Posts by NapTime ForTruth

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Re: Break it, smash it

The previous attack on the U.S. was the test case.

Re: What are the odds

You're giving too much credit. The disaster monkeys will just chop through the power line with a fire axe and shout, "there, I fixed it".

See also "Night of the Long Knives", because axes work on people, too.

Note to admins:

We need an icon for modern Nazism. I guess we could just use the old symbol; Nazism clearly hasn't changed much.

Creators demand tech giants fess up and pay for all that AI training data

There is a technological solution for this...

I believe the term of art is "Rods from God".

https://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-06/rods-god/

(Icon is literal.)

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Off-time phone calls? Ha, that's just the beginning.

Back around the turn of the century I worked at a company that was pushing hard into an IPO. We were shepherded through the process by a team of cutthroat investors and stand-in leadership, and everything reliably sucked. The company philosophy changed from "kind, supportive, collaborative, and communicative" to very much "move fast and break everything (people included), fire anyone involved with the broken part, and repeat until successful".

And, yeah, company or client calls flooding in 24/7, be sure to keep your cellphone on and be responsive.

We burned through people like kindling. The reduction in headcount was sold as "lean attrition", demonstrating to potential investors that we were cutting away the dead weight and doing more with less.

We pushed, god did we push. Ten hour days became fifteen became twenty became twenty-four. Dedication was measured in days without sleep or showers or change of clothes. We smelled like a frat house, we smelled like dead men.

And our exhaustion built failure, with code as a side effect

In the midst of this, and an entirely predictable divorce at home, I had a relatively minor heart attack lovingly distilled from pure stress and lack of sleep, was out of work for a couple of months, and returned not to my office but to the bullpen where new employees started and failing employees ended. I lasted maybe three weeks and hit the silk.

A few weeks or maybe a couple or three months after, I received a call from my equally-cursed successor, a good colleague - smart, capable, great with people. One of our teammates had committed suicide on the eve of their planned wedding. He was a good man. We lost him to effing software.

It is worth noting that this had no discernable effect on the great machine; it continued separating wheat from chaff and grinding each to powder. The IPO proceeded, remnant leaders succeeded. One former colleague acquired a gorgeous vineyard in Argentina, another executive bought a giant yacht and sailed around the world with his family.

The point of this recitation, dear reader, is that "we need you to take some calls after hours" is a gateway drug, just a little taste to get you hooked, a loyalty test hidden in a nod, a wink, and a secret handshake.

Don't sign up for that. Go do something sane and constructive that benefits you and the world around you as much as it does your clients or employers.

Icon for raising a glass to absent friends.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Re: How else...

Probably the same brand, not because it's good or because you want to, but because its lowest price/highest volume targeting won the market and there aren't any real competitors left.

As an example, see Microsoft, et al. Also, the volume of mobile device competitors: Apple or Goog-Android-le, your choice. Both reliably suck, and both reliably profile you at very high resolution and sell you...er, I mean "your data". (Yes, even if they pinky swear that they don't.)

Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands return-to-office despite remote work pledge

Re: All quit so we don't have to pay you

The ideal employee response would be for every employee to quit. Every employee in every service, business unit, location just stops showing up.

It's not a practical response, but it's probably the right one. The alternative is something along the lines of "...but if I don't let them run me over with a truck twice a day, how ever will I make a living?"

We can't make this stuff up: Palantir, Anduril form fellowship for AI adventures

Further evidence...

...that The Lord of the Rings was not fiction but prophecy, a direct warning from the future.

I vote we do what we always do and just ignore the warning. It's the least-possible-effort solution, and that's where we, as a species, truly excel.

Play to your strengths, say I.

FTC scolds two data brokers for allegedly selling your location to the meter

Well, that's fixed then, yeah?

"Both have now agreed to check their databases for information obtained without people's permission, and implement appropriate consent safeguards."

"Crucially, they have agreed to delete any improperly collected location data, and promised not to distribute location information of people visiting certain sensitive places,"

Well, that's all wrapped up, done and dusted, say no more! They've agreed to self-check, implement safeguards, delete some data, and not share some locations sometimes.

Clearly an impenetrable, incorruptible solution, particularly since they've promised - there might even have been some pinkie-swears.

