Posts by doublelayer

Loongson CPU that performs like 2020 Core i3 makes its way to Chinese mini PCs

Re: Good enough

Microsoft and Apple talk about AI a lot, but that doesn't mean people actually want to use it as much as they claim or need to do it locally. Microsoft's AI mostly runs in Azure, but that doesn't seem to bug too many people. A Chinese AI could easily run in Baidu's or Alibaba's cloud, accessed by these boxes, and they'll have a similar experience to people using cloud-supported AI software.

All of that, by the way, is inferencing. People do not do training on commodity small office computers like this. Few people do it at all, and those who do use much more powerful computers so it doesn't take weeks to get a complex model. Do you have a reason to think this is changing, and if so, I'd like to hear your proposed use case for the average user to be training models on their machines. Most users do not find training instructions that include statements like "create a virtual environment and install TensorFlow and Torch" to be easy to follow, and that's by far the easiest item in the list of steps for prebuilt ML software.

Re: Probably not exactly a bargain.

They would fit their argument more, sure, but since I think their argument is wrong, it doesn't convince me. You could propose all sorts of correlations and allege that they make democracy. For both examples, you could say that right-wing* dictatorships become democracies and left-wing* ones stay dictatorships, but there are plenty of counterexamples to disprove that. You could say east Asian countries become democracies and others don't, also easily disproven. There are dictatorships that produce tech products to some extent, and doing that does not guarantee that they stop being dictatorships. Using a bad example didn't help, but it was not the only problem with their argument.

* Right/left wing: Too simplistic, because there are usually long arguments about which side a given dictatorship is on by people who want to make sure it's not on their side.

Re: Speculative Execution Vulnerabilities?

I'm pretty confident it's in there. Whether it is in there with vulnerabilities, known* or unknown, is a better question.

* Known vulnerabilities, not as in deliberate backdoors, but something they considered not important and left in the design. It happens a lot.

Re: "the Morefine M700S isn't a great deal overall. " ... indeed

They were comparing the model of the computer with the same model, made by the same manufacturer, but with an Intel chip. That's why they were using a 2023 Celeron instead of a 2020 I3 as a comparison. I'm not them, but I can answer some of your questions.

"The story claimed i3-10000 series compute, not Celeron.": I've explained why they did that. From benchmarks, the N100 is a little slower than the I3-10100, though much more power efficient.

"A quick research shows 16gb of DDR4 and 256gb of SSD are both $50 [...] I don't see how even a new Celeron will be $130"

I couldn't find the specific model they were looking for, but those prices do exist. I found one from the same company with an N100, 12 GB of RAM, and 512 GB SSD for $144.06. The RAM is a bit lower, but the larger disk probably offsets that. From a different provider, I can match exactly, $129.98, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD. These are from AliExpress. Add $20 and I can get you the same thing on Amazon (US Amazon so I can keep quoting USD), but it's Amazon, so if I search for twenty minutes instead of twenty seconds, I might be able to match it without the premium. So yes, you can get that spec for that price. I wouldn't want to count too much on that warranty.

"a perusal of Newegg shows i3-10000 series desktops going for -$440"

That may be, but there probably aren't many and they're probably not selling. The processor being old enough means that people can easily get a better box for the same price or a comparable one for cheaper. I can easily double the performance for that price.

Re: Good enough

It won't run AI training very well, and even a lot of inferencing will need some more processing, but how many people do you know doing either of those things on a desktop? I know a couple people who have, but all of them used a dedicated GPU to do it, and those can be connected to this as well. Everyone else I know either doesn't use those tools at all or is happy enough to let someone's server do the heavy lifting. I somehow doubt that will prevent this chip being useful to the general office user. Software availability might be the harder problem, though by no means insurmountable.

Re: Probably not exactly a bargain.

