Glacier, and I think a couple of Iron Mountain products, exist for "cheap backups, really expensive restores" because the restore is going to be paid for by insurance (or by a counterparty when it's explicitly used for escrow.) So there is an explicit market for this (in the backup-of-things, rather than backup-of-capabilities, space.)
Huh - anyone recall other examples of open sourcing a product code base to mitigate a user trust issue? (In 2026 it's perhaps less powerful because "you're just going to feed it to some AI tool anyway" but I think it's an interesting attempt to make and I don't think I've seen it before...)
I feel like it has happened, but I certainly can't remember a specific time. It feels in a similar vein to the NSA releasing Ghidra to the public as open source software after the Snowden leaks.
I mean, on the contrary, imagine if the NSA released Ghidra as closed source software. In a sense they really did have to open source it to mitigate a serious user trust issue.
It just happened 2 months ago when xAI open-sourced Grok Build following a similar controversy (wholesale uploading of user repositories). Though ZCode's case here is way worse since there is literally no way to opt-out and the client will always ask the backend for credentials to upload.
gets() was deprecated in C++11, removed entirely in C++14, and also removed in C11. So while it should have been removed in 1989, it did finally get done over a decade ago.
It's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Garage PR2 (according to the paper linked in the description.) It definitely had a design style - which mostly expressed "we have a lot of money to sink in to robots" rather than "anything we are doing has a market" though to be fair they had a lot of interesting spinoffs - just not from the robot itself :-)
I haven't tried with BirdNet, but Merlin doesn't seem to ever false-positive on chipmunks or squirrels (there's been a suggestion that it should explicitly recognize them, and maybe some frogs too, since they're "loud thing in the same register" and it frustrates people that haven't figured it out yet...)
Sounds like you've got birds crashing into the door? That's often something that can be improved (with stickers or hanging decorations) that make the glass more perceptible to the birds. (Another thing that sometimes helps is having bushes or shrubs, or even potted plants, in sight of the feeder - most small birds will use a "staging area" and fly somewhere nearby first, "check out the scene", and then fly to the feeder from there; it doesn't really control the activity, but it adds some options.)
Yeah, Concord grapes are based on Fox grapes; when the new Welch's headquarters opened on Baker Ave they included a plantation started from cuttings from the original farm (which is just a house now but they still maintain their own grapes.) Welch's downsized and moved the HQ to Waltham last year, apparently the vines got distributed to local historic places and farmers https://concordbridge.org/index.php/2026/04/06/the-grape-esc...
The Sotsu "Flip Action Elite" (I think that's the product name? it was in a recent mrwhostheboss thin tech video) is exactly that: 3840x2400, 16", 450 nits, 14.3mm thick, and definitely had "slice the top off a laptop" vibe to the design... I don't know if you can actually find them though, but it looked really shiny :-)
Back in the early 1990s, mice were fragile enough that Apollo salespeople were trained to be able to do their demos keyboard-only as backup (at least for tradeshows) and that was just generally how interfaces were built. It wasn't an accessibility thing, it was a "we're demoing expensive systems to even more expensive people, it had better work" thing...
I've made that point before. From an "alignment" perspective, AIs and corporations have many of the same problems. Corporations, according to Milton Friedman, have the sole duty of increasing their profits.[1] This is a key document in the history of modern conservatism.[2]
So what happens when AIs are "aligned" purely to corporate goals? This is a nearer term worry than machines taking over for the benefit of machines. AIs working hard for the benefit of corporations are already here. Try any customer service chatbot.
There's reluctance to think about this too hard. It raises embarrassing questions about the role of the corporation in society. It can become a challenge to corporate personhood.
That's threatening to many people in power. Dealing with it may be unavoidable as AIs take a stronger role in managing companies.
Also the accountability problem! Sometimes we try to hold the corporation accountable and sometimes the individuals. It never seems adequate though.
I found the documentary "The Corporation" (2003) very instructive in that regard, particularly the segment with the BP CEO where the point is made that a company made up ethical individuals can still act unethically, or unaligned to human values, just by virtue of the incentive and legal structure governing the corporation.
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