You can’t just use an audio file by itself. It has to come from somewhere.

The courts already have a system in place that if someone seeks to introduce a screenshot of a text message, or a printout of a webpage, or a VHS tape with video, or just a plain audio file, needs to be able to introduce that as evidence, with someone who testifies that it is real and that it is accurate, with an opportunity for others to question and even investigate where it came from and how it was made/stored/copied.

If I just show up to a car accident case with an audio recording that I claim is the other driver admitting that he forgot to look before turning, that audio is gonna do basically nothing unless and until I show that I had a reason to be making that recording while talking to him, why I didn’t give it to the police who wrote the accident report that day, etc. And even then, the other driver can say “that’s not me and I don’t know what you think that recording is” and we’re still back to a credibility problem.

We didn’t need AI to do impressions of people. This has always been a problem, or a non-problem, in evidence.

A camera that authenticates the timestamp and contents of an image is great. But it’s still limited. If I take that camera, mount it on a tripod, and take a perfect photograph of a poster of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, the resulting image will be yet another one of millions of similar copies, only with a digital signature proving that it was a newly created image today, in 2024.

Authenticating what the camera sensor sees is only part of the problem, when the camera can be shown fake stuff, too. Special effects have been around for decades, and practical effects are even older.

YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.

Opposite from the enemy’s gate.

I wonder if someone could set up some form of tunneling through much more mundane traffic, perhaps even entirely over a legitimate encrypted service through a regular browser interface (like the browser interface for services like Discord or slack or MS Teams or FB Messenger or Zoom or Google Chat/Meet) where you can just literally chat with a bot you’ve set up, and instruct the bot to do things on its end, and then forward the results through file sending in that service. From the outside it should look like encrypted chat with a popular service over that https connection.

The browser is your thin client.

Mine’s getting pretty thicc

It requires safe design principles to address the specific concerns with timber/wood construction, but some places are starting to do the research to show how wood can be made safe. This interview with a fire safety engineer talks about the state of the industry in different regulatory jurisdictions.

Yeah. Top floors doomed from the start, but a wheelchair-bound person on the 69th floor was safely evacuated. This link says that 5 people were saved using this evacuation chair.

Yup, Grenfell was one of two disasters that I had in mind in my answer, that was bad enough that able bodied people needed firefighter rescues (or where rescue was futile and they were basically doomed from the start).

this seems really dangerous for anyone who might get stranded.

I’d take a step back and say no, this isn’t actually as bad as some of the comments seem to suggest.

The vast, vast majority of building emergencies are safe to shelter in place. Modern building codes generally prevent fires from spreading too far, and isolate smoke to a specific place in the building.

Then, for certain types of catastrophic disasters, being able bodied doesn’t actually help, as people can still get stuck and need rescue from firefighters anyway.

You need some kind of disaster Goldilocks zone where things are bad enough to where quick evacuation is helpful and things aren’t so bad that evacuation isn’t feasible, before it starts making a difference.

And in those situations, many buildings do have evacuation chairs in the stairwells. And stronger people can assist carrying down the stairs, too. There are a lot of variations on two-person or single person carries that depend on exactly what mobility limitation there is. If you live or work with or around people with mobility issues, it’s worth looking them up, maybe taking a first aid/survival class or something.

Nintendo 64 games could hit $75 in 1997 dollars. It wasn’t until Sony enforced a $50 cap on Playstation games that the industry started seeing a practical cap.

reaching those limits requires more manpower in creating assets to populate these larger worlds

Yeah, when a character design consisted of like 30 sprites of 32x32 pixel resolution, that could basically be done by an artist in a day. Then the “physics” of game play could be simply defined in a two dimensional space.

Going to 3D, with different models of clothing, armor, weapons, hair, requires a lot more conscious artistic choices within a broad but consistent visual design language. Each time resolution or polygon count or frame rate or hit box number go up, the complexity of the visual design, gameplay design, etc. go up accordingly.

Physical realism in games increases game development cost exponentially with each generation in tech. A lot of studios simply stepped off of that rat race and went towards cartoony visuals and physics that don’t even pretend to be realistic.

After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done

There were a lot of big things happening in computer hardware: migration to 64-bit instruction sets and memory addressing, multicore processors, the rise of the GPU. The security paradigm also shifted to less trust between programs, with a lot of implementation details on encryption and permissions.

So I’d argue that Windows has some pretty different things going on under the hood from what it was 20 years ago.

Fun coincidence from Newton’s not quite right theory of gravity combined with his not quite right particle theory of light.

It’s just a type of injury. Injuries themselves don’t give you a right to sue, you have to be injured by someone else doing something wrong.

Can I sue for blindness? Yes, if someone caused my blindness in a way that they’d be liable for. Same with other injuries like broken bones or lost employment or embarrassment or paralysis.

So if someone drives drunk and hits you with their car, paralyzing you and causing loss of enjoyment of life, you can sue them and would have to prove liability (they caused your injury in a way that causes them to have to pay for it) and damages (the amount of money they owe you based on how injured you are). Something like loss of enjoyment of life would be part of the second part of the analysis.