Just one tiny added suggestion, the merest triviality: when it comes out that *somehow*, by some *mysterious* and *utterly incomprehensible, truly unpredictable circumstance* it all proves to be bollocks and everyone is still getting tracked, data-raped, and exploited, I get to wield the Holy Flamethrower of Correction. Or we can take turns, make a party out of it.

AI poetry 'out-humans' humans as readers prefer bots to bards

In fairness, a vast number of well known, if rambling, poems are nigh indistinguishable from hallucinatory LLM output.

I'm not looking directly at you, Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric", but I'm not not looking at you either.

LLM-GPT-uvwxyz output is on acid is what I'm saying, like all the kids are, and is probably...<some incoherent mumbling>...communism taking our wimmens and jerbs.

And you can't spell Haight-Ashbury without hate, even though that's technically a misspelling. Or Tory Spelling, I'm not proud.

(Be sure to wear flowers in your hair.)

Here's how a Trump presidency could change the tech industry

This is the way the world ends...

... Not with a bang, but a whimper.

WordPress's Automattic openly tracks websites bailing from rival WP Engine

Re: Are all CEOs

To a first approximation, yes.

If Trump gets elected, get your tech buying done asap

Setting aside the "you're a Nazi! / No YOU'RE a Nazi" act for the moment...

Tariffs have a way of dissolving right after they're put in place. Let's say [NATION] can only sell to [COUNTRY] at very high tariff rates, because (something, something, jobs 'Murica).

Option one:

[NATION] moves manufacturing to a different, friendly, or more acceptable country, and the new DifferentFriendly Co. sells the same products from essentially the same fundamental origin but aren't covered by [COUNTRY]'s nationalist tax, er, "tariff". Third Party Land where DifferentFriendly Co. is, and is *totally* not Mexico Border Place, also gets a boost in skilled jobs and income that, we might note, are not shared with [COUNTRY] who are printing money to pretend to build a wall, but one you can drive midsize light-duty pickup trucks through in salable volumes.

Option two:

[NATION] continues building the same products they already do, the ones that people in [COUNTRY] have been buying all along and like very much. Then nationalist tax, er, "tariff" happens. And [NATION] does something really weird: they take the portion of the products originally destined for [COUNTRY], partially disassemble them (or just don't quite finish assembling them to begin with), put them in tidy boxes with instructions, and send them on to [COUNTRY]. Since boxes of parts are *technically* not the banned or tariffed products, people in [COUNTRY] can either assemble them at home, or, more likely, business partners of [NATION] will spin up a new, barely-over-minimum-wage, totally-not-Amazon-or-Uber-like third-world assembly or "un-chop" shop, AssemblyCompany, LLC, to bolt the bits back together and sell them as completed units at a modest markup. In the automotive industry, these un-chop shops already exist (and have for years for just this reason) and are known as CKDs, for Complete Knock Down kit assemblies.

So, yeah, BAN-ALL-THE-THINGS!!¡, then squint just a bit when everyone is buying them anyway because shopping isn't national pride fight strategy, it's just meeting established needs.

Also, sharing commercial interests binds companies and nations together. You're much less likely to nuke other countries or steal their womens and chirrens if you're successfully doing business with them already. A rising tide actually does lift all ships, except for the ships that have run themselves aground out of spite.

Your mileage may vary.

NASA narrows Artemis III landing target list to nine

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE USE THEM TOGETHER USE THEM IN PEACE

Bluesky capitalizes on X woes with funding and user growth

"The predatory harvesting of social media content to create models that commodify the work of authors, musicians, video makers, and artists, that increase the competition for audience attention, is a profound disincentive for creative professionals to post anything on social media."

I'm not a "creative professional" in this context but this was, in essence, the death-knell of social media for me.

May their empires crumble and their enemies drive them into the blasted deserts, may their children and their children's children across generations turn against them.

Ford CEO admits he drives a Chinese electric vehicle and doesn't want to give it up

Re: For years I've wanted this

Check out the Honda Accord Hybrid and Civic Hybrid. The Toyota Camry Hybrid is also an option.

We have the new Accord Hybrid and it's astonishingly good, bonus points for having a manual pure EV mode option.

Ours was built at Honda's facility in Marysville, Ohio, USA.

US moves ahead with crackdown on data brokers selling to six 'countries of concern'

More holes than a fishing net...

