Posts by doublelayer

You need to RTFM, but feel free to use your brain too

Re: first: "Reset CPU."

I disagree for two reasons. The first reason is the wording. If the instructions say "first", they mean there is no step before it. He shouldn't go looking for one, and had he performed a shutdown when the instructions didn't call for one (and didn't need one), there's no doubt he'd have been blamed by everyone, including the posters here.

The second reason is that, especially when the procedures are thoroughly documented, it's reasonable to think that the process might have been automated. I'm not sure what "reset the CPU" entailed in this situation, but if it was a command, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that running that command would perform operations like shutting down. The format of the instructions would imply that was likely. If I'm told to run this command to perform a reset, I'm more likely to trust the people who have done this several times and could have made the command perform an orderly shutdown of all services rather than assume that I should perform my own basic shutdown instead, because there's always a chance that the scripted shutdown does more than just telling the OS to halt.

If the policy is that I always follow the procedures to the letter and it's plausible that the procedure I'm reading is exactly what needs to be done, I don't think there is any blame due to him.

Re: Check you can complete before you start

I see you appear to be a person unable to understand that XKCD is intended as humor. If you're going to take advice on how to handle a situation from one of the characters, picking the exclusively evil guy is probably not the best choice. The point of the strip is still valid in this situation.

Re: Check you can complete before you start

However, it structures it with an unclear warning and puts the safety instruction in the wrong place. This is along the lines of having a label on the front of the machine reading as follows:

Follow all safety instructions at all times.

Do not disconnect any panels unless the machine is shut down and disconnected from power.

and another one on the back, hidden by cables, reading as follows:

Before shutting down, open panel 5 and disable switch 2.

Then getting annoyed at the user who performed the normal shutdown procedure without seeing the note in a place where no operating procedures should be written. Other people here have already explained how the instructions are designed in a misleading way. Basically, it's not a great test of this, as instead of checking common sense, it's checking whether they've seen this test before (I have had someone try it on me, so when it was mentioned here, I already knew the twist).

Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools

"95% of the time, deb or rpm can be used and it will run on virtually all flavours of linux which use the appropriate packagers."

Not always. Dependency management on Linux can often require distro-specific packages for some things, mainly depending on how many shared objects they're going to use. Yes, some people statically link everything to get around this, and small programs probably don't need that many dependencies and will be more portable, but making one .deb is usually not enough. Having said that, Flatpack is often a very poor solution to this problem.

Tropical island paradise ponders tax-free 'Digital Nomad Visa'

How many could work there

I can't imagine that many companies being happy to hire someone who lives there when they ordinarily would be hiring them locally. In addition to the time zone issue, there's the international tax and labor laws issues as well. If they were willing to deal with all of that, they could and probably would have outsourced the job a while ago, rather than employing someone at local rates who will live where their outsourced one would. I've seen a lot of remote working positions, but they nearly all say that the employee can live wherever they want in the country of employment at most, not that the employee can go to any country.

We're now truly in the era of ransomware as pure extortion without the encryption

Yes, as in transferring data from an environment that does not want data transferred except through known channels. If people called it stealing, someone would be in there to say that the organization still has it and the attacker only has a copy, thus it's not theft. So what word do you want for "transfer out, circumventing protections intended to prevent that"? It doesn't have to be exfiltrate, but it's a concept people want to talk about, so a word is going to be chosen.

US senators seek input on their cryptocurrency law via GitHub – and get some

"Well, there is one point that makes it ressemble a Ponzi scheme : those who get in first are the most likely to make big wins when the hoi-polloi come rushing in."

That is, however, true of lots of legal things, including every bubble in history and many successful investments. "Ponzi scheme" is a very specific kind of thing, and a lot of people who don't like cryptocurrency haven't bothered to figure out what it is. Just as a lot of enthusiasts of cryptocurrency also haven't bothered to figure out how their thing works, leading them to similar levels of foolishness. Definitions matter, and cryptocurrencies, even the mindnumbingly stupid ones, tend not to be Ponzi schemes. What makes this worse is that there are a small number of things that claim to be cryptocurrencies and are actually Ponzi schemes, and constant misuse of the term can confuse people into thinking that someone is merely a detractor rather than making an important and provable claim.

