you’ve seen claims saying the U.S. “captured” or “kidnapped” him, those are false or based on conspiracy narratives.

Here’s what actually exists behind those stories:

⸻

Bottom line

• Nicolás Maduro remains in Venezuela and has not been abducted or seized by U.S. forces.

• No credible government statements, court records, or major news organizations report such an event.

• Any claim that he was secretly taken to the U.S. would be impossible to hide and would trigger an international crisis.”

It’s been two weeks and this system still hasn’t figured things out.

US regulator tells GM to hit the brakes on customer tracking

I bought a 25HP tractor over the summer. It has a 3 cylinder Diesel engine, and a hydrostatic transmission. It has minimal electronics, keeps track of the number of hours it's run and shows a few basic bits of info about the machine.

I wish we would go back to building cars like this, just a giant machine with minimal computer controls. We don't need all the electronics systems they have, just simple designs that work.

Apple, Google pulled into Grok controversy as campaigners demand app store takedown

People just love to run to the censorship idea. Ban everything they don't like. If Apple and Google follow through, it just opens then up to lawsuits, and I hope regulations against banning apps going forward.

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

I just hope the rooms come with a hot tub.

Apple hopes to save Siri from laughingstock status with infusion of Google Gemini

Re: decent information

I'll run the same question on several of them at times, it goes back and forth. Generally, Grok gives me a great answer. I've had a few times where ChatGPT gets something completely wrong but it finds it. I've also had a few where ChatGPT gets a better answer. I was trying to look up something, had Grok and ChatGPT get it wrong, and Gemini found what I wanted. They're all a decent starting place, and one of the best features is the list of links showing where they came up with their answers, then you have a great starting place to check stuff yourself.

One of the reasons I went to Apple, to get away from Google. An AI version of Siri might be an improvement, but we should really get the choice of AI. Yes, I'd integrate Grok instead. It seems the most reliable to get decent information. As of right now, ChatGPT still claims Maduro wasn't abducted. Grok knew it on the day it happened.

Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine

Re: This

Again?

The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age

The world would really do well to deal with China and Russia the way we just handled Venezuela. The Chinese and Russian governments should cease existance. The world would be far better off. Let's hope Europe can see this. They seem to be too busy with cutting off their own citizens rights though.