...should be fine. At least we can say we did something. Or approximately nothing, which is close enough, right?

California cops cuff suspect in deadly drone-assisted drug deal

Re: He's lucky

"Although I suppose there is still hope."

Yes. That sentencing occurs at a later date in a much higher court.

Re: Those are some odd laws...

"Is it because those items need to be registered..."

In essence, yes, at least under California law. The same would apply to, for instance, driving an unregistered car in the course of committing a crime. If the driver was also unlicensed, that could be an additional and separate charge.

(Expansion follows, please don't feel obligated.)

The U.S. system of criminal law is explicitly competitive and adversarial. In the broadest sense, the prosecution's goal is to demonstrate that the defendant is guilty of *something*, and the goal of the defense is to demonstrate the defendant's innocence of *everything*. The greater the number of individual accusations, the more opportunities the prosecution has to convince the court of the defendant's guilt on at least one charge, with the bonus of implying gross criminality and humanity by sheer volume of accusations.

(Richelieu's law applies, as do variants of world + dog, drinking from a fire house, and dazzle them with bullshit.)

It's worth noting that in the pretrial phase, the attorneys involved often negotiate which charges will be argued, and the judge will often disqualify spurious accusations or encourage the attorneys to focus exclusively on the substantive components of the case (e g. "Let's leave out discussion of whether the defendant loves their mother or wears unusual shoes").

It's equally worth noting that each successfully argued individual charge can bring a separate penalty, and multiple penalties can be applied either simultaneously (e.g., five years in prison for charge A and two years for change B served simultaneously result in a total of five years served) or consecutively (e.g., five years in prison for charge A and two years for charge B result in seven years). The latter sometimes results in the bizarre notion of e.g., "four consecutive life sentences".

Why send a message when you can get your Zoom digital video clone to read the script?

Re: Max Headroom called...

Great minds think alike!

Max Headroom called...

...he wants his job back, about 20 minutes into the future.

(Icon because we're teetering on the brink of artifice-nuking the only known habitable world, leaving only charcoal to defend.)

Microsoft cash to help reignite Three Mile Island atomic plant

Perfect (Nuclear) Storm

So Microsoft requires a rehabbed nuclear plant...to run AI.

A dedicated nuclear power facility.

To perform crucial tasks like artificial customer support, on-demand artificial "art", selfie-polishing, white-paper and sales-pitch writing, Excel spreadsheet refinement, and inaccurate next-word suggestion in Word. Probably also security - er, "security" in Defender, et al.

A nuclear facility.

They can't not wreck their own products and services with every update, but they're buying a nuclear reactor.

I look forward to the dull blue-green glow of hubris as the windshield melts and our tears evaporate, leaving only charcoal to defend.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Re: "Curbing their spread feels like a good idea"

You're not wrong and I agree with you...but...

The trouble is that although humans do have intelligence, it's not our primary driver. Instead we are mostly (averages, Law of Large Numbers) first selfish, then lazy, and then (eventually) intelligent (sometimes).

I mean, look at us right now: we could be out picking up trash and making the world a better place, but instead we're lounging around talking about why no one is out picking up trash and making the world a better place.

We're doing this on short-lived electronic devices that, as a group, require vast extraction of rare and hard to access materials, have a voracious thirst for generated electricity, and offer an average first-user lifespan of 3.5 years...after which they too - and too often - become...trash.

Soylent Green is People*. So is pollution.

-----

* From the movie, not the extant, appalling, ostensible food substitute.

Feds urge 3D printing industry to end DIY machine guns

3D Printer = Terrorist By Default?

America:

"We need many, many guns for freedom and safety."

Also America:

"We have a gun problem that cannot be solved by freedom guns."

Also, also America:

"Our freedom gun problems are caused by...3D printers."

W...T...F?

(Icon for personal weapon optimization.)

Australia to build Top Secret cloud in AWS for military and spooky users

Edit

FTFY:

Australia to build Top Leaky cloud in AWS for military and spooky losers.

(That last term in the sense of losing data, control, privacy, access, secrecy, possibly your beloved pets, and the next world war, obvs.)

American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years

How much is "who" and how much is "what"?

Note to moderator: what follows is unquestionably immoderate and might require moderate immoderation. Or immoderate moderation - I'm not telling you how to do your job.