"Competition with Japan worked out well in my view, bringing it out of its axis-of-evil past and into 21ˢᵗ century democracy"

It may be worth including in your theory the fact that, during the period when all of the products you mentioned were being developed, Japan was already a democracy. China isn't. I don't know whether this changes your plans, but if your theory went country makes tech products > country makes good tech products > country becomes democratic, it can be worth considering that Japan didn't do those things in that order.

AI spam is winning the battle against search engine quality

Re: Maybe…

Granted, but the effort is going to be much worse than it ever was. It works for a small subset of things, but there are a lot of topics for which a simple list of curated sites is not good enough. I've recently done a few searches in different topics in which the best, most detailed, and least inaccurate information were found on personal blogs. Manually adding in sites wouldn't have included these because they were small and it's hard to know when a blog stops being useful and either is no longer updated or taken over by a spam campaign. For any niche search, there are likely many sites that are too small for even a large team of curators to pay any attention to.

MPs ask: Why is it so freakin' hard to get AI giants to pay copyright holders?

Re: Begging the question

The parallel is still correct. Reading copyrighted material without obtaining an authorized copy is also illegal. The copyright holders usually won't bother charging you, but not because they can't. They don't because it's a small case, not worth their time, and they don't care. It's still illegal, though. The initial recording is already a crime. The reproduction is another crime. If you do either with a human brain instead of a computer, it is still a crime. If they obtain authorized copies, they may still not be allowed to do with the contents what they are doing, and that's a legal dispute that will be handled separately. So far, the LLM creators have decided to skip this argument they might win and skip straight to a stupid one, that they should be allowed access to it all for free, that they should not.

Re: 'AI', another nail in the coffin of copyright?

What they were saying is that requiring creators of work to perform in order to benefit from having done so is adding an unnecessary step. This becomes more evident when we consider things where performance is less important. You may enjoy performing your music, but if someone composes a piece and you play it, is it fair that you are the only one to benefit and the composer gets nothing, even if you didn't write a note? If an author writes a book, do we just assume that people will want to attend a live reading? I've read lots of books, but I don't want to hear the author read it to me. The valuable part is the book itself, and the important work involved is writing it. Copyright exists so that work can be done even if they don't have a patron who decides to fund it, which very few creators get.

Re: Begging the question

If you have a memory that can accurately record copyrighted works, and you use it to reproduce them, that's not allowed and they can take you to court and win.

Re: Begging the question

"Well, does AI training?"

Yes.

"the ultimate end product, that is, the ML model, doesn't store of the ingested data"

Yes, it does. Hence why verbatim copies tend to get spit back out, and why they've had to build rules to look for and deliberately prevent it from showing it to you. It's in there.

"(barring effects like overfitting, which are not intended to begin with)."

Why their production models contain the data isn't really the important part. Whether they wanted that or got it by mistake, they obtained it without permission and despite it being illegal, used it without permission and despite it being unauthorized, and store it without permission and over the protests of those who could give them that right.

"Does a browsers cache (which can store images for days or even weeks depending on what the header says) count as an illicit copy of copyrighted material? What about the caching mechanisms of proxies, VPNs, ...?"

If it is being used for a commercial purpose, which the LLMs are and the caches aren't, then it becomes much more obvious. I think the law could be improved to clarify that caches don't qualify as infringement, but it's a completely different issue than this. The data isn't being stored temporarily in the service of some other operation. It is being stored permanently in a lot of locations with the deliberate goal of having access to use it. They are not similar. I think you knew this already. I wonder why you tried making that comparison.

Apple stops warning of 'state-sponsored' attacks, now alerts about 'mercenary spyware'

Re: Very NewSpeak, that

NSO claims all the time to be state-sponsored, so much that they claim to have all the immunity of host governments whenever they face legal consequences (they don't really get it, but they try). It's more that, when NSO or some criminal group like them sells their product to a private actor, it can't really be said to be state-sponsored. The criminals spying on you aren't a government. The ones who made the tool aren't a government. If the latter group is NSO, you can claim that Israel is responsible for all NSO's actions as they condone their existence, but if it's a different company, that may not be the case, and if it is, it may not be easy to prove. Hence, Apple has made their message more generic so it covers cases where it isn't a state-sponsored one.