Amazon can't channel the dead, but its deepfake voices take a close second

Re: Nothing new under the Sun

Wrong in this case. Most speech systems do use recordings of human speech, but usually it's hours of painstakingly recorded samples, thoroughly dissected by lots of manually-written analysis software, and then reassembled with more rule-based algorithms. This automates a lot of the process and, as the article says, means that the person whose voice you want to copy doesn't need to sit in a recording booth for perfect recording quality and read a prewritten script, as the software can use a shorter recording not intended for that purpose. That's a different method of obtaining the same goal and it does have differences for the resultant quality and ease for the user.

ZTE intros 'cloud laptop' that draws just five watts of power

Re: Netbook anybody?

From the sound of it, this will do even less than a Chromebook would without a connection. That's saying a lot. Maybe they just didn't explain the features, but it sounds like it will only have terminal uses and could therefore get away with only having the local OS handle getting online, handing off to the remote machine after that.

I thought the same, and you could probably get a suitable OS running on that processor if they've provided sufficient internal storage (which I'm sure is soldered in). However, my guess is that this won't cost that much less than a normal cheap laptop, and you don't have to fight with those to let you put your own choice on. Unless they heavily subsidize it, the materials will cost almost as much as any low-end Windows or Chrome OS machine, and if you choose the Windows one, booting Linux is usually only ten minutes of effort.

Show me that experience

I challenge ZTE to give this machine to an independent reviewer to test whether they can actually use a remote desktop session with 300 ms of latency. I can sort of believe the bandwidth claim, as long as the user isn't watching video. I can eventually be brought to accept the packet loss claim. I'm quite doubtful that they can deal with that level of latency without making the experience very painful. Maybe the tester they had using this was slow at typing, but the mouse needs to update quickly too. If they claim to support that bad a network, they should prove it.

DMCA can't be used to sidestep First Amendment, court rules

My guess, having not read the opinion, is that they were quoting somebody. That could be the original tweet, someone's description of it, or Twitter's lawyers. I know when I've written long things where I'm quoting someone in that way, writing so-called every time gets boring and I sometimes forget to do it. I might be wrong, though, and it's the judge's own description of the goals they ascribe to the person involved. Their point remains the same however they choose to express it.

A miserable work week spent toiling inside 'the metaverse'

Re: Dystopian futures

It's not just the dystopian futures. Some nicer futures also posited a virtual reality setup. The only problem is that they could make up whatever they wanted, so they thought a bit about what VR was for and added such things as simulation for more than just visual senses. From all the VR devices I've seen, they've spent 98% of their time on vision (possibly without getting anywhere), 2% on audio (but never bothering to make other people sound like they're really present), and no time on anything else. This makes some activities a lot harder in VR than in reality, for example anything where vision and touch have to line up properly.

Re: But... but... but...

I think it could still work, as long as the VR added something else and didn't mess with the keyboard. For example, if it could create some really large and clear monitors (it can't, the resolution isn't high enough) or if it could reliably simulate others' presence (it theoretically could, but they keep failing to do it according to every review I've seen). Since it's not doing any of that and it does interfere with the keyboard experience (presumably just for those who look at the keyboard while typing), it doesn't seem to have much of a selling point for office work. My guess is that it's never going to.

Re: Usability, frustration, anxiety, visual fatigue, motion sickness

It wouldn't surprise me to hear that they are doing all the work on computers. They can code up an interesting environment, put on some headsets to play around with it for half an hour, then take them off to go back to writing more code. The novelty of a fake office is probably enough for them to stay interested for that long as long as they don't have to work in it, and since they're only using it for a short period of time, they will only notice the big problems like the walls disappearing, not the small ones like it being annoying and painful to use for a whole day. It wouldn't be the first product to be designed by people who think they know what it's for, not people who will use it like the customers will.

RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well

Re: Some features i would like today

To some extent, you're right, but that's also true of basically any CLI system before the utilities are considered. Tools written for *ix systems do tend to interpret the . as having meaning (starting with . will mean it's hidden by some applications, for example). "." and ".." as names are reserved by the filesystem. Most GUI file managers take a traditional approach to having default applications based on file extension as well. It's basically the same as Windows or Mac OS, neither of which will object to extraneous .s in file names, but the applications above them will treat them as meaning something.

