It gets much worse than this if you think about what they decided to do with Minecraft. They obliged millions of kids - literally, kids - to have a microsoft account to play a game that has nothing to do with any other microsoft products. They apply sub-standard and child-unfriendly security measures and when armies of kids get hacked (mostly phished) every day the only thing they do is to close down their account and FORCE them to buy the game again.
I still have to understand whether it's incompetence or a business model.
If one company becomes massively profitable despite offering literally zero consumer level support, then why would any other company, that covets the same scalability, make any attempt at consumer level support at all?
Google has not scaled it's services, it has ignored hard problems of scaling in favour of solving (relatively) easy technical problems. It has not been punished in any meaningful way for this unbalanced approach, and so "the norm" shall it become.
Had one of the first 10k Minecraft accounts or so. Never changed the name or anything. When Microsoft bought it they spammed me that I would loose my account if I don't transfer it. So after the 3rd email or so I did. It got hacked a few days after that, took several weeks to resolve for whatever reason. Ive had the account a few months after that until it was "hacked" again.
The very few times I played Minecraft since then I just used a hacked client.
I have a friend who bought Minecraft for the full price of 30 USD, and one day microshit decided "hey you know what? fuck you, we're deleting your account". so he went to a 3rd party site and bought a 2nd hand account, sketchy as fuck but it worked and this time he didn't have to pay full price again; but the fact that he had to pay *again* is simply outrageous.
On the other hand, last time I got actually hacked was in 2015, when I intentionally shared the password for a popular kids game that I used to play back then. And I'm not a cybersecurity expert at all, I don't follow the best security protocols, heck I don't even have good passwords, but I have never been hacked in 9 years.
As a bonus, you can can get completely stuck if you made the mistake of creating a MS family when signing into Minecraft. In the forums there are hundreds of problems like mine where the family becomes completely uneditable and Minecraft offline-only.
But I should've never attempted anything that complicated with MS. They can barely manage simple cases, groups of users is way too hard.
Just going through that myself. My son's Microsoft account was hacked, we contactes customer service and all they did was acknowledge the account was compromised, close it indefinitely asking us to buy the game again, and locked my account as the family manager. Fortunately I am a Linux guy and the last Microsoft thing I've touched was windows xp some 20 years ago. But imagine thinking this is acceptable?!
I guess they still suffer from monopoly syndrome. The EU should get them again.
The business incentive is funneling new users into their walled garden. If they could, they would assign a MS account to every newborn. There are still loopholes to protect your children from Minecraft's new "features" (at least for Linux users, ask privately), but it's only a matter of time until they are closed to appease the gods of enshittification.
The problem is that my kids want to play on online servers and for as much as they are learning to hate Microsoft, they still love Minecraft. I don't think loopholes can help with that, can they?
Huh, you actually are an expert in this area. I’m curious to hear more too.
> There, I studied the early stages of neuronal development in the Drosophila embryo…
> I graduated with my Ph.D. in September 2006 and decided that I would continue my research activity on sleep, using flies as the animal model.
The conclusions are pushed and hyperbolic exactly to get this type of reaction from the public, at best conflating control with function (we solved sleep) while the sleep phenotype itself is basically non-existing.
Proper rebuttals will come up in due time on the appropriate channels. all the colleagues I talked to are as pissed off as I am about this way of doing science.
This is what got me started with claude-code. I gave it a try using openrouter API and got a bill of $40 for 2-3 hours of work. At that point, subscription to the Anthropic plan became a no-brainer
I tried quite a few of them, including the cheap / free models but the only one that was really working was claude. The others were hanging whenever the model needed a confirmation for action. Mind you, this was some time ago.
There is also a social issue that has to do with accountability. If you claim your model is the best and then it turns out you overfitted the benchmarks and it's actually 68th, your reputation should suffer considerably for cheating. If it does not, we have a deeper problem than the benchmarks.
Arduino a poorly designed board is up there with the iPod being lame. Arduino was designed to be accessible and lower entry barriers and it became unrivaled for these purposes. If you want to have long lasting battery powered project you just power directly with 3.3v.
I spent some time* working on the firmware side of developing custom electronics based on various AVR chips, ATmega328 among them. Arduinos are not good for much more than babby's first microcontroller project. They're not even that great for prototyping. Besides the aforementioned hardware design issues, the "arduino" language(really just C++) and core library had several problems both in terms of code quality and abstracting over things that shouldn't be abstracted over when working with such a limited chip(8bit, 2k SRAM...), like significant memory allocations and interactions with SREG.
My EE partner in crime ended up designing a prototyping board himself, with various creature comforts included that we needed shields for with Arduino, and I ended up writing just C with avr-libc instead of using any of the arduino library/tooling, developing a set of core modules to use the things we added to our boards, in a more flexible manner than the Arduino library. It took some time, but it saved us a lot of time and friction in our future prototyping efforts.
All that being said, there's nothing wrong with Arduino as a platform for learning and personal tinkering. I do think they could've done a better job bridging the gap between that and prototyping though.
* Ten years ago, so my memory of specifics is very fuzzy and only reflects the state of things back then.
> Arduinos are not good for much more than babby's first microcontroller project.
Baby’s first microcontroller project is exactly what they excel at and, by doing so, they made hobbyist microcontroller development vastly more accessible.
The Arduino value comes from the ease-of-starting and they made that a lot easier than the then-extant state of the art.
>So ... exactly for what the device is being sold as? Weird complaint: "I purchased an apple, and all I got was an apple that's only good as an apple."
Like I said:
>>All that being said, there's nothing wrong with Arduino as a platform for learning and personal tinkering.
I was just adding my 2 cents on Arduinos based on personal experience. That is all.
>Then you would know that ATmegas are in a lot of successful commercial products from the past.
Yes. What led you to believe I was suggesting otherwise? I made no criticism of the ATmega328, any other ATmega chip, or the AVR ISA for that matter. I could make some if I wanted to, but it doesn't seem relevant. The topic was Arduino boards, which typically contain an AVR chip, but is in fact not a chip but a dev board.
- the only real comparisons they make are with the parental model, llama 3.7-70b without fine tuning. That tells us what is the added value of fine tuning the dataset but it is hardly state of the art. I guess it should be seen as an indication of how difficult it is to stay afloat in this world when you are in academia and the tech barrier stands billion dollars tall.
- Fig 4a shows Centaur clusters more closely to humans than any other model in a cognitive benchmark (CogBench) but also shows that parental llama cluster closer than claude and openAI thinking models which makes me a bit sceptical of using this measurement at all and reinforces the need for further comparisons.
- the fMRI stuff makes no sense and transforms the paper into a propaganda stunt, IMHO.
- At the end of the paper, the comparison with an "informed" Deepseek-R1 (not shown in data?) shows that a modern reasoning model matches Centaur-performance even without any fine tuning.
The latter point is incredibly interesting in principle but it has nothing to do with the claims of the paper. It basically concludes that a modern reasoning model with CoT can outperform out of the box a "simpler" model that was specifically fine-tuned with a huge dataset of human cognitive behaviours. Bigger claim than the title itself basically IMO.
I've joined Mensa a few months ago and I've never met so many idiots in my entire life. It's a small percentage of the members overall but they take over the online communities compulsively and make the environment miserable. Ant they all have the same political profile (won't say which one).
Mensa is sadly a combination of positive and negative selection. Positive: by IQ. Negative: by having nothing more important to do than become a Mensa member.
If instead you took random people on the street and gave them IQ tests, and invited those who passed the IQ 130 bar to a meetup, it would be much more interesting than a typical Mensa meetup.
I still have to understand whether it's incompetence or a business model.