All politicians meet with lobbyists. It’s hard to get a handle on the needs of the nation (or state, or so on), and lobbying is how people inform their representatives of that need. Now whether those lobbyists are scumbags or saints, that’s a different question.

I was ready to hear something like a story from someone who had signed onto a medical trial and was upset the trial was ending. Nope, instead an absurdly short support period that seemingly is fed by the same culture of replacement over repair that has infected our economy.

Meh. Net worth can be volatile in the upper echelons of wealth. It’s often based on volatile assets. He’s still giving away plenty. I’m seeing a budget of $8.6 billion in 2024 for the Gates Foundation.

Also, his wealth doesn’t need to be spent within his lifetime to remain true to the pledge. The Gates Foundation can continue functioning long after his death, much like other foundations like the Carnegie Foundation.

Look at all our WONDERFUL job creators amassing their dragon hoards!

I’m not sure who is doing the calculations here, but the latest estimates I’m seeing for Gates have him down a bit for the year. He also is down after is divorce from Melinda, which included splitting off a good chunk of money for her own personal and philanthropic use.

YOU CAN HAVE MY COBOL ON COGS WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS.

I’m doing a series of conversations/interviews with my parents’ generation to keep a voice record of their stories. As part of that, I’m doing transcripts that start with the transcript feature of Google’s Recorder. It can do some nifty things like assign speakers to individual voices. I have to clean up the transcripts some, but it’s far less laborious than dealing with a 15-20 minute conversation. I can fix up a transcript in maybe 5 minutes.

If you start adding on mandates to the IP like that, that severely narrows the list of companies that are even capable of buying it. They have to have employees with knowledge of the specific device, which only a small number of people may be using.

As part of unwinding a company that is going out of business, they usually do sell off their IP. That doesn’t mean that anyone will continue this particular experiment.

I work at a university IT department. It’s been a struggle with our auditors to loosen up the password expiration requirements. At least with the students they let anyone with 2FA to go without password expiration, which acts as a nice little carrot-and-stick. But for staff it’s two years (2FA always required), regardless of password quality. I’d rather be able to base password expiration on password quality, personality.

LessPass and similar software has some problems. Things like you can’t simply change your master password, you must then recompute and change every site. It’s also not strictly stateless, since you need to know which password iteration you’re on and the user name. Full fledged password managers also typically provide other secret management features, like API keys, SSH keys, credit/debit cards, and identity cards.

38 million in 2021, according to the Census Bureau.

What does that even look like as a business model, though? There’s an expectation now that you don’t pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?

As long your strings aren’t null terminated

What kind of monstrous bug prone language would do that?