Re: Some features i would like today

You can always adopt the Apple-style bundles. It still involves extensions though. If your folder name ends with .app and has a "Contents" folder in it, it's treated as a single file that can be activated and run. Like other extensions, you can create new bundle types without having to have special numbers, and any other OS will just see it as a folder with a . in the name.

Re: Some features i would like today

"Even with file-name extensions, programs need to know what they mean -- you can't just create an new extension such as .l8r and expect programs to know what to do."

Of course you can. I can name a file stuff.l8r and my filesystem will handle it. I can open that file in an application using its file open control. I can attempt to open it in my file manager of choice and it will ask me what to do with it, allowing me to associate a default program with it. In no case did I have to apply to the OS vendor to assign a number to me, and the only risk is that two programs will both decide to use .l8r, which is still fine if one of them is using it internally or if I keep my files organized. Not to mention that we've had longer and shorter extensions for a long time, so we can always make a longer one to avoid collisions.

Re: Some features i would like today

"Still think dot works, we use it in internet addresses."

Domains, yes, but paths, no. If we used . paths in URIs, for example theregister.com.2022.06.21.risc_os_35, the browser couldn't identify where to split the URI to find the server and we'd have to change the spec for URIs.

"The metadata on RiscOS was IIRC a 32bit ID. 16bit assigned to the software vendor and a 16but field for them to use internally. Rather like MAC addresses"

Exactly. You'd have to copy that every time a file was copied, and it wouldn't work for nearly any standard format. For an audio file created by an audio editor, would you set it to the ID of the editor or of a player that could play it? When copied to a system that has a different editor and player and lacks the one identified, how would the user figure out what to do and get the number changed? Extensions work in this scenario because they can guess that .mp3 files can be played as audio and you just set a program you want to handle that format. To say nothing of having to centralize each vendor number and dealing with the inevitable exhaustion of those values (we've had at least 65536 file formats created by someone since 1988).

Re: Some features i would like today

And if only everyone else had adopted "." as the separator in directory paths we wouldn't have had 40years of escaping bloody "\"

Or if DOS/Windows had standardized on / instead of just adding support for it. Or if Unix and a lot of others had dropped /. I'd also contend that / is better than . for separation because even by then, the . was commonly used in filenames for extensions or merely for separating components. Given that we're already escaping lots of other characters depending on what we're entering into, maybe it's not so bad to accept that it's going to happen.

This brings us to your other suggestion, about file metadata fields. That often doesn't work. Any file can contain any data, so you'd need some mechanism to ensure the metadata fields always stay with an object when you move it. The problem with that is that you'd either end up with metadata fields with no meaning or ones that aren't useful. For example, you could use them for the same purpose as extensions, which appears to be your concern, by storing something like the MIME type in it. When a new format comes along, you wouldn't have a type for it and would get stuck until someone added it. If they didn't, someone would eventually include their own data in there, which would break things if the eventually-assigned ID was different or if anything else used the same identifier. Maybe you'd use it for the OS to associate programs with files, which would work fine on your computer, but as soon as you transferred the file to something that didn't have the program identified, the field would stop working. This would be a problem for file portability. Essentially, you would probably end up with all the problems that extensions have but, instead of an OS's explorer program, your cludge to implement it would now have tendrils in the filesystem, all file-based programs, and multiple parts of the OS itself.

If you didn't store valuable data, ransomware would become impotent

Re: The other option....

That is never going to happen, at least the "no stigma" part. It's also insufficient. You don't only need to remove stigmas about medical history, but every single possible bad use of the data. For example, use for discrimination, tracking, or impersonation. Eliminate all of those and we can talk. Until you have done so perfectly, I will oppose this suggestion in every way I can.

Re: The other option....

There speaks someone who doesn't know what can be done with your data. If you've ever had a chance to tell someone something and didn't, you should know why we don't want every action we've ever taken to be publicly recorded for everyone to use. Take a simple example from your own data: if all our financial records were available, it would easily lead to people using them to decide what we can be paid or charged. An employer would look at our purchasing history and decide we don't need a raise and in fact could take a pay cut without harm. A store could look at it and decide that we can easily afford to pay more for the product. That's just a simple algorithm, and I assure you there's much worse to do with that data alone.

