* Posts by imanidiot

4403 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Mar 2012

Nano a nono: Pixel 8 phones too dumb for Google's smallest Gemini AI model

imanidiot Silver badge

Not the latest version, currently, by what is known at time of publication. There's probably already at least some AI crap on those.

Biden's State of the Union included a battle cry against AI mimicry

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Impossible

There are many legitimate uses for AI voice tech and voice mimicry in things like music and film production for all sorts of reasons. From finishing dialog from actors who have shuffled off their mortal coil to correcting minor mistakes or improving editing "flow", such things will always be useful for someone. If the tech exists and gets improved for such things, there will always be someone who can use the exact same tech for nefarious purposes. Since the act of imitating someone for personal gain is already pretty much covered by other laws, trying to ban AI voice imitation directly is imho both foolhardy and superfluous

An engine that can conjure thrust from thin air? We speak to the designer

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I don't see this working at all.

Either you need some sort of ram system to get a lot of volume through your thruster (and thus take the drag penalty this implies) or you need a massive intake to gather massive amounts of very thin atmosphere and use massive amounts of power to push against molecules already moving at a relative speed of some mach 20. In either case you are going to need very big solar panels that are going to further increase your drag (if you can even keep them intact at those kinds of drag scenarios). Not to mention the problems of keeping anything cool while screaming through the atmosphere at those kinds of speeds.

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

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Re: The wheels are coming off at Boeing

That was on a 22 year old aircraft. Lets not blame what seems likely to be an isolated maintenance issue at United on the structural issues at Boeing please.

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Re: The title was too long.

"You really think out of the 171,000 employees, they're all careless, cost-focused jokers?"

No, but I think it's near impossible to sort the chaff from the wheat in-situ. There's too much rot, too many bad apples to turn things around as is. There's not enough people who don't put there foot down when it comes to compliance or safety issues. Down from the work floor up into (upper) management.

"Boeing is not doomed and will (eventually) be fixed. There's a clear problem of compliance sometimes taking second place to speed and cost, that is entirely resolvable, albeit slow and time consuming to do so."

Read up on what is going on in nearly every single production line. 777 and 787 have very very similar cultural problems. There are structural, ongoing quality issues in nearly every single production line that Boeing is currently operating. The leaked information on what happened internally at Boeing with the accident door plug is exemplary of the sort of skullduggery where a MULTIPLE quality hit (incorrect/out of spec rivets, damaged door seal, rivets initially "fixed" by painting over them) should have led to a line stop and a quality audit at Spirit. Yet apparently Spirit employees thought it OK to initially just paint over out of spec rivets instead of replacing them and a work order in the Boeing quality management/tracking system was never made for opening the plug after the damaged seal was discovered. And it's unclear at this time at what point the damaged seal was found. A while back a big issue was workers leaving rubbish inside fuel tanks, the 787 early on suffered from battery fires because apparently they never even performed basic QC audits at the supplier, nor bothered to inspect the battery systems before installation. The 777X is several years behind schedule as as late as last year suffered from problems in it's flight control systems and there's reports they still don't have a handle on some of the quality issues they were having with the carbon composite layups for the wings.

There's so many layers of people at Boeing where it's obvious they think getting the aircraft to the next station on time is more important than getting it there 100% correct that you can't just fix that with a simple memo. There's too many people with the wrong mindset. Even if you get the right persons in upper management positions you have to somehow get that attitude to permeate to the rest of the tens of thousands of employees and there WILL be too many resisting such a change or unwilling to change their way of working. Weeding them out and firing them is near impossible and as such I consider fixing the companies attitude to safety and compliance in situ near impossible. The problem also isn't compliance or finances. The problem is a fundamental lack of the correct mindset when it comes to safety and delivering high quality work in an aerospace company. Compliance follows pretty much automatically from such a mindset.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: The title was too long.

The thing is that the NTSB investigation isn't about appointing blame to a specific person. It's about understanding the entire process, top to bottom and what led the person at the bottom of the food chain to make the decisions they did.We can already tell there's structural problems at Boeing, but understanding them from the viewpoint of the person that actually made the final mistake is imperative for a good understanding of the issue. And that is what Boeing is blocking. Because it doesn't WANT that person to point out the entire thing is a smegging clown show.

