That is true for all media purchases since the invention of copyright in 1662.

You think you own the Silmarillion because you have a paper copy? Hah! No, you have a transferrable license to read it.

Every hard copy movie you have starts with a big green FBI warning reminding you that having that disc does not means you own the movie, it means you have a transferrable license to play it for yourself and small groups on small screens.

Digital media with DRM allow content distributors to remove the "transferrable" part of the license if they want, which often allows them to sell for cheaper since they know that each sale represents only one person recieving the experience. The license comes with less rights (no transferrance), so it can be priced lower.

The same is true for Steam games.

Only drm free steam games. The ones with the steam drm require steam client to be running to launch (steam itself can be in offline mode but it still needs to be running)

Games using things like steam input might also require steam to be running so there is some drm free games that might not run also. Some of those will if you move them outside the steam folder / rename Steam.exe. If you leave them in the steam folder the game will start steam for you if when you launch it.

Xbox One/PS4 is when both sides standardized on BluRay.

When Xbox360 and PS3 came out, the format war was only just starting, and the consoles were on either side of it.

PS3 came with a BluRay drive and the games were delivered on BluRay.

Xbox360 came with software support for HDDVD, but the actual disk reader hardware was a DVD reader (famously, a large off-the-shelf part selected at the last minute that required a redesign of the cooling system to accomodate its size), and the HDDVD drive was an optional add-on that nobody bought.

The fact that every PS3 could read BluRay, but you needed a special extra to play HDDVD on Xbox 360 is arguably the main reason BluRay won the format war.

Which is probably why Microsoft decided to focus so much on media features for the Xbone. What they should have considered was that they had won the Xbox 360 generation by being a better game platform; it should really be no skin off Microsoft’s back that Blu-Ray won the format war.

This title is misleading. The article doesn't say that the chat history will be used as evidence, only that it exists. Whether it can be used in court is an unsettled question, as explained in the last few paragraphs.

How is it unsettled? If they got a warrant for it, what would prevent them from using it as evidence?

Another thread says they tried to use his past "drawing a fire related photo" to try and paint him as some kind of pyromaniac. These clods just cant help themselves but to prove AT THE FIRST CHANCE that they will twist and abuse anything they can get their hands on to paint some kind of picture. Its hilarious that they cant even keep this in their back pockets to wait for a real real bad hard to persecute criminal to use it on either

it's like not speaking to the police - but it's everything you have ever said/asked for in your life outside of talking to yourself in the shower. or at least it's getting there.

a lot of people, especially younger ones, seem to use chatgpt as a neutral third party in every important decision. so it probably has more extensive records on their thoughts than social media ever did. in fact, people often curate their Instagram feeds - but chatgpt has their unfiltered thoughts.

Judges can refuse to admit anything they want, or give jurors instructions of any kind about how to consider evidence in relation to a crime. About the only thing a judge can't do is fabricate evidence themselves.

Yes, you are right. The OP has a weirdly narrow definition of what RAG is.

Only the most basic "hello world" type RAG systems rely exclusively on vector search. Everybody has been doing hybrid search or multiple simultaneous searches exposed through tools for quite some time now.

How are they niche? The default mode of search for most dedicated RAG apps nowadays is hybrid search that blends classical BM-25 search with some HNSW embedding search. That's already breaking the definition.

A search is a search. The architecture doesn't care if it's doing an vector search or a text search or a keyword search or a regex search, it's all the same. Deploying a RAG app means trying different search methods, or using multiple methods simultaneously or sequentially, to get the best performance for your corpus and use case.

Most hybrid stacks (BM25 + dense via HNSW/IVF) still rely on embeddings as a first class signal. So in practice the vector side carries recall on paraphrase/synonymy/OOO vocab, while BM25 stabilizes precision on exact term and short doc cases. So my point still stands.

> The architecture doesn't care

The architecture does care because latency, recall shape, and failure modes differ.

I don't know of any serious RAG deployments that don't use vectors. I'm referring to large scale systems, not hobby projects or small sites.

But this thread and the OP article assume that RAG is always done *exclusively* with vectors, and that's just not true, it's almost never been true.

Chunking is still relevant, because you want your tool calls to return results specific to the needs of the query.

If you want to know "how are tartans officially registered" you don't want to feed the entire 554kb wikipedia article on Tartan to your model, using 138,500 tokens, over 35% of gpt-5's context window, with significant monetary and latency cost. You want to feed it just the "Regulation>Registration" subsection and get an answer 1000x cheaper and faster.

but you could. For that example, you could just use a much cheaper model since it's not that complicated a question, and just pass the entire article. Just use gemini flash for example. Models will only get cheaper and context windows only get bigger

That's a silly distinction to make, because there's nothing stopping you from giving an agent access to a semantic search.

If I make a semantic search over my organization's Policy As Code procedures or whatever and give it to Claude Code as an MCP, does Claude Code suddenly stop being agentic?

According to Wikipedia, CU-SeeMe was released in 1993 and Skype came a decade later.

I'm referring to the fact that johnny-come-lately Zoom is the reference point for all video conferencing products. CU-SeeMee isn't "proto-Skype" it's a "proto-Zoom".

It's also just wrong that it was innovative. The Wall Street Journal website set up a paywall in the same year, and many other smaller sites probably did as well.

As you say, the idea of subscribing for content goes back hundreds of years.