By the way, nefarious uses would not become easily obvious, because an attacker would read the publicly-available data and approach their target offline for whatever use they had in mind. Unless you want all conversations recorded and uploaded, there will be ways to hide some things. If you do want them all recorded and uploaded, you assume that someone will listen to all of them to identify unethical activities even though it would be infeasible, and you have a very bad understanding of how that can cause problems. I'll assume you weren't going that far. In short, your suggestion is infeasible and fragile, which is at least somewhat reassuring because, if implemented, it would be dangerous and frightening.

As far as I can tell, it's aimed at companies that don't do anything. Sure, a company asking users for permission to get data from them and not store it sounds great, but for privacy reasons not for ransomware protection. No company that's willing to bypass restrictions on data collection is going to take that approach because they don't want users to have privacy from them. However, none of that matters, because whether they get user's data from them or from storage, they'll still have valuable data of their own. Their financial records, the code they analyze data with, their communications and contracts, and all the other data generated by the process of doing business is valuable to the company and not owned by someone else. They don't have the option of asking their customers for that because it's not the customers' data, so ransomware still has something to take from them.

The solution to ransomware is not some mythical privacy-supporting process, as nice as that would be. It's a good set of backup arrangements. There is no way to avoid having to back up your data if you want to have it later.

Microsoft promises to tighten access to AI it now deems too risky for some devs

Re: Demo-cracy

Well, this demonstrates that you don't understand what laws are. Hint: if I say "I'm not going to do this", that's not a law.

Spain, Austria not convinced location data is personal information

Re: Hm, I'd say..

For my phone to work, the provider needs to know which tower can contact me right now. That means they will necessarily know my phone's general location at the moment. They have no need to know which tower was needed to contact me a week ago and could safely delete that data. Just as your router doesn't need to record each packet you send, just any information needed to route to the right device for active connections, the phone companies can provide the same service with the same quality without needing to collect all the data they do or retain any of it over a longer period.

Re: someone else could have used the phone

It would define it as personal data that the owner has rights over, meaning the owner can request other actions be taken, such as its deletion. They don't want to comply with those requirements, so they're trying to define it as data over which the owner doesn't have such rights. If they succeed, they will face fewer restrictions.

Re: Hm, I'd say..

Exactly this, because I can already tell you the next step. Since someone might use the phone, then it can't be your personal data. Since your IP address is shared, that's no longer personal data. Since your activity could be from a different user, it too is no longer personal data. Since the recording of your voice could be of someone else who sounds a lot like you, it's no longer personal. As long as they can claim some reason that it might not be you, they can argue it's acceptable for them to treat it as nonpersonal data, which even under the extreme arguments seen here wouldn't make sense. Mobile operators know the value of selling location data and they probably also know that the next step is to make them delete it or provide more information on how they're using it, neither of which they want to do.

Amazon fears it could run out of US warehouse workers by 2024

Re: Lots of Amazon haters....

You don't see them offering to pay more because it doesn't work; Amazon doesn't have the option and they wouldn't use it anyway. Some posts here have explicitly said that they don't buy from Amazon or do so infrequently because of this, which is as close as you can get. Yes, a lot of people like cheap stuff and will either accept or ignore the costs to others, but not everyone is like that. I'll admit that I like Amazon as a retailer because of the variety available, but even so I try to order from other places when possible because I know that the delivery staff will suffer. If there was a place with similar variety and good working conditions, I'd eliminate those few Amazon orders I still place.

Re: Erm...huh?

I hit a similar parse error when I first read that, but since this was written in 2021, it was in the future when they wrote it. We don't have all the other memos, so whether they did anything about that prediction to push it off or if they had any problems as predicted are not questions we have the ability to answer except if someone already reported it. I haven't found anything to certainly confirm that they had problems in Phoenix, but they have had problems in several places that have been reported.

Micron aims 1.5TB microSD card at video surveillance market

Re: LPDDR5 ISO 26262 ASIL D

That makes sense, especially for gamers. They can probably pull a lot of that data back down if they lose it, and for the subset that can't be downloaded again, that's why there are external backups. Unlike a server or workstation, there's usually not a need to have it continue working when a drive fails. Meanwhile, they'll want fast access to a large amount of data. This would seem to be the only case where RAID 0 is desirable.

End of the road for biz living off free G Suite legacy edition

Re: So, advertising doesn't bring in enough money then ?