Amazon search results now less self-centered, boffin says

Re: An admission of guilt?

That's not how any of this works. Their making a change does not imply guilt at all for two reasons:

1. Until the DMA, the things the DMA forbids were not illegal. You can't convict them of anything that wasn't a crime when they did it.

2. Their choice to make a change suggests that they thought regulators would find their algorithm violated the DMA, not that they were necessarily doing something else illegal. In order to charge them for market manipulation, you have to prove specific violations. That's what they're already trying to do, and they will have to do so as manually as they did before.

You also have a weird idea of leaching off the power grids, which I assume has to do with their cloud business instead of the retail one, but we can leave that for later.

Linux Foundation is leading fight against fauxpen source

Remember also that the ability to sell your hosted thing comes from people wanting to use it. A proprietary tool that does what Terraform does will get few if any customers. That is one of two reasons why it was released as open source in the first place. The other was that people wrote parts of it that Hashicorp didn't want to, and they could still sell services based on those things. Any company is free to try to make a proprietary program. I won't object, but it's very unlikely that they'll get users the way that open source projects do, especially when we're dealing with developer-oriented tools. I object when they start open then try to take everyone's contributions as their property.

When you found a company, you have to make decisions about what you're going to give to your customers. You don't have to give out the source code. It is a choice. The choice comes with benefits (free work, more adoption) and consequences (you are no longer the only person who can sell something based off it). You can't have one without the other.

BOFH: The new Boss, Aiman, is suspiciously good – for now

Re: Hilarious!

I don't think he needs to do that if he can just submit three fake candidates. Preventing any communication from real people is harder than submitting communication from fake people.

GCC 15 dropping IA64 support is final nail in the coffin for Itanium architecture

There are legal and IP problems, but theoretically they could deal with those and open the thing up. Let's assume they did it, which they won't do because the checks that they've done so properly take employee time and they don't see a reason to waste it. Even if they do, who is going to build the computer? Someone has to design a processor using the architecture that can be usefully built on modern fabs. Someone needs to manufacture and test a lot of them. Someone needs to build a board that uses that chip. Someone needs to write the firmware and get a kernel which can run on it. Who is going to do each of those four things, and why do you expect that it will be any more interesting than the many ARM or RISC-V based SBCs that are easily purchased? It probably won't be cheaper or lower power, and it certainly won't be more compatible with anything, and if they make it fast then AMD64 becomes a valid competitor as well, so what's the reason for a user to buy it? If there isn't one, nobody will bother making it.

US House mulls forcing AI makers to reveal use of copyrighted training data

"Secondly, it is not always obvious that any given material is subject to copyright, or the version thereof that the bill would apply to."

This is not new. If I gather code, I have to know who owns the copyright to it and what license terms apply. This is something that any software company has done hundreds of times. It's not hard to know that the GPLed thing isn't to be pasted into the Windows source. Microsoft can do that and does. OpenAI probably has the same thing for any of their source code. They can do it with training data as well. It would involve more work, but the work is not the tricky part; they could hire people and train them to track this down. The tricky part is that they know full well that a lot of that was obtained illegally, and if they admit its presence, they're going to get sued. They knew this from the start, hence the various attempts to hide it.

Re: License fees should be due

Yes, which is as it should be. I've written a book. Do you want to train your LLM on it? Here's the price. You may well feel that what I'm asking for is not worth the value of using that book in the training data. This gives you two options: negotiate to lower the fee or leave the book out of the training data. Both are completely viable. A lot of creators will likely accept the use at a relatively low license fee. Those who do not won't be so crucial that developing an LLM is impossible without their books in the training set.

