Ultimately how useful is the high uptake in individual states? My understanding was that the US had a lot of weirdness going on about provision of utilities over state lines.

(Mind you here in Oz I think we have our own state politics involved, but I guess at least we have fewer states )

The US has three separate grids: east, west, and Texas. Who are oddly separatist about their badly managed energy system.

Ah, it was probably me hearing about Texas and then extrapolating that to the rest of the US. Probably not a great idea on my part. Thanks for setting me straight :)

Gemini refused to provide any suggestions about implementing a serial connection in a non-standard way for some hardware I own because I ran the risk of “damaging my hardware” or producing buggy code.

Copilot pulled something similar on me when I asked for some assistance with some other third party code for the same hardware - presented a fading out message (article paywall style) with some ethical AI disclaimer. Thought this one was particularly strange - almost like a request from either the third party or the original manufacturer.

God I hope we don't end up in a world where LLM's are required to take an ideological stance on things like software architecture or testing paradigms

In the case of software I can still laugh and shrug my shoulders.

It scares me more that something like that will happen not only to software architecture questions.

I'm very curious to see how AI companies respond when the US presidential election really gets going. I can see both Left and Right political sides pushing the limits of what content can be generated using AI. If the Right comes out with something effective the Left will scream the parent company supports conservatives (not a popular view in SV) and vice versa the Right will scream of censorship and "the elites" which plays well to their base.

There have been a number of instances here in .au where centralised location/health/etc data has been misused (stalking, checking out potential dates, domestic abuse or aiding domestic abusers) through inappropriate access. I doubt we're unique.

I'd argue that it doesn't need to be "Joe Q. Public", because companies are made up of Joe Q. Publics.

I teach kids to code (plus other techy stuff) for a living.

Some kids love my robotics classes using MakeCode or MicroPython. Some kids love my data science classes with Python and SQL (I doubt anyone loves the Excel formula :P). Some kids love writing games in Scratch or MakeCode Arcade. Some love writing MakeCode in Minecraft EE. The one thing they all have in common is there are always kids who get turned off by the environment we're using.

The screen sharing one has bitten me a couple of times. I record live classes for students, and we've had occasions when someone who was away goes back to the video and it's a black screen with me nattering away as if they can see it :/

That said, apart from the shitty embedding support and their channel management, I REALLY like Stream and using it for a video lesson platform. The captioning is quite good even for my fast talking, Aussie accent and jargon.

Ah yes, I noticed the live CC recently! I tried it out in a conf call between myself (very Scottish accent), a Swede, a Norwegian, an Indian and an American - it really was amazingly accurate for everyone!

That said, beyond novelty I'm not sure how useful a CC feature is.

Some of my students tell me I talk too fast, so it can be helpful for them to review content, and I've had quite a few students with varying degrees of hearing impairment. Pretty useful in my field.

Massively helpful to me, a deaf person.

I've use Teams every day in education for a couple of years now.

My favourite file access "feature" of Teams (I verified it was in fact working as intended, at least until the pandemic and the warts started getting more obvious) was that class teams had read/write access by default for all files in a team. This meant every student in a class team could modify what you uploaded by default. Of course fixing this required opening up the team in Sharepoint and fiddling with permissions, totally something every teacher is expected to figure out right?

Not really a software feature, but their update rollout style is awful as well. Announce features 4-8 weeks in advance of rolling out patches. Inconsistent rollouts, so my home desktop might have the latest feature patch, but my work laptop won't (I was around 4 weeks out of sync at one point). Manual checking for updates won't apply the latest patches. Meanwhile their consultants in education are crowing about all the new features or bug fixes.

I actually like some of the feature set, and it's very useful in an educational setting now they've brought some of the new features online (3 months later than would have been useful for the pandemic lockdown in my part of the world, but oh well), but enough frustrating elements that I'm constantly supporting workmates in its use.

Alternatively it could be objection to numerous examples of somewhat arbitrary standardised testing which takes over student education to the exclusion of pretty much anything else, limiting a lot of the creativity and enjoyment students might otherwise take part it.

But that's just my cynical educator's view.

I quite like Publii. It’s more of a CMS that builds a static site, and is nice from a “don’t want to fiddle with template languages” perspective. Will push to different services (I use GitHub Pages) as well as just generate a folder to sync yourself.

I’ve been using Thonny with my students which has some basic feedback about errors and possible solutions, which isn’t bad (as well as variable inspection, although that gets a bit tedious with larger programs).

Authentication != authorisation.

The bank manager is still authentically the bank manager, gun or not.

Identity != authentication. The bank manager is, from the identification POV, still the bank manager. The bank manager may not be intending to authenticate, though.

I think you're splitting hairs. Authentication simply means to verify someone being who they claims they are. No more, no less.

If we go by your definition login with id and password isn't authentication either. How would we know if the person is "intending to authenticate"!

The bank manager is identified, but the request is not authenticated.