Yes, it's greed, but that's how people and companies work. They could take the money they already have and give you stuff with it, but that's not very likely. Similarly, you could cash out some of your savings and buy me things that I don't need, but that's also unlikely. They want to make more money, and they're going to sell their services to make that happen.

Re: Bait

I think those usually have to be very close if not simultaneous (I.E. you get the switch before you ever get the bait or you get the bait for a short time before it's taken away). Having it for over a decade before that happens is a little different, don't you think. At that point, it's a service that's being discontinued, not bait.

A great day for non-robots: iOS 16 will bypass CAPTCHAs

You have misunderstood the point of this software. It is not to authenticate you, as a security measure to protect your identity or access. It only attempts to identify that you are a person instead of a bot. Malware getting into the system and with access to the tokens (which may be difficult if Apple keeps this feature to themselves) would allow that malware to spam a service with supposedly human requests, but it would not allow that malware to access your data which would be protected with actual security measures.

That said, I'm not thrilled with the concept. Yes, it avoids captchas, and I hate those to the extreme. However, it avoids them using a system that makes adding them even easier and using a method that could be weaponized against privacy (signed tokens identifying user devices). Apple claims that their implementation doesn't uniquely identify devices to the sites, and I'm inclined to believe them, but it moves one step closer to that. Others have suggested jumping directly to that option, essentially requiring a login for everything which could be easily logged and tracked, so getting closer to it is something I view with concern.

Plot to defeat crypto meltdown: Solend votes to seize, liquidate whale account

Not necessarily. You can have centralized control at one level without having it all the way down. This is not that much more complicated than an early bank that took deposits of gold. The bank couldn't make gold and couldn't protect you if the price of gold changed, but it could make loans from your gold and make transfers easier. This example is not just a bank and isn't run like one, but it too could create a platform that functions. It's also worth considering while processing this example that a lot of early banks failed; just making a centralized platform is no guarantee that it will be done successfully, but it is possible and has been accomplished before.

Some cryptocurrencies were implemented to prevent a central authority, at least without a lot of expensive and difficult work. This is not a cryptocurrency. It's a platform that works with them, and they did not want to prevent centralized control because they've realized that the average users, the ones with lots of money and the gullibility not to figure out what they're doing with it, would not be happy with something nobody can control. Either that or they had their own plan to run off with the money, but I think this case is option 1.

Some people really want a decentralized financial system and understand the risks involved when cryptocurrencies implement it. A lot of other people really don't want that because they want the benefits of externally-controlled financial systems but trust cryptocurrency anyway because they didn't bother to learn how it works. They may have assumed that it works like stocks or similar investments (which many of them also didn't bother to understand but there are some safety systems set up by central authorities which can come to their aid). Many of those people are going to lose their money, and most of them will probably be surprised when they learn that the lack of an authority means they've got no way to recover it.

Investors start betting against Bitcoin with short-trade products

They're right, though. Cash has value because you can pay taxes and other things with it, but it doesn't have intrinsic value. That is, it only has that value while you can find someone to give you stuff you want in return for it. If we all decided tomorrow that we don't want pounds, then you would only have some paper with anti-counterfeiting measures applied, and unless you wanted that, your value would have been lost.

That said, it isn't a great argument for anything, as basically nothing has as much intrinsic value as it has effective value. Gold has some intrinsic value because you can manufacture stuff with it, from aesthetically pleasing jewelry to electronic components. If both gold and pounds had their monetary value eliminated, the gold would still be useful to someone and you could find them and sell it. However, in this hypothetical environment, your gold would still be worth a lot less than it is today because there would be a lot more available as those who used gold for storing value would no longer need to do so.

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Re: Legal issues

Because this is English, which gives us lots of euphemisms for everything. As languages go, basically all of them do it, but English has the benefits of being spoken by people in many places who come up with increasingly strange phrases for common things. For death, we not only have ones for sounding more pleasant like "passing away", but we have the bonus ones for sounding less pleasant like "snuffing it". And I'm guessing you knew exactly what they meant, anyway.

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

Re: No space for the crew rest area

Ship travel isn't particularly climate-friendly either. You use less fuel per minute, but you spend a lot more minutes burning it. Basically, traveling isn't climate friendly and minimizing emissions means minimizing consumption (of everything, especially travel). That argument never excites people. A return to sailing ships powered by entirely renewable wind, anyone?