The biggest problem is that there is no fixing Boeing. The company is doomed. The ONLY way I can see it happening is literally firing EVERYONE. And then hiring back a competent engineer (who has not previously worked for Boeing) to slowly build things back up from primary principles. But that would take decades.

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

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They'd try to take that out of HIS IT (read: pints of lager) budget.

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Re: ChatGPT

Preventative measures. Keeps the AI in line. "Behave, or we'll let this guy handle you". That sort of thing.

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Facepalm

Re: Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

GOD(*&*&^*&%, have an upvote you bastard!

Reddit rolling out AI bouncer to halt harassment

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Alternatively, it's an attempt to hide the stink

Personally I think it's more of a sign that they're losing actually engaged mods in droves and they're trying to hide this fact somewhat. I see more and more subreddits implode because mods just give up on the shit-heap that Reddit has become. The API closing to stop 3rd party apps was the a big drive in this regard.

US wants ASML to stop servicing China-owned chip equipment

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I'm not entirely sure the US is in a position to even be able to force ASML to do anything in this regard. The EUV systems they blocked previously hold "Technology of US origin" and can thus be export controlled.

The slightly less advanced DUV systems they're selling now, afaik, hold no such tech, and thus no such restrictions on export are possible from the US. The only way they'd manage this is if they strong-arm the Dutch government into withholding export licenses that should be granted based on the laws and regulations as they are (and which would require government agreement to change)

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Trollface

Re: Sell

Also China. By the communist party.

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Re: Sell

Because no-one is willing to work the very very very very long hours for low wages that the Chinese and Taiwanese are, nor are most of the requirements for water, power and space available "over here". And there's no-one willing to spend the hundreds of billions to build new fabs here and support them with a guaranteed long term support plan in place either.

Most EU and US "support" for new fabs amount to peanuts and hollow hand waving. When it comes to planning something that'll cost a company tens of billions to build and billions a year to run they want very solid and hard commitments that will allow them to be certain that fab will remain economic and workers will remain available.

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Re: The United States Of America are going too far...

Problem is, Taiwan ISN'T a country in it's own right. The Taiwanese government still claims to be the only legitimate government for the entirety of China, including Taiwan. Which means that recognizing Taiwan and it's government by extension means saying that the communist rulers of China are illegitimate.

Taiwan would do well at some point to say: "Screw this, we release our claim on the mainland and this island is where we live now" as it would make international relations far less complicated but that's unlikely to happen.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

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Re: That was my thought, too.

Just because Putin/Russia doesn't want to call it a war because it would mess with their precious constitution and show that what they're doing is illegitimate doesn't actually mean it isn't a war. It's a war in every possible meaning of the word.

"Putin stated that the SMO was a war of attrition"

Hahaha, good one.. But you're actually serious? To quote Bender Bending Rodriguez: "Let me laugh even harder!".

First he said he'd never invade Ukraine. Then he did and said it would be finished in 10 days. Then a month. Then it would take longer. Even now they're still not fighting as if it's a war of attrition. And even if it was, they're losing it. (Not so much in men, but in modern, capable and capital equipment).

Tesla Berlin gigafactory goes dark after alleged eco-sabotage

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Power grids are very complex, very large, very distributed machines. It's often not possible to have multiple feeds from multiple directions to a large end user like a car factory, and substations are very expensive bits of kit. That makes it very likely most if not all smaller cities, towns, villages and large scale industrial plants are fed from a single substation or feed line. And thus vulnerable to these sorts of attacks. Those better read into the whole thing have also warned for years that with out increasingly tied together grid, causing a cascade failure where simultaneous failure/attack at certain key choke points could take down pretty much every single power plant in Western Europe or most of the grid in the US as each failure causes such a surge of demand on the next plant that it too falls over, causing another surge on the next plant.

And in the coming years with the increasingly distributed power generation from wind and solar, it's likely we're going to see just how vulnerable our power grid really is.

