To be clear, Google will still be storing copies of the pages they crawl. They just won't be making those copies available to end users.

There is a Jira ticket (ID-240) for Atlassian requesting the ability to merge Atlassian accounts that is over 10 years old. I'm one of the 1,450 watchers. This news does not bode well for this ticket ever getting implemented.

It amazes me that there are so many people who buy a printer, are offered this "pay $x a month for Y pages" type of plan, and say yes. I mean, sure, HP sucks, but they wouldn't be able to get away with such slimy business practices if there weren't so many people willing to pay.

While this is amazing and all, it's always seemed to me that this approach of using hundreds of laser beams focused on a single point would never scale to be viable for power generation. Can any experts here confirm?

I've always assumed this approach was just useful as a research platform -- to learn things applicable to other approaches, such as tokamaks, or to weapons applications.

In what I'm sure is totally unrelated news, South Korea's work force is predicted to shrink by half in the next 50 years.

The article isn't clear about the mechanism by which the data center is supposedly affecting the woman's well. Is the data center using well water, depleting the supply of ground water in the area? Or is the claim that the construction disturbed the geology enough to cause problems with flow and sediment in a well 366 meters away? Does anyone know or have theories?

This is why companies like Perplexity and OpenAI are creating browsers.

I don't disagree with the criticisms of American cars -- overpriced, uninspired, unreliable, over-engineered, etc. -- but to everyone saying "we should just compete", do you realize the realities that Chinese workers experience? Have you heard of 996? It's shorthand for a common work schedule in China: 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Benefits that are common in the U.S., even in non-union shops, like retirement plans, PTO, worker's comp, and overtime pay are rare. So, yeah, things can be made much cheaper if you are willing to feed your workforce into the grinder.

This situation seems analogous to when air travel started to take off (pun intended) and existing legal notions of property rights had to be adjusted. IIRC, a farmer sued an airline for trespassing because they were flying over his land. The court ruled against the farmer because to do otherwise would have killed the airline industry.

Thought experiment: What if AI companies were allowed to use copyrighted material for free as long as they release their models to the public? Want to keep your model private? Pay up. Similar to the GPL.

I feel like this is the ad-equivalent of the sub-prime mortgage situation, pre-crisis. With mortgages, you had loans that no individual bank or bank manager would want, and then you had an automated process that obfuscated the individual loan details and produced financial products that could be sold as high quality. In the ad world, it's the same thing. You have these websites that nobody would buy ads from, individually, but somehow, through an automatic process offered by Google and friends, the worthless product becomes valuable.

I suspect there is at least one engineer who voiced concerns months or years ago, was not listened to, and is now having an "I told you so" moment.

I never thought forcing Google to sell Chrome was a good idea. Most of the companies lining up to buy it were AI companies flushed with private equity money. Does anyone really think those companies would do a better job at protecting user privacy and avoiding monopolistic practices?

They should re-make Episodes 1-3 and do what they should have done the first time -- reveal Jar Jar as a Sith Lord at the end of the trilogy.

I'm with you. Also, it seems like it would be much more efficient to do carbon capture at the source, where the fuel is being used, like a power plant, where the concentrations are relatively high, compared to atmospheric capture where CO2 is less than 0.1%.

Exactly! Back in the day, you had two options: (1) subscribe or (2) buy a single magazine or newspaper. Now, there's no equivalent to the newsstand for digital media.

I've noticed the same thing. I was somewhat optimistic about Apple's purchase of DarkSky and planned integration of DarkSky technology into Apple Weather. I mean, DarkSky was awesome. Surely, DarkSky technology + Apple's resources would result in the ultimate weather app! Boy, was I wrong. Apple obviously took a wrong turn somewhere because the new and improved Apple Weather is anything but.

And it's written in Java. Even though I'm not a huge fan of Java, it's almost refreshing to see a new project claiming high performance that isn't written in Rust or Go.

Businesses that create custom works should be able to decide what they want to create, but they shouldn't be able to limit who they'll sell to.

Trump did end the de minimis rule. The executive order was made April 2nd; the loophole closes May 2nd. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/03/de-minimis-trade-loophole-to-end-may-2-white-house-says.html