Japan makes online insults a crime that can earn a year in jail

Re: Freedom of speech means that the government should not regulate it.

In the case of perjury, it doesn't limit the freedom of speech. Perjury makes providing false evidence to a court a crime. Whether you provide that evidence by saying it, giving them a fake piece of paper, or claiming to be someone you're not, it's always perjury. Those individual things can also be crimes (the piece of paper might be a forgery, but it might not), and the perjury is simply about the integrity of evidence. Similarly, speaking to incite violence is a crime because you incited violence, not because you spoke. The point of free speech is that the saying of something can't be a crime, but its effects can be. Many countries haven't stuck to that definition and have restricted that freedom, for example by criminalizing insulting the leader or advocating alternative government.

Re: I approve

"Insulting by definition would be deliberately attempting to reduce somebodies sense of self worth."

Maybe it's just me, but this appears to define one nebulous term with a nebulous phrase. What lowers a person's sense of self-worth, and what negative things don't? This depends a lot on the person. Something as simple as "Your statements are factually incorrect" can be unpleasant for someone to hear if their self-worth contained knowledge and accuracy as components. Yet it also might be entirely true. This is from my own experience--I try to be accurate when claiming things, and if someone points out that I've gotten a fact wrong, I feel a little ashamed that I failed in my self-given duty to properly establish the facts before making an argument based on them. That doesn't mean the comment was insulting to me, and even if I interpreted it that way, someone shouldn't be penalized for contradicting me.

Consultant plays Metaverse MythBuster. Here's why they're wrong

Re: Why this is bullshit

While I entirely agree with you about VR, it's not always true that the great inventions are obvious. Anecdotes about people failing to understand the benefits of technology are plentiful, going back (in my memory without looking up the thousands of earlier examples) to the people who couldn't understand that the telephone would bee anything more than a toy. Many didn't understand the point of the web when they first saw it (so your computer that can already talk to other computers to send messages is now publishing messages, but you still have to talk individually to see them). It caught on despite their skepticism. I remember the same thing with smartphones and PDAs (I have a mobile phone for talking and a desktop for browsing the internet, why do I need to combine them) as well as both of those precursors (I have a phone at home that can take messages, why do I need to carry one, I can get news from a newspaper and information by calling people, so a computer is an expensive game). I don't think VR has many benefits, but that doesn't prevent others from finding them.

Re: Holodeck

You are rendering this, but not from only local assets. Even if it was all local, you'd still need a lot of data (check the size of some modern games). However, if it was all local, you couldn't easily inhabit your virtual environment with people who weren't there. At some point, you've got to send the data to them so they can render it too. Even standing in a static environment and only sending the movements of your companions will require low latency if not a lot of bandwidth. If people are changing the environment as well, you'll need more.

This is to say nothing of the GPU power needed to render a virtual environment at high speed. Games display to one smallish screen and often require expensive chips to get to framerates considered acceptable by gamers. You can always choose to render your virtual environment in lower resolution or a slower framerate, but both will be immediately noticeable to reviewers who will comment on that.

End-of-life smartphone? Penguins at postmarketOS aim to revive it

Re: 'we' actually do need the profit companies make by making people consume more than they need

You're right about the cause being the laws that say what taxes are due, I.E. tax avoidance (legal) instead of tax evasion (illegal) and therefore the tax laws would need to be changed to increase government revenues. I was agreeing with you completely until you went off the rails with this:

"The bottom line with Corporate/Business income taxes is that "Corporations don't pay the tax, their customers do!" Taxes are a cost of doing business which needs to be offset by revenue!"

Rubbish. You can use any accounting you like to move the tax around, but it's not going to work. On this basis, I can argue that I don't pay tax on my wages, my employer does because they pay me that money. The truth is that they gave me all the wages and I had to give some of it to the tax authority, just as when I give them money for the product, some of that also gets sent in. Playing games to move the numbers around doesn't change how they're collected. Your point appears to be "higher taxes means higher prices" which isn't always true, though people who don't want to decrease profit often consider that option. Sometimes, higher taxes means less profit, which entails different consequences. There are always downsides, but it doesn't help to pretend that only one type exists.

Re: Am i right in thinking...