If you disagree, then we should simply require that OpenAI give us full access to their model immediately when they've created it. That will conclusively prevent them from using the books in their training set, because it will then be impossible for them to make any money from their model when everyone has it for free, so they won't make one. If they deserve money for their product, the authors making the training data do too.

Ex-Microsoft engineer gets seven years after trying to hire hitman for double murder

Re: Child Protective Services

It sounds like they've been involved from the start given that's what caused the guy to want to organize some murders. Even if they hadn't been, that's the kind of thing the police would do after arresting someone with children, although if there is another person taking care of them, they might have delayed calling them. I'm pretty confident that someone is already trying to do something, though I don't know what they're doing or if it's the right thing.

Re: use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of a murder-for-hire

If everything was in one state, the interstate charge would not apply and it would just be a murder case. This is a federal charge that adds to, not replaces, any other charges at the state level. In addition, if he was in New York at the time but the exchange or bank involved wasn't, the interstate charge still applies.

Cloud vendor lock-in is shocking, but there's a get out of jail card

Re: Second Sourcing

In production, having a feature cut off is rarely the lock in concern. Cloud providers do discontinue things, but they usually start by cutting them off for new customers, then a few months to a year delay, then they prevent existing customers from starting new instances, then another year or two, then maybe they'll do something to existing instances. That maybe is truly a maybe; I've seen cloud providers offering services that have been discontinued for ten years because someone is still paying for them. This kind of lock in is not that different from a software provider that has ceased offering a certain feature in their next version. It is troubling, but it's the kind of thing that IT departments have to deal with anyway.

The things that create greater lock in risk are services which cannot be simply deployed somewhere else. If I build something using what they sometimes call "cloud native design", for example using a providers serverless functions system for computing and message passing system, then I cannot simply pick it up and put it somewhere else. A different provider probably has both of those, but they don't work the same way, so I can't remove and replace like I can if it's a binary on top of an OS. Another lock in mechanism is data transfer costs. If I stored a ton of archival data in one cloud, it will cost quite a lot to transfer it out to another one. Another is integrated features. If I have linked all my systems together using a virtual network, it requires a lot of changes to get it running over the open internet instead, especially as any data-intensive features will now start to cost me significantly in bandwidth charges. These things make moving cloud providers costly.

Re: Why not have cloud.gov.uk ?

Again, I don't know how useful that point of contact is. I do know, from experience, that they do have those points of contact and that initial messages get responses. Fortunately, as a programmer, I've rarely had to get any more connected than that. I am responsible for making sure that the cloud bills shouldn't be very high. Once I've done that, making sure they send us the right bill is someone else's job, so if any interaction is needed, they do it. Maybe the communication will still be fragmentary, but it won't be a forum topic alone.

Re: Terraform

When it became popular, Terraform was open source, so you couldn't get that locked in, and now you'd probably use OpenTofu instead. In both cases, the software runs on your equipment by default, meaning that you're not locked in to any particular external provider to keep information about your system state. Most deployments I've seen store that data in the cloud somewhere, but that is a cloud location of your choosing, under your control, and not under Hashicorp's control (maybe they have a managed version, but I've never seen it).

Re: Why stop at cloud?

I think my view is based on a narrower definition of lock in. Some of those, including licensing, sunk investment, and integration I file under lock in. Feature parity, on the other hand, doesn't really count for me. If you use a program because it has a feature you want and others don't, that's not lock in, that's a product being better for your use case. I count something as lock in if you would prefer to use something else but it is either impossible or impractical because of your previous use of the first option.

Re: Why not have cloud.gov.uk ?

If you buy enough stuff from them, you move from the basic customer to one who does get specific contacts and priority support. I can't promise that those things are as good as they sound, but I can virtually guarantee that, if the UK government buys a lot of services from AWS, they have someone at AWS they can complain to and get responses from quickly.

Re: Why stop at cloud?

I don't think all of those have the same lock-in potential.

