Have they not gone bankrupt yet? I just kind of assumed they had once their “prototypes” turned into a complete laughing-stock and having not heard anything from them in years.

Poe’s law? Can’t tell if this is serious or not. I’m hoping this is sarcasm that’s just running afoul of Poe’s law, but it’s a bit hard to say.

Lets see what Biden’s plan to deal with them is. He’s promised to do some kind of SCOTUS reform act before the end of his term.

The real powerplay if Trump loses would be to pass an amendment setting a maximum age to run for president. Maybe tie it to retirement age. Old enough to receive social security, too old to run. Ideally you make that apply to all political offices, but I’m not that optimistic. Not that I think there’s a snowballs chance in hell of this actually happening as that would be a sane and sensible thing to do and therefore antithetical to everything our current crop of politicians stand for.

It would be somewhat interesting to see what would happen if Biden called their bluff. Biden resigns, Harris becomes the President, she nominates someone to replace her as VP, then runs a reelection campaign in a few months. Without their usual talking points to bitch about with Biden I feel like they’d be kind of at a loss for what to even say. No more Hunter to complain about, none of the tired bullshit they’ve recycled for years now. They’ve sunk so much time and effort into attacking Biden I’m not sure they could pivot to Harris quickly enough. What could they dig up on Harris? A lot of progressives don’t like her stance on law enforcement, but that’s a non-starter for the Republicans as it’s basically their stance.

Because his supporters don’t care if he’s a gibbering idiot as long as he tells them their particular deplorable -ism is perfectly valid and fine. He gets the racist votes because he tells them that they’re right and all the non-white people are inferior and out to get them. He gets the Christian votes because he tells them that the US has, is, and always will be a Christian nation that should be run by their particular flavor of Christianity and btw all the non-Christians are out to get them. He gets the homophobe and transphobe votes because he tells them yes, LGBTQ+ is a choice, they’re all perverts, and they’re all out to get them and their children.

Basically he tells everyone that’s on the wrong side of history who have been told that they are terrible people for decades that they are in fact not terrible people, that they’ve been right all along, and that it’s all a conspiracy by liberals/democrats/minorities/homosexuals/satanists/whoever to get them, and they eat that shit up. As long as he keeps spouting support for their particular prejudices he’ll keep getting their votes, because they rather elect a gibbering moron who validates them than someone sane and competent that tells them their prejudice is wrong.

He never had it.

It depends. There’s a lot of areas in coal country that are deeply conservative in part because conservative politicians promise to protect coal jobs and to disrupt renewables. That of course varies by location, but E.G. Texas which has a large oil company presence is going to have a lot of conservative voters who are anti-renewable because they’ve made their career working in the petroleum industry. So while not every conservative is going to be against solar, quite a lot of them are.

That can delay things, but ultimately it will be the US against the rest of the world and no amount of subsidies will be able to offset that. We’re already seeing the early stages of that with China having invested heavily in solar. Cheap Chinese made solar panels are starting to drive the cost of solar installs down and China is still ramping up. Between the public backlash against fossil fuels on one side, and increasing economic pressure on the other eventually they’ll cave and phase the subsidies out.

Ultimately this is how renewables win. Not because people are pushing for them, but because they’re cheaper and easier. In order to reach that point we do need a certain number of early adopters that are using renewables because it’s the right thing, but we’ll eventually hit a tipping point where it costs you more to use non-renewables and the migration becomes self-sustaining at that point.

It’s important to distinguish between lossy and lossless algorithms. What was specifically requested in this case is a lossless algorithm which means that you must be able to perfectly reassemble the original input given only the compressed output. It must be an exact match, not a close match, but absolutely identical.

Lossless algorithms rely generally on two tricks. The first is removing common data. If for instance some format always includes some set of bytes in the same location you can remove them from the compressed data and rely on the decompression algorithm to know it needs to reinsert them. From a signal theory perspective those bytes represent noise as they don’t convey meaningful data (they’re not signal in other words).

The second trick is substituting shorter sequences for common longer ones. For instance if you can identify many long sequences of data that occur in multiple places you can create a lookup index and replace each of those long sequences with the shorter index key. The catch is that you obviously can’t do this with every possible sequence of bytes unless the data is highly regular and you can use a standardized index that doesn’t need to be included in the compressed data. Depending on how poorly you do in selecting the sequences to add to your index, or how unpredictable the data to be compressed is you can even end up taking up more space than the original once you account for the extra storage of the index.

