The UN doesn’t have any particular claim to the word “international”, except insofar as anything they do is international because the UN itself is international.

Other organisations, or even loosely affiliated groups of nations, can do international things because the word just means something like “between nations”.

Well there’s a clickbait headline if ever I saw one

Given that we’re discussing the behaviour of phones, I’m quite certain that there was never a time when they generally had line out ports. Also, I can’t imagine people are connecting their Bluetooth speakers to the wrong interface.

What you’re describing is still wishful thinking, because there’s no world where every consumer device is going to have accurately calibrated volume regardless of whether there’s a protocol which specifies it.

That’s pure wishful thinking. The vast majority of users wouldn’t even know what line level is, and you can’t expect end users to have audio engineering expertise. You also can’t expect anyone other than an audiophile or actual audio engineer to be able to get alll of their consumer electronics conform to such a standard

Agreed, perfectly reasonable precaution so long as it’s possible to calibrate it per device

I get really irritated when my phone limits volume with a notification like this, because the phone has no idea what hardware I have playing the sound. They’ve made some unfounded assumption about how loud 80% volume actually is, and interrupt whatever I’m doing to complain about it

Now you have to opt-in (in theory, according to Microsoft, who historically aren’t terribly trustworthy about such things).

When the feature was first created, and released to a group of end-users who have opted into the “insider program” to get new features earlier than most people, it wasn’t opt-in

I imagine he means things like Chromebook, rather than Chromebook itself. Mass-market consumer hardware which comes with Linux by default

The safety designed into Rust is suddenly foreign to the C family that I’m honestly not sure you can do that. Even “unsafe” Rust doesn’t completely switch off the enforced safety

Those two things aren’t being claimed by the same people.

There are people with functioning brains, who are aware that AI is shit at programming, and there are managers who have been sold a sales pitch and believe that they can replace half of their software engineers.

AI doesn’t actually need to be effective to cost a bunch of jobs, it just needs to have good salespeople. Those jobs will come back when the businesses which decided to rely on AI discover the hole they’ve dug for themselves. That might not be quick though, because there’s no rule saying that major businesses will have competent leaders with good foresight.

I don’t know what names are typical, but they certainly aren’t using actual norse gods. All the characters, gods included, have german-sounding names, but they’re mostly long enough that I doubt people use them routinely in real life

There are a million ways to back data up, many of them are as simple as “copy it to removable media”, and don’t require any clever operating system features at all.

What removable media you can use depends on the quantity of data, and how long you need the backup to last. Maybe DVDs, or USB drives. If the data is valuable enough, you can also pay for cloud storage and upload it

Be cautious about trusting the AI-detection tools, they’re not much better than the AI they’re trying to detect, because they’re just as prone to false positives and false negatives as the agents they claim to detect.

It’s also inherently an arms race, because if a tool exists which can easily and reliably detect AI generated content then they’d just be using that tool for their training instead of what they already use, and the AI would quickly learn to defeat it. They also wouldn’t be worrying about their training data being contaminated by the output of existing AI, Which is becoming a genuine problem right now

Oh, absolutely. It’s not something which should be encouraged, and against a well designed modern system it probably isn’t possible (there must be some challenge-response type NFC systems on the market).

I’m just saying it isn’t unambiguously “illegitimate”

That’s probably debatable, if they have permission. They probably shouldn’t have been given permission, but that’s a separate issue

Perhaps, but they do still need to know who’s going to be absent even if they’re going to approve it either way

It’s only true of badly designed bridges, these days. Modern engineering tools can calculate the resonant frequencies, and they make certain that those are far away from the frequencies which humans or wind can create

Light is a subset of the electromagnetic spectrum

No, it’s not. In physics, we call the entire spectrum “light”, because it’s all fundamentally the same thing.

We can talk about “visible light”, but that’s a subset of light in general. Microwaves, radio waves, x-rays, gamma radiation, and any other section of the spectrum you can think of are all light

Sure, but there are far more things which will kill the entire person at the same dose they’ll kill the cancer than things which can be carefully controlled by choosing the right dose.

These studies which claim to kill cancer in a petri dish usually turn out to be the former, because not killing the host is the difficult part

An experimental capability being kicked out of the kernel, so that it has to settle for being a kernel module or custom forks of the kernel, is absolutely a minor matter