Operating system: I'll grant there is a tendency to rely on software which doesn't support all ones, but that's more on the writers of software who choose not to make builds for other OSes than on Microsoft or Apple. You can always install another one, and they don't prevent it from doing what you want.

Office: Not really. The file formats are understood by other applications. When I stopped having Microsoft Office and started having LibreOffice, there was little change for me and no change for anyone I interacted with because I could still open their Office-generated files and send them ones they could open. I know that complex spreadsheets can be an exception to this, but that affects a smaller proportion of users and is something they can try to resolve by considering other programs, one of which probably supports them better than LibreOffice Calc.

Email: Moving email suppliers can be tricky, and it's one that fits somewhat better, but it's also where the protocol should make it straightforward if you control the important things like the domain and the configuration. Porting from one supplier becomes more work, but not one that will cause chaos for users if you do it right.

Teams: There are lots of videoconference programs out there. Many of my employers have picked a non-Teams option. It doesn't have that much lock-in potential, especially as multiple such programs can be installed simultaneously, making it possible to gradually switch over.

What can be done to protect open source devs from next xz backdoor drama?

Re: The victimzed linux releases were loading opaque tarballs instead of cimping from source

"So the victims were not compiling from the original Github open source version, but from some tarballs instead? This surprised me - maybe it's wrong to call it "open source"?"

Open source refers to the licensing. Both copies used the same license. It was definitely open source.

The distinction is just where people who needed the code went to get it. They had multiple options, and the exploit was added to a subset of them. Someone who chose to get the code by cloning the repository evidently would have missed it, whereas someone who used the alternative would end up picking it up. That's a problem already, because we'd probably want to make sure that the two sources are in sync, but it doesn't stop the project from being open source or indicate that the people getting the source were necessarily doing something obviously wrong.

I do this myself with some projects. You can clone my git repo and get a copy, or you can download copies of the source from a different site. If you make sure you're on the same release with both, the operative files will be identical. The git repo has more files in it because the source archives just contain the code and build scripts, not irrelevant things like the .gitignore file.

Re: Maybe follow the well trod road ...

"And make sure that some of that 'paid for' goes back to the original developer/s, although they would not be responsible for maintaining the software at 'ISO' level (or whatever it's called)."

If they're not responsible for doing that, I'm not sure who will be. Maybe you can get enough people to pay them so they agree to be responsible for it, but if you can't, then it likely won't get done. A separate group of people certifying software is not likely to have the knowledge necessary to actually know whether the code has been compromised. This is especially true if they have to certify every package on a Linux system, as they would have to if they're going to catch things like this. That is a lot of packages.

The logic for having them be one set of people is that the developers know what the system needs to have on it since it's running their code, so they can make changes faster. The logic for having them be separate groups is that those who specialized in administration know things developers don't know which turn out to be important to the health of the system. Both arguments have some good points, but taken to their extremes, don't produce the obvious better results their adherents hope for.

Take this as an example. Sysadmins wouldn't, just by being sysadmins, recognize this vulnerability in XZ. The people who spotted it were programmers reading its code, not admins installing the thing. Alleging that having a sysadmin running the server instead of combining that role with a developer would prevent the class of problems is overoptimism.

Google sues app devs, claims they're Play Store crypto scammers with 100k+ victims

Re: PlayStore

I would generally agree, but that's what both Apple and Google say they do every time someone suggests that maybe they shouldn't have a monopoly (Apple) or near monopoly (Google) on app distribution. They say they're inspecting apps for dodgy content, and I'm not just talking about a scan for known malware files. We know that, to the extent they're doing it, it's a minor automated scan, but if they're promising to catch things they won't, it's fair to point out when they fail to keep that promise. They can switch to telling the truth: "We run a few programs over the package and if they pass, the app goes up, but those scans are better than nothing which is what you get if you download from some site." whenever they want. They'll probably start to lose the monopoly cases if they do, but that doesn't stop their version from being dishonest.