I'm not entirely shocked at the argument that people buy or don't buy specific vehicles based on (e.g., Elon Musk's) image, but I'm inclined to think that MOST of us choose our transportation by some significant component of need. For instance, one might consider buying a Corvette E-Ray to impress the neighbors, or at least the neighbor's kids, but having to get all four of your own kids to band practice three days a week, pick up groceries, take the dogs/goats/chickens/spouse to the veterinarian rules the Corvette right out even if you are a complete and dedicated douche, er, "social media influencer".

I've just read that the latest BMW M5 hybrid - which is VERY fast and reasonably practical for a family of five ostensibly upstanding Deutsche people (probably) - weighs 2445kg (5390lbs). That plus your spouse totals out only slightly less than a Ford F150's 2628kg (5794lbs), or approximately the mass of a mid-sized country home. And at least the F150 could carry that home along on holidays and/or pull an actual train*, which is a kind of practicality, however improbable. Improbacticality, I guess, after which you really should wash your hands.

What I'm getting at is this: buying hypothetical environmental cleanliness and virtue at the price of vast road hugging weight and sheer straight-ahead-ing-ness doesn't feel like a meaningful gain. Except in mass, obviously, or en masse if you lean that way, évidemment.

----

* hypothetically, and more likely downhill

Pew: Quarter of web pages vanished in past decade

It was ever thus...

I think we're looking at this with eyes too modern. Death, abandonment, and decay are part of the natural order of things. Everything that lives, dies, dissolves, is lost or forgotten - only to be repurposed either as fertilizer or a new world's fossilized curiosity. It has to, lest all space become occupied to capacity with dusty cruft and remnants (much of which we call "the ground".

We might mourn the passing of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, but we surely don't wish they were all still alive, generations of them, to entertain us with their rapacious killing...possibly including us, not that we're delicious. ( <--- Perhaps Jurassic Park was the answer to "why shouldn't I wish dinosaurs back", if the wisher was modeled on Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life", or Rod Sirling's Twilight Zone teleplay of that work. Quick, somebody write up a treatment and we'll turn it into a fortune!)

The public Internet was built on the back of sharecropper's hope, fertilized with dreamy little lies about ethereal eternities of connection - "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" - sold to the rubes for the low, low price of a shiny coin each...and all of your data.

Let the dead leaves fall, get plowed under, be forgotten, making room for the next dead leaves to fall, etc.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls.

[If the references escape you, perhaps they, too, fell to dust]

Critical infrastructure security will stay poor until everyone pulls together

Re: It's 2024 ...

"But did they listen? No. They did not. The idiots."

It's the same old story.

As long as there is profit or other benefit to be gained, and as long as the gains to the profiteers outweigh the losses by some arbitrary margin, no one with power or authority will listen. It's not in their best interest to listen, the grift is working as designed.

The solution is to make the cost of failure high enough to cool the reflexive cravings of the extractive capitalists. The countervailing problem is that they have all the money, so they can manipulate decision-making processes to not merely reduce the cost to something bearable, but to make it directly or indirectly profitable.

It's hard to beat cubic wealth and political connections. History suggests it's impossible at human scale.

Lights about to go out on US Affordable Connectivity Program

Re: A Modest Proposal [No Term for What We Have]

The term you're looking for is "capital-ish-m".

Microsoft teases deepfake AI that's too powerful to release

#not_just_the_old_folk

All but literally on script:

"Gee, the lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me."

"Don't you see the danger...inherent in what you're doing here? [Technological] power is the most awesome force the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun."

"...your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they *could"* that they didn't stop to think if they *should*."

"God help us, we're in the hands of engineers."

_____

We are a bloody stupid species.

(For the inexperienced, the quotes above are from the original "Jurassic Park", a movie about the inevitability of disaster when humans act through their arrogance and greed instead of their - admittedly rare - wisdom and intelligence. The movie also mentioned dinosaurs.)

Google fires 28 staff after sit-in protest against Israeli cloud deal ends in arrests

A number of Google employees unionized back in 2021 (I think). If the fired employees were union members, Google may face legal repercussions.

Per the US Government's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB):

"All employees - union or not - have the right to participate in a protected strike, picket or protest."

There are limits and exceptions, but this is the general guideline.

Hugely expanded Section 702 surveillance powers set for US Senate vote

Re: Palantir In The NHS???