Legal eagles demand $6B in Tesla stock after overturning Musk's mega pay package

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Re: Contingency

Sucks for them to take on a case on contingency basis without a very clearly defined contract then. Their contingency could only be based on what their direct client (the person that hired them) actually gained or saved, not what ALL shareholders (even those that didn't hire them and that they had no contact with) gained or saved. Which is likely not a portion of the total gain or savings on share packages but a portion of the change in share price for their client. So they can look forward to a few hundred dollars probably. These lawyers/parasites are acting like they were employed by all shareholders collectively or by Tesla. They were not.

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Re: Biased Judge Kathaleen McCormick ..

You may want to read better sources than Zerohedge... I've been some way into that rabbit hole but at some point I noticed the pure vitriol emanating from sites like that and crawled back out. Ever since then the stupid spouted there (no matter the sometimes correct or factual things found sprinkled in) just hurts.

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Re: Biased Judge Kathaleen McCormick ..

Judges by and large have a dislike for people that make their job needlessly complex and take needlessly long. And yes, once you've shown you don't respect them or their profession it's likely judges will take a very dim view of any further such attempts in any subsequent cases. Judges have a lot of leeway in how they apply the law with regards to requirements for filings and allowing changes, amendments, etc and not needlessly pissing off the judge by taking the piss with their initial leniency like Musk did in the first case is always smart. Especially the first case was basically down to Musk and his team of lawyers using every single thing they could think of to "yes, but, actually, no" on every little thing they could think off and at some point the judge just had enough and laid down the smackdown according to the law.

In the second case (the one about the compensation package) it's also well motivated on law and precedent on why the very close ties between Musk and the Tesla board were reason for not allowing the exorbitant package to go through. Basically it comes down to Musk having unlawful sway on the board to get them to approve a compensation package that wasn't in the best interest of the company and it's shareholders for them to approve. Nothing to do with personal dislike (though I can't rule out McCormick had a smile on her face as the wrote down her verdict)

YouTube workers laid off mid-plea at city hall meeting

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Re: These were CONTRACTORS on the Day their Contracts Expired.

This seems both a case of "kids who don't understand their situation get slapped with a dose of reality" and "US employment terms and regulations suck donkey balls while gargling bull semen, without the courtesy of so much as a reacharound".

WATSON picks up slack on Mars for SHERLOC as Perseverance gadgets show age

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Re: Ingenuity also far outlived all expectations before its retirement.

If they are a beancounter worth at least some of their salt they'll understand some basic statistics, and with that you can then calculate easily for them that if you built something with a certain certainty (lets say 99,999996% to last at least X days of operation, there is then a certain (fairly high) chance it'll operate for 2*X or even longer. Especially if you consider that things like the main drive and suspension systems can basically kill the mission due to a single failure these will have been designed to the highest standard and lowest probability of failure and a single failure in some other components (like the SHERLOC lens cap failure) might take out a single instrument but not immediately kill the mission.

If we consider the chance of a device failing to be a Poisson distributed event, cost savings to make something last less time directly impact the probability of something failing within the initial mission time. Thus trying to cut engineering costs because something "lasts too long" is stupid if it means thus also compromising the chance of primary mission succes. And yes, you CAN usually explain that to beancounters, but you have to put it in terms of data and numbers they can understand.

FAA gives SpaceX a bunch of homework to do before Starship flies again

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Re: payload ?

gaseous oxygen is really good at making things not normally all that flammable, very flammable. Hot metal, insulation material, wiring, electronics, o-rings, all of it becomes flammable when you introduce pure oxygen into an environment not designed for it. And enough fire or fire in the wrong place then releases the fuel and KABOOM!

Intuitive Machines' lunar lander tripped and fell

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Re: from Apollo days there wasn't one mission that went absolutely perfectly

I would, at least for the IM missions.The fuel and oxidizer mix they use doesn't have the same density and volumetric flow rates (they're using liquid hydrogen and oxygen) which means they need either 4 tanks to distribute the weight evenly (with 2 oxygen tanks and 2 hydrogen tanks opposite each other) or they need 2 tanks to be stacked on top of each other (automatically leading to a relatively tall design). The only way to increase the footprint would be to go to folding legs, which is a lot of extra complexity for not a whole lot of reward if all other things work as intended. It would also have helped a lot if they hadn't left the safe-ing pins for the laser range finders in. That's the "WTF?" takeaway for this mission.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: from Apollo days there wasn't one mission that went absolutely perfectly

