I know multiple people who after 10-20 years with them, they have tried to increase the price to 4x what a new customer would pay. They phone to complain and it's cut to 3x. This is despite alternative fibre having been installed on their street so they switch to that. VM make no attempts to cut the price to something even close to reasonable.

We do have a right to free speech under article 10 of the human rights act - the thing that all the right wing parties are saying we should remove.

I got a Captcha on some search result a few weeks ago that initially looked legitimate then came up with this.

It had put obfuscated code on my clipboard to download and run an executable.

Yeah i write financial software now and we're PCI compliant. Devs can't access prod or its very limited and read only with no access to encryption keys. Those who do have prod access, don't have write access to the code. No one has both.

All software installs on any company device are reported to ops.

I'm not saying this couldn't happen but i think it would be way more difficult. Also, we're a company of 15 people.

Yeah i do this. Whenever i try to write in paragraphs the recipient ends up not responding to half of it. It's like they reach the first question and stop reading.

This AI expansion and summarization reminds me of when translation online was new and you'd translate something then translate it back and get a totally different thing.

I think the doomerism was all to get that moat. There's no vendor lockin either, even if you're using the API. You can switch between providers really easily.

100%. I've had the same email going on 20 years. It's been hosted in a dozen different places. It was on proton for a while, it's on mailbox.org now. I can move again in an hour.

Agree with all your points but none of those reasons are we supposedly live in a democracy and the vast majority of us don't want these data centres.

Charitably the best i can come up with at least the business would know they're not offering enough if people keep rejecting them. But then that's the status quo and all evidence points to wage suppression so clearly they're just making up bullshit to justify wage suppression.

My wife applied to a job this weekend, no salary mentioned at all and a required field on the form was her salary expectation that would only permit a single number, no letters, not a range.

Not even just boomers anymore. I get AI slop shared with me by all ages. I just tell people now assume nothing online is real.

100% this. A cut of every penny we spend goes to mastercard or visa. Most products include cloud compute these days with AWS or Azure, which are really expensive, that are baked into the prices. Everything is on an app that's does nothing but extract a margin. How much of our GDP ends up in these foreign tech companies?

Me too, was a paying customer for several years. Perks of using your own domain. I can switch providers in under an hour.

It's the amount the average energy bill is going to increase by between January and April. It's not supposed to solve problems now, it's for that specific problem coming in January.

They're hoping energy prices will drop by April.

In UK in 2010, 10 new nuclear plants were announced. Since then 5 older plants have been shut leaving us with 5 active. 1 of the 10 new ones started construction and it's massively over budget and delayed.

In the same time we've added about 20GW of solar.

My first thought. Everything is going to look the same soon isn't it

I was looking for graphics the other day and the stock images sites I've used before were virtually all AI slop. Why would I pay for that?

Probably 10 years ago I encountered a pump on a job. It was huge. 2-3 stories tall. Probably cost millions.

There was a computer plugged into, an old beige tower case and a CRT monitor with RS232 serial cable between it and the pump.

This was the control system, it was connected to the network (airgapped LAN fortunately).

Was running NT4!

I have no idea why it was set up this way, PLCs were definitely the standard at the time and there were older PLCs than that on the site. No one who worked there was around when it was installed, it was just the way it was.

How do you know the software running on the voting machine you're about to vote on is the software that was audited?

You go get all the machines together, make sure all the software runs on the newest version and it's correct and it's configured properly with the candidates. When you've got to distribute them to the polling stations, they've got to be kept securely between audit and polling day. Your adversaries are foreign state actors who want to manipulate your elections.

And then at the end of the day you have to get the results off the machines. You have to trust that the machine gave you the correct numbers and then you have to get those numbers all together without anyone having the opportunity to manipulate them.

Usually at this point someone comes up with the idea of a paper backup so the machine prints like a receipt of who you voted for that you can put in a ballot box.

If you're doing that and then count all of the paper ballots to verify the machine count, why even bother with the machines? Just have people vote on a paper ballot with a pencil and count them by hand. The ways to attack paper ballot just don't scale. You might be able to manipulate a few votes in one polling station, but you'd need a massive operation to do it across the whole country.

It can't spread across networks because it doesn't run locally. The "agent" is running in their data centre the entire time. It should be very easy to stop it

Saw this coming when Microsoft admitted to have bought up loads of hardware they couldn't actually use yet. I'm convinced the data centre build out is to hoard all the computing capacity so we are forced to use their cloud services because our own hardware isn't capable.

If this keeps up in a couple generations every personal computing device will essentially be a thin client with everything running remotely for a subscription.