Local councils struggle with ill-fitting software despite spending billions with suppliers

Re: That's air gapping

It did if that internal system was disconnected from the internet. If that server already had a network connection, then it isn't an airgap and it's just an inefficient manual step with no security benefits at all.

Re: All the above suggestions about standardising council software are good, but

"Whatever happened to the old way of doing things? - I'll pay the bill when it works."

Some people realized that it was a recipe for not being paid at all because the software did what you asked for, not what you actually needed. Those people put in a contract saying you'd pay when they implemented your design, whether you decided changes were needed or not was being a separate matter. Then someone else realized that, if people signed that, they could make the contract even more lax and get paid in a lot of situations. The first is logical. The second could use some people pushing back against it.

Re: Problems and solutions not welcome

I do, and it's a problem, but I also see the opposite which is also a problem. For example, having a computer take a paper form and transfer it between different mailboxes, just like the original paper forms did. You could probably do things a lot more efficiently by having the computer read the form and use the contained information to decide how to direct it, but the original process says that Dave does that, so we just send everything to Dave and wait for him to send them. If we automated that part of the job, Dave could probably do a lot more of the tasks that actually require some thinking, but by not touching the process, we're not saving the time we could. The best approach is to frequently consider changing the process, and keep in mind all available tools when you do, but only actually change it when the change will or is believed to make a real improvement, then check whether it has. That's a lot more work than assuming that someone, whether it's the software writers or the people running the original process, will be much better if only the other group conforms exactly to what they want to do, so people don't always want to do it.

Re: Problems and solutions not welcome

A lot of those customized machines are really just customized machines with wheels. The casing and the engine may be trucklike, but the important part that makes them different are the machines in the middle. There's a reason why you don't just buy a harvester and plop it on a truck.

Their point was that, when you want a vehicle to move something, you often choose between the general purpose options on offer rather than trying to make a custom one. If you succeed, the custom one might be a bit more efficient and maintainable, but it will be more expensive because it's only customized for you and you will have waited a long time for it to come around. Unless you need something that the general purpose options don't do, you will probably be better off with one of those instead. At times, it might be necessary to change a process so that you don't have to spend a lot of resources making tools that are otherwise useless.

Re: Problems and solutions not welcome

Those companies mainly exist because they have the ability to provide something based on a design that sort of looks acceptable and technically isn't broken, then charge for each change so that it actually becomes a little useful. Their business is based on those who need the software not being able to plan out exactly what they need and describe it accurately enough that they get what they need, and from having frequent enough changes that there's always someone around who needs them to build a new one. Some of the tools they have could be handy, but they'll still need to design something that's likely to do a lot of things for a long time, which current projects sometimes say they're doing but don't always accomplish because the design doesn't allow for it and neither the seller nor the buyer makes sure it happens.

How HashiCorp's license shakeup seeded a new open source rebel

Re: The Hyperscalers are forcing this

There's a reason I have mostly used Terraform or the fork. I've used ARM for Azure and Cloud Formation for AWS, and neither was great and both were pretty useless on any other system. Terraform is also kind of painful* and I don't much like it, but learning it can at least be useful in multiple types of deployments.

* Terraform is a functional language without being able to write functions. It supports complex data types, including nesting, but the code to untangle it ends up getting very large and ungainly if you ever find that you need them. Some of its competitors don't even support those types at all. IaC doesn't have the best tools.

Re: The Hyperscalers are forcing this

Of course. Who can forget evil AWS taking all of Terraform to -- sorry, what, they use Cloud Formation instead and want people to use that, grudgingly accepting Terraform? I meant it's evil Microsoft with their -- they have one too? Well, where's my evil company I can point at and say that everything is your fault? The people who ignore all of open source in the search for money? I think the best candidate in this situation is... Hashicorp. They're the ones that took the work of contributors, without paying them, and incorporated it in a version that they sell for money, then blocked those contributors from using their own code* if they competed with Hashicorp, as determined by Hashicorp's lawyers.

