How is that worth $500M per year?

Even at the $20 subscription level, this means they think they're going to get or retain at least 25 million months of subscriptions per year just for WWE? What?

Presumably you wouldn't have to pay the AI CEOs, so it will at least eliminate the social arguments around "CEOs are paid too much relative to workers!"

(nervous laughter)

A change in theory, yes, and I'm in the camp that thinks a switch to analog computing is going to be a big part of it.

Stop trying to "compute" things and instead create systems that just evolve in the desired manner and measure the relevant parameters.

Ah nevermind, you did say they take a cut... missed it on first read.

I don't think it's "tiny" though: Best I can find is about $7 per copy. It's roughly 10% of the retail price. Note a retailer's cut is also roughly 20% of the retail price so... wow magic, 30%...

I just don't see what is so onerous about 30%.

You do know that every copy of a game sold for a console, even not on the console stores, pays a licensing/royalty payment, don't you?

(I don't think that has changed has it?)

The philosophical discussion that interests me is - when is leveraging someone else's work as inspiration stealing versus just using it for inspiration?

I can't imagine Apple directly copied the tech; if they didn't at least try to modify it enough to think they worked around the patent claims then I think they do deserve the consequences.

But if they tried to make a different implementation to get the same effect and still can't get around the patent claims, that suggests the patent is indeed far too broad: if you have a patent that cannot be designed around, you have patented an effect, not a device or method, and that type of patent should be invalidated.

Sadly though, that determination of where inspiration turns into patent violation is often subjective, and in the case of Apple vs anyone, I think people (even judges) would say "Apple has so much money, I'm just going to find against them."

Half in jest: Can't we use AI to decide these cases, since it should have fewer human biases?

I'm still trying to figure out, if every CEO is cutting their staff by 5%, extrapolating that out - if every company cut their staff 5%... wouldn't this immediately cut all sales 5%, all else equal?

Or are these CEOs thinking that only they are going to cut staff, and nobody else is, so they will reap the benefit?

I think it's going to be a while before those folks who lose their jobs are going to find whatever "new opportunities" folks like Gates are saying will appear to offset the losses. And if it's not 5%, but the 40% number that was being tossed around in other articles... when has high unemployment ever been good for bottom lines (as a whole, sure there will be some winners...)?

As of today, developers can begin exercising their court-established right to tell US customers about better prices on the web.

I think this means "better prices for developers", not for end customers. I'm guessing this means that an app that used to be $9.99 on the app store is now going to be $9.99 on the web and $14.99 on the app store.

If an app that used to be $9.99 on the app store stays $9.99 on the app store and goes to say $7.99 on the web, I'll be astonished.

Why not send the LLMs to school, and have them learn like humans?

I mean, people going to school don't have to worry about copyright or any of that nonsense when they are learning that data. The copyright is fulfilled by the purchase of the textbooks and other materials. Just because a computer learns "faster" than a person, and can answer questions "faster" than a person, I don't see a fundamental difference in what these LLMs are doing versus some teenager just reading the internet all day.

I'm not a huge fan of the present state of AI technology, but this "we need to get paid for everything" and "these companies are just only and ever stealing things" nonsense is getting old.

Put another way: there's more to life than getting paid. This messages is for both the copyright holders and the AI peddlers.

Why do they have to even have an idea of what the missing application is?

The point is to create a canvas for all the app developers, isn't it? They are banking that someone comes up with the "killer app" using their tool. Sometimes you don't even know what you can make unless you have the tool first and can experiment with it.

If it fails, so what? (Unless you're a shareholder and worried about stock declines?)

Where's the sense of dreaming and adventure? What applications do we not even know we were missing, because we didn't have a device on which to create them?

There are two ways to make products: have a need and make a product to fulfill it, and to make a product and see what people can do with it.

Be thankful we have companies with so much money they can play around with crazy tech, even when they don't have a known killer app for it.

This is better than just "we'll only make something if we know how we'll make money on it." This is "we're going to make a tool, hopefully some people will come up with amazing things to do with it."

Whatever else you think about Apple, they are one of the few companies willing and able to spend the resources it takes to do something like this.

It is indeed interesting how building your own product ecosystem is deemed more anticompetitive than literally buying up all the competition and restricting access to things that used to have more wide access.

For example, why should Apple be forced to make their watch connect to other companies' computers?

Siri is hosted on Apple's computers and runs on their dime, why shouldn't it be restricted?

About the only competition argument that makes sense is the one about payment processors. I can definitely see Apple moving to a hosting fee based structure, or license fees on iOS API libraries, rather than a cut of sale price structure. Somehow I don't think it's going to be as good for the mega-app-developers as they think it will be.

I have to ask - what do you mean by a viable concept for charging fast enough? There are numerous EVs on the market today (although I agree they are not at your price point of $30k or equivalent) that can gain around 200 winter miles of highway range in about 30 minutes. Sure you won't break any speed records on a trip, but if you *gasp* plan a trip so that you line up food and rest breaks with the need to charge, these vehicles make long trips very feasible.

It's not that it isn't feasible so much as EVs are less forgiving of reactive (instead of proactive) lifestyles.

Dunno about anything else, I just want the magical 5.6 mi/kW-hr performance of the 74kW-hr version! That's crazy impressive if true over any kind of average driving (my EV lifetime average over 10k miles is about 4.0 mi/kW-hr).

I understand it's a law. What I don't understand is the rationale for unanimity in a civil suit, especially when humans on a jury are demonstrably not objective.

I can see why you don't want a simple majority, but unanimity in a civil case seems to just mire the courts in mistrials and appeals. Especially in technology cases, where juries probably don't have the background to make informed decisions. And if you do have educated juries, we know that engineers are extraordinarily opinionated and biased anyway.

I can understand unanimity requirement in a criminal case, because there is good rationale to prefer incorrect "innocent" verdicts over incorrect "guilty" verdicts. But in a civil suit? I'm not sure.