There's no problem: everyone is potentially a baddie, so everyone is surveilled.

For what it's worth, it has always been this way. The novel component is that everyone now continuously generates an unending supply of information to be used against them, and allows that information to be held indefinitely by third parties around the globe for future use.

Soylent Green is people.

YouTube now sabotages ad-blocking apps that stream its vids

Re: 52% of Americans said they use an ad-blocker

"I have to think that hurts Facebook in the long run..."

Much like the guy who sells crack exists to take your money, Facebook exists to serve you ads, while also offering misleading information and making you feel bad about yourself. The ostensible content is a trivial side effect of that.

The only people hurting at Facebook are the users.

Devaluing content created by AI is lazy and ignores history

The single most important thing AI can do...

... is to render the Internet unusable for any meaningful purpose, and in so doing drive us back toward actually thinking and acting in the real world (if only occasionally, lazy curs that we are).

Being handed an answer isn't learning, and being offered synthetic images of your imaginary dream partner isn't a relationship. Yet we're too weak to turn off what amounts to an interactive version of television and go be in and of the world.

With luck, and some significant probability, generalized AI could be the tool that either ends the omnipotent artifice of online "presence" or renders the human component of technology redundant.

Perhaps somewhere ages and ages hence our successors will find the remnants of us buried thousands of meters deep in the internetworked strata, just below the still-hot fallout layer, and will draw wise conclusions and wiser paths from the folly of our self-destruction.

I hope they are evolved from cats.

NASA confirms Florida house hit by a piece of ISS battery pack

Re: slightly off-topic

Upvoted for the phrase "...being Donnie Darko'd".

"...Sheeple are asleep..."

Sooo...ashleeple?

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

If we get rid of the rich executives, who will be left to exploit the poor? The job is harder than it looks, what with the taxing, the disenfranchisement, the distractions and the displacement. And the police! It's a lot of work, this keeping people down!

And Soylent Green isn't just good, it's available! Also, it's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. That's not just a slogan, it's our future. Also, our dinner.

Listen, without the lovingly handcrafted threat and misery, the less-wealthy aren't going to just destroy themselves. For that, we need billionaires and executives.

Remember, you can't commiserate without misery.

Uncle Sam, 15 US states launch antitrust war on Apple

Cory Doctorow (who is, admittedly, an acquired taste) has a lovely descriptive term for the apparently inevitable corporate sort of buggery:

Enshitification.

I mention this because that's just a great word, and because his latest well-written screed dives right into the hows, whys, and wherefores of interoperability and lock-in:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/21/involuntary-die-hards/#evacuate-the-platforms

Euclid space telescope needs de-icing

It's not water icing...

The monks just completed their list of the Nine Billion Names of God.

Google brains plumb depths of the uncanny valley with latest image-to-video tool

And here we have the hollow men...

Clearly, Google ingested Eliott and saw that it was good for their bottom line. Also, to simulate the dried voices of any world leader.

(With all due apologies to T. S. Eliot, though maybe he was gifted with a sort of indirect prescience):

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

...

...

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Google gooses Safe Browsing with real-time protection that doesn't leak to ad giant

Re: Safe Browsing API to look up websites

I, for one, am enthusiastic about Google not being able to go anywhere (as illustrated by the attached sign icon)...with the possible exception of "away", which would be the ideal outcome.

Firefly software snafu sends Lockheed satellite on short-lived space safari

Exactly this...

Earlier space efforts were built on rigor, lengthy and specific and detailed checklists that were themselves built on checklists, and everyone involved was focused on getting as close to perfection as humanly possible. It didn't hurt that governments and the populace were both literally and figuratively invested in the work and the outcomes.

We had something to prove, part of which was that we could do extraordinarily difficult things and get them right the first time much more often than not.

Space is expensively unforgiving, and frowns on the wasteful, half-assed "fail fast and iterate" model of development. It is no place for dabblers and dilettantes.

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

Re: Query: the timing of ads

A colleague reports that a ~47 minute episode of vintage Star Trek on Amazon includes ~15 minutes of adverts divided unevenly over 5 occurrences - some are 30 seconds, others are several minutes. They also mentioned that the ads start several seconds ahead of the original slots in the broadcast, interrupting dialog.