The Apollo landers (and Surveyor before that) had a comparatively much larger footprint and much lower center of mass. Which made them far less sensitive to tipping over. Both SLIM and Odysseus (Intuitive machines) used a very different landing style and design. SLIM had the novel approach of tipping over on purpose and intended to end up on it's side. It lost an engine nozzle on approach and still managed to get to the surface more or less intact, it just didn't have enough control with the missing engine and ended up over rotated and on it's side. Odysseus was quite tall with a pretty high CoM . To avoid complexity it's landing legs were not folding, but the largest they could fit inside the payload fairing of the launch vehicle. That meant it was more sensitive to lateral drift and likely it just caught a rock at the worst possible moment (just before touchdown) and ended up face-planting a rock.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

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If we don't have anyone writing code, we won't have anyone capable of understanding code. If we have no-one capable of understanding code we lose the ability to check and control the AI written programming.That way lies madness.

You'll still need people capable of understanding basic programming so that they can go on to learn how to understand complex programming, so that they can then learn how to interpret specs, write documentation, specs, process descriptions, etc and translate these into useful components of programs. I just don't see it happening that LLMs can take over "programming" all that much. It's great at rote repetition of unoriginal thought, it sucks at actually novel invention (or actually, it just doesn't).

Please stop pouring the wrong radioactive water into the sea, Fukushima operator told

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Because it is a lot. Or not a lot. Depends on the process and how they should have been closed. If it was an operator in a control room missing a single checklist item to press a single button that would auto close all of them, no it's not a lot. (small mistake, big consequences). If it's 16 valves that should each individually have been closed by hand, at location and checked off on a checklist before the flushing, then yes, it's a lot (big mistake, equally big consequences). Either points to structural procedural issues though.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

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Re: It's a shame

The story only supports concluding he was smoking the devils lettuce before/during work hours. That doesn't mean he wasn't doing some stronger stuff outside those hours.

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

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Re: That's why collecting and selling location information needs to be very illegal

The problem is that they'll never admit to doing such a thing and it's nothing a quote "we received an anonymous tip about the activities of the suspect" end-quote can't fix.

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Windows

Re: Planned Parenthood not-so secret Agenda

I think you forgot to take your pills. And your tinfoil hat.

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Re: OK, enough of the BS, already

Some people just don't want to hear they're actually horrible people who hold reprehensible ideas.

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Unfortunate evidence of the need for security conciousness

Unfortunately this once again goes to underpin the need for people to become much more aware of their data security. Opt out of every single bit of Google tracking, the very minor "inconvenience" if you use their products is worth it, always keep your GPS, bluetooth and wifi off unless you're actively using it. When doing something very privacy data sensitive (like getting an abortion when living in an anti-abortion state) leave your own phone at home. Bring a dumb phone with some emergency contacts if you have to. Don't navigate directly to the location of the clinic but to something close by if you need GPS route instructions. Consider having a cheap "burner" smartphone (can be second hand) without a sim card for such occasions using an app that supports offline navigation (and not made by google). Always be conscious of what data you're giving away.

Remember, you're not paranoid if they ARE out to get you. And data brokers like Near (with support of companies like Google/Alphabet) are out to get you.

Out with the old, in with the new as 100 Starlink satellites take atmospheric exit

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Re: Social good from de-orbiting

These satellites are intentionally designed to burn up long before they reach the ground. No part of them bigger than some tiny (mm size and below) fragments should ever reach the ground. Accelerating them just means either skipping back out of the atmosphere or burning up even faster.

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Re: tracking them to avoid collisions with other satellites.

Knowing where your satellite is and knowing where another satellite is going to be allows you to warn the other satellites operators (if it's still under maneuvering control) in time to allow them to avoid a collision. The other operator may not be aware of where your satellite is and where it's going to be.

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

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Flame

"Look at what you made me do"

Seems like the classic abuser line of blaming the receiving party for their behaviour. *Smashes your things* "I wouldn't have to do this if you just did what I wanted and not got these laws passed EU. Really this is your fault. I don't want to, but you leave me no choice"

Piss off Apple. May your revenue decline and profits falter.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

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Re: Query: the timing of ads

As a non-USian I find "normal" TV over there completely unwatchable. There seems to be more ad time than actual program and ad breaks are so long I had usually gotten distracted and wondered off before they even finished. Never mind remember what was actually on. The big draw of streaming is/was the same as it was for cable TV at the start. Lack of ads. With this continuing enshitification it's going to drive people away again.