* Unless they forked before the license change, which effectively means using OpenTofu because they don't want to maintain a ton of forks.

Malicious xz backdoor reveals fragility of open source

Re: “… reveals fragility of open source”

They mean that it wouldn't be discovered, since both of those are instances where poison code was added to the binaries produced by those companies. I don't think they're correct about that, because the exploits in both of them were eventually discovered, though after they were released and caused havoc. Proprietary software is no guarantee that poison code won't get in, and open source code is no guarantee that poison code will be noticed before it is released. Viewing either as certainly better almost guarantees that you're not thinking the way you need to to prevent it happening.

404 Day celebrates the internet's most infamous no-show

I think it's meant to sound like what you might say if you were searching a physical location. For example, I looked under the bed for the page, but I only found the phone someone dropped there.

Re: Its worse than you could imagine....

It's efficient for programming time, so implementations can be made quickly. The same reason why we use text-based formats like XML or JSON frequently rather than making a custom binary format. Sure, an HTTP response code could look like "\x02\x04" (one byte for version number, one byte for status code), but that wouldn't do all that much for efficiency and makes the protocol harder to extend. It also has little to do with datagrams. If you use UDP for the protocol, you still have to encode the protocol data somehow. UDP can't send a single page as a packet in most cases, and it shouldn't be expected to. Somehow, HTTP has been a viable transmission mechanism for a long time. As we increase network speeds, the overhead from the protocol becomes less and less important, yet a small device with little memory and a slow connection can implement and use HTTP well enough as well. Leave even more efficient protocols to places where you need them.

Iowa sysadmin pleads guilty to 33-year identity theft of former coworker

They use a few methods to guess how likely you are to be able to pay it back, and you can quite easily get a credit card while having a lot of debt, especially if that is typically large types of debt like mortgages. Cautious banks may start someone with a lot of debt with a low limit and increase it. People are most likely to be rejected if they have no history with the identity or if they have previously failed to pay a debt. If you have borrowed tons of money but never missed a payment, they usually don't mind giving you some more. Even if you have missed a payment, if it was long enough ago, they may still accept you. They're in the business of lending out money, and sometimes it goes badly for them, but they lend to so many people that they can lose some of it without trouble.

This is why I assume they're asking a religious question, not a legal one. The legal answer in many countries is that the marriage can be dissolved. Whether it happens automatically, requires an annulment form, or if you actually have to go through the divorce process probably varies from place to place, but the union does not need to continue. I think they are asking based on religious authorities that do not acknowledge a divorce as legitimate, and there are a lot of them who do everything differently and their reasons for what counts and what doesn't are based on subjective interpretations of religious texts, so I don't think you'll find consensus between their opinions.

The social security card isn't as obviously acceptable as you say:

The card on which an SSN is issued is still not suitable for primary identification as it has no photograph, no physical description, and no birth date. All it does is confirm that a particular number has been issued to a particular name. Instead, a driver's license or state ID card is used as an identification for adults.

Nothing associates a card with its true owner. He did also have an ID with a picture, but of a type that can be faked or obtained fraudulently (by providing documents without pictures). The other person using the same name almost certainly also had an ID card with the same information and his picture on it. So they can't assume that someone with a card with the correct SSN and an ID with the person's picture mean the presenter controls this account. If you're the only person presenting them, they'll probably accept them. If you're presenting them while someone else, also with documents, says you're lying, they'll either require more or bring in the police to determine which of you is the true one, since law enforcement can validate documents with more accuracy than can a bank.

I can pretty much guarantee that nobody knows. If you ask enough people, you will get every possible answer. Each of those answers can be backed by some kind of reference to religious text if you want. People with one view who strongly object to the other view will say that the other guy's reference is misinterpreted, assuming you get them to make an argument instead of just shouting.

