Extend? Do you mean it was already in place? I thought it was something that was not yet imposed, and the discussion was whether to start requiring it.

“Research” must have never met my friend Sturgeon. (Of Sturgeon’s Law. No I didn’t actually know him).

BYOVD = bring your own vulnerable driver. Seems to mostly be a Windows thing. Closed source drivers, bah.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/54-edr-killers-use-byovd-to-exploit-34.html

TERCOM for “hobbyists”? Just what we need. What could possibly go wrong. :(

Thinking about this a little more, that particular example doesn’t seem important. I’d like to know more about the shape change at the high income part of the curve you mention. That would be more significant. It still sounds like you’d get a curve that you can describe with two parameters instead of a single parameter, still not that big a deal.

Pikkety’s observation was that invested wealth tended to grow faster than the overall economy, if I have it right. So that would give some exponential growth at the high end that’s not present in other sectors. It’s not mathematically obvious to me that this makes the distribution stop following a power law. Maybe it does, either necessarily or as an observational matter, I just don’t see a quick proof either way. It would at minimum change the shape of the Lorenz curve (i.e. change the exponent aka shape parameter of the curve) but that’s still a power law. So I’d be interested to know what economists are saying about this.

I still haven’t read up on GINI enough to see if it means something different from power law.

It’s not that complicated - block all bot traffic by default,

It’s not that easy to identify bot traffic. AI companies have been incredibly persistent and aggressive at pretending to be humans to scrape sites.

Let’s see them try to opt out of AI training.

IDK really. I’m repeating what I saw someplace years ago. I would say do a real RAID if you manage it. Maybe RAID 5 on 3 drives.

I didn’t know about “quietly”. It used to be “delve”. Bah.

It bugs me, yes. The anthromorphic “ask AI” makes it even worse.

While I don’t exactly intend to run RAID, I ended up choosing nas drives for the 24/7 intended usage,

The purpose of a NAS drive is to be LESS reliable than a regular drive, not more reliable. Explanation: if a regular drive gets a read error on a block, it will retry for quite a while before giving up. The host, meanwhile, has to wait for the data to be retrieved if the retries work. That’s all it can really do, wait and hope. Meanwhile, the waiting slows the application down.

A NAS drive instead will fail once or twice, then give up immediately, since it knows that it’s in a RAID system and that the data is also present on other disks. The RAID then puts the data together from the other drives and gets it to the host, logging the error. It will also hopefully mark the bad block on the drive with the read failure, and rewrite the recovered data to a spare sector. So this is faster than all the retries even though the drive that had the bad block gives up on it rather than attempting recovery by repeated reads.

So if you buy NAS drives, put them in a RAID.

Drives are currently around 2x as expensive as a year or so ago but they are available if you can afford them. I guess that’s better than shortages where they’re hard to find even if you can pay. We’ve had that before too.

I like to think the current situation will settle out. Who knows though. Drive space is still way less expensive than in 2010 or anything like that.

IDK but they’ve done that for a very long time. I remember wondering if ebay had some exclusive deal with them for annual plans. For a while, the website only had monthly plans. Or maybe, they are adding some friction in the hopes of getting some less careful shoppers to pay more.

The pi is pretty slow too, compared to a basic x86 laptop. I use a Logitech K40 wireless keyboard (USB dongle, not bluetooth) that has a built in trackpad though. So that gets rid of the mouse and two cables, and you can actually use it in your lap.

I don’t want to watch a 6+ minute video. Is it about Woodie Guthrie’s guitar? I’m sure writing songs can help but we’ll need an awful lot of them.

If you can establish that it was written before 2021 or so, it’s probably not from an LLM. That kind of text has been compared to “low background steel”, typically salvaged from ships sunk in WW2 or earlier. Low background steel is a valuable commodity used for some types of highly sensitive instruments. Steel made in August 1945 or later, especially post 1950-ish, always has trace amounts of radioactivity from u-know-what.

Note that contamination is contagious. Even if you know that a human wrote something post-2021, for example because you wrote it yourself, you still can’t say it’s guaranteed AI-free, because of how AI has warped language and to some extent everyone’s minds.

https://englishlanguagestudies.com/the-impact-of-artificial-intelligence/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/202507/the-emerging-problem-of-ai-psychosis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

If you can’t deal with an adult partner, dealing with kids might not be so great for you either.

I’ve never heard of one of those with no recurring charges (typically you get a service plan that expires after 1 year), but yes, that type of phone is super cheap. Like here’s two flip phones each with 1 year of service, $70 for both:

https://www.qvc.com/tracfone-blu-b300v-2-handsets-1200-talktextdata.product.E323463.html?sc=srch&sku=062

I think there’s a way to do two sim activations on one phone, so you get two years of service. r/nocontract on spezzit would have more info about this.

QVC used to have tons of cheap Android phones (search “tracfone”) with similar deals but they’re all OOS now, I guess due to AI semiconductor shortages. No idea about Walmart. I haven’t looked at ebay recently.

Here’s a bunch of other links: https://old.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/1setzil/low_data_phone_plan/of1yxnz/

I think Helium Zero is long gone, and has to have been a privacy invasion scam or something. But other stuff starts at $2.40/month which most people can manage. Redpocket is fairly decent these days and they have a $30/year plan on ebay.

Here’s some others: https://prepaidcompare.net/ But remember that “free” never really is.

Added: I can reasonably recommend this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/136840233242?

It’s $30/year for unlimited voice and data plus 200MB/month of data, which is comfortably enough to check email and Lemmy now and then, though not enough for video watching or heavy web surfing. I’m on a $10/month T-mobile plan from them and it’s mostly been ok.

Hmm, another idea might be a data-only plan plus your google voice number and a VOIP client. That’s going to be pretty annoying though.

I remember the early days of desktop publishing. Before that people couldn’t easily use multiple fonts or sizes. After, at least for a while, everything looked like a ransom note.

What you’re asking for has never existed in the US as far as I can tell. There have been some prepaid plans with rollover, so every payment you make gets added to a credit balance that you draw against by making calls, but you have to keep adding money every month or every 3 months or else you lose it all.

Simply having a phone number costs money (like a domain name), so any plan that allows you to receive calls is going to have recurring charges. If you don’t need a phone number and have internet access, you could use something like linphone and a SIP plan. Those are around $.01/minute with no recurring charges depending on where you enroll. You usually have to make a minimum payment in advance, like $20, which gets drawn down as you use it.

I’ve heard Google Voice assigns you a phone number at no charge, but you have to figure that if you aren’t the customer, you’re the product. Otherwise, phone numbers at least at retail in the US are around $1 a month depending. You can get them from the same places that have SIP plans. I’m on vitelity.net which is more like $1.50/month but it’s been ok for me. Twilio seems to have pivoted towards enterprise. voip.ms is another well known one.

All the time?! Yikes. Yeah out of place on nottheonion, but still seems like a very weird incident to me.