Fair point, there's a lot of nutritional bunk going about. I'm not an expert either, but the Wikipedia article seems to cover the big studies that I've heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_alternative#Health

> What we do know: neurons carry electrical impulses across their synapses to trigger other neurons to fire, and more frequently used synapses are strengthened while infrequently used ones are pruned. This is not all that dissimilar to how a multi-layer perceptron is trained

ANNs have been inspired by biological processes, but in practice you have to squint very tightly to see the similarity. Biological neurons are multiple orders of magnitude more connected than the nodes in an ANN, plastic in terms of their connectedness and continuously learning, and their activations are also affected in complex ways by the levels of various transmitter molecules in the brain.

This is DRM as in Direct Rendering Manager, which is the kernel interface to GPU hardware; not Digital Rights Management.

Named long before Digital Rights Management was a thing (or at least the 3 letter acronym existed for it).

If I remember correctly, actual pirated copies would have been maybe tens of megabytes, since they didn't include the CD audio. But that would still have been a hefty modem download.

People were still replacing their 14.4k modems with 28.8s in 1996. I remember seeing the Quake 15 x 1.44 zips on local BBSes, which would've taken at least 3.5 hours over a perfect 14.4 connection so definitely a daunting phone line tie-up for the average kid (I had the CD.)

The common pirated version of Quake was a 20MB pre-release leak that had oodles and oodles of minor differences to the final version. All of the actual levels themselves are playable and completable. The funniest differences are a mean trap that was removed from the final E1M1, and E2M6 still begins with the eponymous oubliette, banished from official releases until 2021 (!).

That's why you had a download manager and left the machine running all night.

I got 3kB/sec, or 6 minutes per meg in ‘96. 10 meg an hour wasn’t terrible even I. The U.K. where you paid a penny a minute.

Correct

The cookie laws and GDPR are hampered by malicious compliance, sure, but also outright intentional non-compliance. What's needed is more efficient oversight and enforcement.

How would more efficient compliance help the constant annoying pop ups?

You are not required to present an annoying banner to the user. You could simply honor user-agents' DO NOT TRACK header and silently avoid setting tracking cookies and that would comply with the law.

According to the rules, accepting or refusing cookies should be equally difficult. Making them both difficult makes people not use your site, so the incentive should be to make both options easy if you follow the rules.

Malicious compliance is to make cookie acceptance much easier than refusal. Lack of oversight doesn’t punish this. Now, the incentive is to make life hard for people who decline cookies. That results in more annoying pop-ups.

> Malicious compliance is to make cookie acceptance much easier than refusal.

That isn't malicious compliance, it is just non-compliance. If the equally difficult rule wasn't there then it would be malicious compliance.

also, session cookies for eg login and error tracing etc dont actually need a banner. you only need to use it if youre participating in the internet stalking behaviour by integrating eg google analytics and similar integrations

Rust has it as an experimental feature: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/keyword.become.html

Of course it's nowhere near a guarantee that it would land in the stable language, but it's still an opportunity to try it in practice.

In recent years we've also had browser-exploitable vulnerabilities that allowed reading arbitrary memory as a regular user, but slowly or without full control over the locations. I think wiping credentials as soon as possible after use is a very sensible precaution, even if it's only a moat.

I wonder about those kinds of exploits that sit on a webpage, but what stops someone from injecting their payload on a sites login page? JS can grab the password in plaintext in such a scenario, at which point the password manager does not save you. Can we normalize Passkey more?

I think the point is that you can have arbitrary website read the browser’s memory so example.com can read the password for example.org and example.net.

Or the computer's memory via Meltdown and Spectre-like attacks

That's why I disable JS by default with UBlock Origin. And OFC never allow JS to acces your clipbaord.

It's surprisingly hard to do the compiler or cpu may see a write without a read and optimize it away. Windows has a SecureZeroMemory and a few other barrier primitives but not all languages reach to it

Manufacturing dispute on non-disputed things is also a common tactic to influence people and create confusion and disorder. For that you don't need to turn the facts on their head, just make the result seem indecisive.

There were decent and reasonably thin layers over that to solve the immediate practical issues (e.g. Delphi, MFC), but they're no longer fashionable and nothing seems to have replaced them in the same space. Maybe we need a "NoFramework" phase to get back to RAD again?

IBM owned literally the whole market on computers at a time when computing equipment was prohibitively expensive and centralised.

IBM was a special case, I'm not sure there were many markets so thoroughly cornered like IT was for about 3 decades. I guess telephone (AT&T) was similar.

I think there's similarity to the dynamic too. Not many instances have the means at this time to produce LLMs from scratch and operate them at scale.