Re: geniuses everywhere you look

There are certainly reasons that might have happened with the person coming in being a criminal. The easy example is multiple holders of a single identity. If two people buy the same fake identity from a criminal who stole it, they may end up in an identity theft collision. Person A goes to take out the debt, person B hasn't gotten to that stage yet and is still pretending to be the person, all while the actual owner of that identity isn't doing any of the things that person A or B are doing. A bank could have decided that this was what happened in this case. This situation wasn't that, but there is a method by which a similar set of circumstances could arise.

Re: Why did he do it ?

"Something seriously wrong with USA .... this and the recent monkey torture story :("

Why is a country being blamed for a single criminal? Maybe, if I'm being generous, you could say that there is something wrong with the California police system which failed to unravel the crime*, but that wouldn't be the whole country either.

* Not knowing many details, I'm inclined not to blame them too much. With an identity theft going on for three decades, including lots of documentation, it would be hard to prove who is correct from documentation alone. If one person has a full set of documentation for an identity and another one has a partial set, one of them has clearly stolen the set. Governments are likely to believe the one with the full set who has been working under that identity for seven years at the time because that is not typical for an identity thief. This may be a reason to treat all identity theft cases with more scrutiny, maybe getting DNA testing involved in all cases of identity confusion, but that has its own potential downsides.

Re: Why did he do it ?

The first bit appears to be the typical identity theft playbook: steal someone's identity, earn some money on that identity to establish a history, borrow money, don't pay it back, if questioned, tell them it's not you. The normal method is that, once you've stolen money that way, you burn that identity and either stop committing crimes or go get another one. I'm not really sure why he kept doing things under the second identity. My only theory, and one I haven't researched, is that he may have polluted his own identity, for example getting arrested, at some point and used this as a backup.

Software engineer helped put Sam Bankman-Fried behind bars, say prosecutors

Re: And yet

No, not a classic Ponzi scheme. FTX was, although it was more of a classic "I stole your money and spent it". But cryptocurrency, while there are a lot of problems with it in general, is not, nor is the description to which you replied describing a Ponzi scheme. A zero-sum environment does not make a Ponzi scheme. It makes something where there are winners and losers, not just winners. A lot of investment either is or looks like this environment, and investing properly often involves trying to find something that escapes it, hence the focus on growth when valuing companies.

The difference is important. If you dismiss everything related to cryptocurrency as a Ponzi scheme, it makes it sound as if you understand neither cryptocurrency nor Ponzi schemes. When something like FTX comes along which actually is a Ponzi scheme, people won't believe those who call them out because they've become used to people describing things incorrectly. There are ways to express a general or total contempt and distrust of cryptocurrency without being inaccurate. Others will benefit if you use them.

Uber Eats to rid itself of pesky human drivers with food delivery by robo Waymo

Re: Much more efficient

The same logic could be applied to any technology. Spending millions so a chunk of metal that fails all the time when the vacuum tubes break so it can add up numbers, when we have banks of computers (people who perform calculations on paper) that can add just fine. Every technology can look unnecessary if you only consider its first application. Only by considering the capabilities available in the long term can you distinguish between those that are truly unnecessary with ones that may prove revolutionary.

I think you already know what the theoretical possibilities of advanced automated road travel are. We could have lots of discussion over whether this can be made safe or economically, or if they will ever be accepted by the public, or whether they will prove to be useful alternatives to automated fixed-route transportation, but I don't think we will get anywhere if we assume that the only thing they'll do is deliver lunch.

Re: I hope you know up front that's how your food is delivered

The article did cover both questions: the app lets you opt out and, if there is an automated delivery, they don't take the tip. It's true that you have to go out to retrieve the delivery, and the points raised by others about those with disabilities that make that difficult are valid problems with the idea. I have a feeling a lot of people who don't have those concerns won't have a problem with that and may approve if the deliveries are cheaper, especially in a city like Phoenix whose unpleasant weather is usually just it being really hot, where a few seconds outside probably isn't too bad.