The most 2024 things to do are laying off staff and eyeing up AI – Mozilla's doing both

Re: Mozilla is a dead man walking

Firefox just works. And it doesn't package you up like data-crops and sell you at auction.

The party isn't the venue or the streamers. The car isn't the chrome. The road isn't the destination.

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

Quite an energetic rant...

...but I'm not sure what the point of it was.

Someone at the Reg hates Firefox? And that deserves screen space because...why, exactly?

Firefox has a small share of the market, therefore...what?

Firefox users don't visit U.S. government sites with great frequency or volume, thus...bad? (Also, weird metric.)

I install, use, and update most browsers, meaning the Chromium cluster, Safari, and Firefox, plus the Tor browser, mostly to mollify clients with documented compatibility testing. They all work, routinely.

We don't care which a client - or anything else - uses. We don't back brands, we back function and results.

Firefox works fine. What's the problem? And why the vociferous howling?

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

About that very specific 1,977 calories...

... I'll wager that's the year of his birth. Magical thinking is like that.

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

Extortion, by definition

How is this not the very definition of extortion, indistinguishable from:

"Hey, we're so glad you're here. Really. And since you're here, you can either pay us or we'll hit you repeatedly with this hammer and maybe share some of your "private", uh, stuff with some other people - like your family and friends, or your boss, or maybe the police, or literally anyone who's willing to pay for it. I mean, it's entirely up to you, no pressure. But you should probably pay us so nobody has to get hurt or get their data passed around. You know what I mean."

For reference (from Wikipedia):

United States:

[...] Extortion, which is not limited to the taking of property, involves the verbal or written instillation of fear that something will happen to the victim if they do not comply with the extortionist's will. [...] In United States federal law, extortion can be committed with or without the use of force and with or without the use of a weapon. Violation of many state extortion statutes constitutes "racketeering activity" under Section 1961 of the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 18 USC

[...]

In the United States, extortion may also be committed as a federal crime across a computer system, phone, by mail, or in using any instrument of interstate commerce. Extortion requires that the individual sent the message willingly and knowingly as elements of the crime. The message only has to be sent (but does not have to reach the intended recipient) to commit the crime of extortion.

It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

Encrypted Data & Services

I wonder if my new car - the first modern vehicle I've owned - has access to unencrypted data from otherwise encrypted applications or services, e.g., VPN, email, chat. Does the car access such data at the cleartext UI level, or does it only perform such access at the application or user-data blob level?

The latter would represent an even more invasive step in what I now call everwatching.

Separately, I don't know to what extent the embedded "infotainment" device includes or ties to key features like engine control systems.

Even more separately, I hate this version of the universe and would very much like to replace it with something actually good.

US actors are still on strike – and yup, it's about those looming AI clones

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle?

A few years ago a close friend who worked in tech but dabbled in theater and screenwriting and short films was offered a part as a prime extra in a big name, big budget Hollywood movie. It paid a fair bit better than minimum wage, he hung out with some big-name actors, and eventually got to see himself - if briefly and occasionally - on the big screen. Fun stuff, dream fulfillment.

As part of the "standard contract/standard prep" the studio required him to participate in live and green-screen motion capture over a period of several weeks prior to actual filming. He had to sign off on the "usual" releases. He thought the capture technology was pretty neat.

And not too long after production wrapped and the big movie was on every screen everywhere, my friend died.

His wife called me for help and, in the course of untangling all the things that come with death, asked how she could prevent the studio from selling or showing - in any capacity - her deceased husband over and over again forever.

All I could offer was "get an exceedingly skilled and connected and likely very expensive attorney", because once he was motion-captured and digitally mapped, he - not just his likeness, but the visual and mobile and vocal uniqueness that was him became the property of the studio, to be used as they saw fit.

I think there needs to be a better answer and a better model for this. No person or organization should own unlimited rights to any other real person, no matter how digitized and data-fied they may be.

(The pint is raised to absent friends and the digital ghosts they leave behind ==> )

5G satellite briefly becomes brightest object in night sky

Sic transit gloria astra...

This affects not just astronomers and scientists, but every kid who might have looked to the stars and now sees only space-junk whirling by.

Is that Venus? No, kid, that's a telephone relay satellite, an Internet propagator, an automated advertising beacon. You were born too late to see the glory of the planets and the constellations.

Sorry about that. Who knew our saddest science fiction would become a template instead of a warning.