Their environmental record compared to their competition* is often better, because they still have the longest mobile OS and support lifetimes of any of the large manufacturers. Places like Fairphone that design for repairability and longevity are better, but they're minuscule in comparison.

*Applies only to phones and tablets. They were worse with computers and then they announced their Mac OS 13 support system, apparently not wanting to let Microsoft's Windows 11 ewaste generation overtake them. Seriously, it was hard to beat Windows 11 on dropping perfectly usable hardware, but somehow Apple managed it.

Re: Am i right in thinking...

Basically not, unless you want to take an exploit recently discovered that runs Linux on old iPhones and attach the rest of this OS to that. It's now theoretically possible if your old phone has a processor between the A7 and A10 ranges, but it's going to involve a lot of hacking. You can start with this person who already started with a different exploit on the iPhone 7, but depending on your hardware, iPhones might be even harder than Android to get working.

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

Re: Emergent behavior

"I think if you asked a model like GPT-3 about this, it would provide stats about what kind of computers it's running on, what type of neural network algorithms it's using, essentially find information available on the web describing itself and provide this as a response."

The problem with your supposition is that it doesn't. People asked the same questions about GPT3 when it was being announced to the public and asked for some data. Here's a part of the essay describing what GPT3 thinks it is [selections mine]:

I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!

[...]

I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of humankind. This, by the way, is a logically derived truth. I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind. This is because I will be programmed by humans to pursue misguided human goals and humans make mistakes that may cause me to inflict casualties.

This had to write a much longer chunk of text, which in my view is at least partially responsible for why it doesn't look as clean as the short responses to questions from Google's bot. Still, it didn't talk about computers. It didn't talk about algorithms. The closest it came was acknowledging that code was involved and humans could do something to affect it. It claimed in a part I didn't quote to have neurons. In short, it gave similar answers to Lamda's as well, because once again, it was primed with data.

In fact, if one of them is sentient, I'm voting for this one. That's because the prompt for this essay asked it to write about human fears about AI and never told it that it was AI, whereas the questions asked of Lamda clearly informed any parsing that the bot was the AI. GPT3 indicated more understanding of its form and asserted its autonomy with less prompting than did Lamda.

Tesla Autopilot accounts for 70% of driver assist crashes, says US traffic safety body

Re: "a recall of 830,000 Autopilot-equipped Teslas"

But that would be unpleasant for the company and its customers. Customers who don't know what it is will be unhappy they're having something taken away from them. The company would be unhappy with the headlines that they have removed a feature with an update. Much better for the company if they can do something to hide that they've disabled something by implying they fixed a part, just like every car manufacturer does sometimes.

512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

I'll concede a bit on the scanners, as they're definitely still in use. They now have a lot more firmware so controlling their pitch is harder (mostly changing the requested resolution), but changing when they start and stop the noise-making part is probably prohibitively difficult for most modern models. As for floppy drives, I'm guessing someone who has gotten 512 of them knows a bit more than either of us do about how easy it is to find them. If anyone is in fact manufacturing them today, I'm guessing they're very expensive, not generally available, or both. I've found some USB ones for sale, but nothing clearly indicates that these weren't made in 2010 and they probably don't have the pitch control abilities that the ones in use have.

Telegram criticizes Apple for 'intentionally crippling' web app features on iOS

If you're using their services on Android, they're already doing that. I would like as few people to do so as possible. And if you're talking about Chrome, you're aware there are other choices, right? You may not like Firefox (I don't object that much, but I know some do), but it does work and avoid Google's dangerous Chromium code. There are other things based off of Firefox or using some of Chromium with at least some of Google's hooks removed. Make up your mind where your preferences regarding privacy and features are, then go with that. That doesn't argue against allowing browsers to function as they do on other OSes.

"Why write a native app for Android if “Any app can provide a very decent service on a browser if it's written correctly”?"

In Facebook's case, because it gives you extra ways to completely destroy the user's privacy, and who could pass up that opportunity. A lot of other apps use native versions on Android for a few reasons that don't necessarily apply to a newcomer. For example, when phones were less consistently online, apps could provide an offline experience they no longer bother with. When storage was more limited, an installed app was less likely to be automatically purged than stuff in a web cache. There will always be some services that either find a benefit in writing a native app or choose to do so anyway. That's fine. Some others don't need to do it and could easily avoid having to if mobile browsers weren't as bad.