Bumblebee malware wakes from hibernation, forgets what year it is, attacks with macros

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"We've asked to see if the owner is aware that its email system is being used to send malicious emails but haven't heard back"

Are they actually using their mailsystem? Or just spoofing their adress?

Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen

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"It is so widespread and long-running that it should have its own name"

While it covers a broader process/process I would put it under the banner of Enshitification.

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Re: "JetBrains' own developers are, well, developers"

I have my doubts anyone that drove a Model T would have any regrets moving away from it's arcane control scheme. Especially the "hold down the pedal continually to engage the slow gear" bit. That gets annoying and tiring on the leg muscles very quickly. But apparently it was more user friendly that way when no-one knew what a car was and gearboxes where by default "crash" gear boxes because no-one had invented synchromesh yet.

Europe loosens the straps tying Apple and Microsoft to tough antitrust rules

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Re: mmmm

Want to know how bad it really is? Just hit Ctrl+Alt+Windows+Shift+L (yes, it's a big combo, just try it). And be horrified. Yes. That combo is hard-baked into Windows. There's no off switch. Now try +T instead, or +W. Microsoft has lost the plot.

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

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Re: > Hanff, in a LinkedIn post, argued this is unacceptable.

"they are transient and should not be considered as unique to an individual". Isn't that exactly the same as an email adres? Doesn't that have exactly the same issue? Yet afaik nobody so far has ever made a problem of password recovery/reset via email.

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Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

Would you ever be able to fully inspect it? Would you build it yourself from source? If not, how are you going to be certain the compiled code you install is the same as the source? Open source is nice, but in the end imho, trusting the source of the programming is more important.

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Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

If you can keep a phone number up to date, you can keep an email address up to date. Being allowed to change a password in a 2FA scenario without requiring a 2nd authentication factor (email and phone for instance) is just silly. What's the point of having 2FA if you can defeat it by bypassing one of them with a single compromised authentication factor?

Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours

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Am I saying they're the same? I'm just saying the outcome will very likely be the same (Europe will be on it's own). DESPITE very different policies.

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Bosses can send me all the mail they want out of hours. I'll be reading, responding to and taking action whenever I get back into work. If you're not paying me, you're not getting my labour.

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Even worse the rest of the world gets saddled with the choice of those 350 million people and has to deal with the fallout of it. Trump has already stated he wants to practically hand Europe to Putin, Biden would probably achieve similar end goals through bad policy.

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

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Re: Forget the helmet

For the pedants, yes I realize I got the ages mixed up, TOS era had command/officers in yellow and cannon-fodder in red, TNG and later had command/executive officers in red and generally the cannon-fodder in yellow.

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Re: Forget the helmet

Since he survived it probably wasn't a red one (or a yellow one if this tale is sufficiently old)

CableMod recalls angled GPU power adapters to prevent fiery surprises

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Re: 12VHPR is a shit standard

The great thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from. Unfortunately if nobody chooses to use it...

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

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Re: Harks back to

Even if the lesson is: "underlings might store emails and messages documenting my stupidity so it's not a good idea to try to shove the failure in their shoes"

Which is why I too would always recommend keeping a paper trail. Always send those: "here's what we just discussed" emails after verbal agreements. It avoids confusion, it avoids misunderstandings and most of all it diverts the river of shit running downhill when things inevitably go pear shaped

Google silences Bard, restrings it as Gemini with optional $20-a-month upgrade

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Re: A question

While SEO crap certainly doesn't help, Google also has shittified their search by searching for what they assume you should be wanting to search for, not what you're actually searching for. I've searched for websites I had lost the link for by literally searching from a direct quote/passage I know should be on there, in quotes. I get nothing (or nothing useful). Eventually by searching as specific as I can manage but with "generic" search terms I find the site I'm looking for buried on page 6 or 7 of search results. And the excerpt of the site shown on google contains the exact quote, verbatim, to the letter that I was searching that gave me no hits. Conclusion: Google search is shit.