The other thing you didn’t talk about was the size of the market in general.

As onbaord CPUs were becoming popular the biggest reason for a GPU was games or video processing. Which, while significant markets, isn’t huge.

Over the past couple decades, GPUs have made headway as the way to do Machine Learning/AI. Nvidia spent a lot of time and money making this process easier on their GPUs which lead to them not only owning the graphics market, but the much bigger ML/AI market. And I say the AI/ML market is bigger is simply that they are being installed in huge quantities in data centers.

Edit: My point being that the market shrunk before GPUs became so critical. To counteract Nvidias stranglehold, a lot of big tech companies are creating custom TPUs (Tensor processing units) which are just ML/AI specific chips.

Yeah, but that doesn’t help if you can’t make apps that support the hosted services. Google is trying to have complete ownership of what runs on your phone.

There are laws about how to handle PII and potential criminal charges based on things like the Privacy Act. Meaning there are additional requirements above and beyond how people normally store data on a system.

More requirements = More chances to mess up

I think the line “how does handling PII make it easier to mess things up” just about sums things up for me.

While AWS/Azure do make the initial configs rather fool proof, that falls apart the moment you start configuring them for actual use. It’s also especially easy to mess things up when handling PII, at the SSA level it’s probably something that DOGE staff don’t have experience with.

As for vaccines. Largely through that out there cause it seemed like obvious bait for you, but I don’t think a single slogan “my choice my body” really encapsulates the arguments around abortion

In cyber security you may never know if a bad actor got access to your systems/data. The issue with not following good security practices is that you increase the risk of this happening.

Its like saying we should stop mandating vaccines cause the diseases aren’t around anymore. When you let down your defenses you end up with outbreaks that shouldn’t have happened and are harder to control.

The SSA stores a lot of sensitive data. Normally with sensitive data you want to be very careful with who can access it and how.

What is potentially worrisome in this situation is it seems like the SSA is taking on the “move fast and break things” attitude of Silicon Valley.

More technically, most government agencies use AWS and Azure (cloud providers) to host data. So spinning up a new server isn’t inherently bad. However, creating a new server that is secure and has the correct access controls (user permissions regarding who can see/change content) can be challenging. The whistle blower believes they are not doing this right, and it sounds like the head of the SSA isn’t disagreeing, just saying he thinks the risk is worth it.

Given it’s the government it’s most likely AWS or Azure. That really isn’t inherently bad, it’s more the attitude of “move fast and break things” doesn’t necessarily work for secure systems with sensitive data.

Later versions of the xb1 controllers should have Bluetooth support, so you wouldn’t need the dongle.

If you look online there should be guides to check if your controller supports Bluetooth and how to connect it.

If you read the article, the current head of the SSA acknowledges they did set up the system being discussed and that he’s accepted the increased risk of the implementation as there is a “business need”.

I agree that “random server” is a bad choice of words, but do want to add additional information context as the concern isn’t necessarily unwarranted. Another qoute from the article:

“I have determined the business need is higher than the security risk associated with this implementation and I accept all risks,” wrote Aram Moghaddassi, who worked at two of Mr. Musk’s companies, X and Neuralink, before becoming Social Security’s chief information officer, in a July 15 memo.

Its also sounds like they did spin up a new database with limited security/oversight to “move” faster. Why that’s worrisome is they aren’t denying there is a risk or lack of security, they are just saying it’s justified.

While you’re right, it is also the national guard so it’s a supplemental/part-time job and not the primary job for a lot of them.

Yeah, I made a separate comment, but AudioBookshelf can play nicely with ebooks and comics. It’s not super smooth, but provides the most features in a self hosted solution from what I’ve tried.

I just use AudioBookshelf for books. It’s a little annoying, but basically just requires an extra nested folder structure.

The best part is offline reading seems to resync back to the server, so you can download books for local reading or read through an internet connection.

Not only did I really enjoy it, I thought it was really well received critically?

Rotten tomatoes has it rated well too - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/inside_out_2

It might be worth giving it a shot.

It’s not really possible, especially given that most music is touched up post production to begin with (so isn’t “natural” anyways).

Much like detecting LLMs or AI photos/videos it’s mostly heuristics and so it can only give you a probability something was AI generated. Even worse, any improvement on detection can be used to improve the models that make the content.

Am I missing something? SQLite is great, but it isn’t really comparable to most other SQL databases, unless you’re talking about nosql alternatives?

A big difference is the Trump one is political.

The Regan one is just making fun of his lips.

I didn’t know that existed!

Its decline reads like everything else going on in the US. Government provided a service a lot of people liked, private enterprise lobbies to have it shut down and lock people into nickel and diming them.

I’ve long held the belief that the US postal service should also provide basic banking services too in the US, that way no one can be denied a bank account.