From a theory perspective everything is classified as either signal or noise. Signal has meaning and is highly resistant to compression. Noise does not convey meaning and is typically easy to compress (because you can often just throw it away, either because you can recreate it from nothing as in the case of boilerplate byte sequences, or because it’s redundant data that can be reconstructed from compressed signal).

Take for instance a worst case scenario for compression, a long sequence of random uniformly distributed bytes (perhaps as a one time pad). There’s no boilerplate to remove, and no redundant data to remove, there is in effect no noise in the data only signal. Your only options for compression would be to construct a lookup index, but if the data is highly uniform it’s likely there are no long sequences of repeated bytes. It’s highly likely that you can create no index that would save any significant amount of space. This is in effect nearly impossible to compress.

Modern compression relies on the fact that most data formats are in fact highly predictable with lots of trimmable noise by way of redundant boilerplate, and common often repeated sequences, or in the case of lossy encodings even signal that can be discarded in favor of approximations that are largely indistinguishable from the original.

I still don’t understand how she hasn’t been removed from the bench for her blatant bias and incompetence.

I feel like Google is trying to speedrun killing their search service. It was already significantly shittier lately just because of all the sponsored bullshit and SEO spam, but this rush to cash in on the AI fad has really destroyed the last utility it had.

They did, but then Elon insisted they add a virtual neuralink into it and now the neural network is braindead.

GPLv3, make it really radioactive to them.

The implication of a 200 to 1 algorithm would be that the data they’re collecting is almost entirely noise. Specifically that 99.5% of all the data is noise. In theory if they had sufficient processing in the implant they could filter the data down before transmission thus reducing the bandwidth usage by 99.5%. It seems like it would be fairly trivial to prove that any such 200 to 1 compression algorithm would be indistinguishable in function from a noise filter on the raw data.

It’s not quite the same situation, but this should show some of the issues with this: https://matt.might.net/articles/why-infinite-or-guaranteed-file-compression-is-impossible/

Company should be banned. Nobody should do business with them anymore.

Honestly the short 5 year from original release till EOL thing really fucking annoys me, but it’s literally every phone on the market. I’ve looked, it’s impossible to find a phone that doesn’t force you to replace it every few years unless you go to a plain dumb phone that only supports voice calls and maybe basic SMS with no apps. That’s just a nonstarter in this day and age.

Even alternative Android firmware like GrapheneOS and /e/OS are dependent on the stock firmware releases by the phone manufacturer so when the manufacturer goes EOL and stops releasing updates your alternative installs also are effectively EOL.

The only solution to this problem I’ve seen that seems like it has a chance is Linux Phone OS, but it still has several problems that make it unusable for most people (biggest one probably being that it provides absolutely terrible battery life).

Technically you’re correct, but it’s effectively the same thing since I’ve literally never used NFC for anything besides contactless payment and initial phone setup when migrating from an older Android phone to a newer one. For most people NFC is synonymous with contactless payment.

You know that if someone skims your card and makes a fraudulent purchase, you will likely be able to get your money back, right?

Sure but it’s a major pain in the ass. Every time it happens I have to cancel my current cards, request a new one, find all the services I’m currently paying with the now cancelled card and update them to a different card while I wait for the replacement, and then maybe remember to swap them back when the new card shows up. It doesn’t happen constantly but if I use cards to pay they seem to get skimmed about once every year or two.

What do you think will happen if someone exploits a 0-day in GPay to do this? How could your bank know the purchase was fraudulent? At least with a card it is obvious that this can happen.

Literally never happened before, but same way they know a credit charge is fraudulent, I tell them. Also if someone found a 0-day in GPay I wouldn’t be the only one complaining of fraudulent charges, they’d be flooded with complaints.

If you care about “secure” payments that much, why not use cash?

Because that’s a pain in the ass. I don’t care about “secure” payments, I care about not having to spend days dealing with the aftermath of it. Paying with cash means I need to constantly go to ATMs to withdraw money, and if I’m doing that my odds of getting my card skimmed actually go up so it doesn’t even protect my from that.