So far this is only affecting fools who pay up for such ridiculous features. The real problem comes when you have to pay to not have the thing you purchased controlled from afar.

For large failures that won't save you. Does Amazon have enough infrastructure to run all of the East instances on their West hardware? That's doubtful and if they tried it would degrade performance if not outright take down the West due to the load.

Having someone to pick up the slack is only possible if there's excess infrastructure in place to handle it. If there were dozens of smaller players this isn't a problem, but if there are only two or three major providers, none of them will overprovision enough to absorb that much shock. That's effectively asking each of them to have a completely redundant system to handle their own outages. Most customers won't pay for that.

Some Europeans lived through the Black Death. Necessity often leaves a lot of corpses in its wake. Ban something outright and by definition the only survivors will have found a solution. That says nothing about how many companies won't make it. That happens anyway, but this is a bit of unnatural selection.

What megalomaniacal near-trillionaire had a whole squadron of leet hackers hoovering up federal employee records just a few short months ago? I forget. It musta been somebody with pockets 30x deeper than George Soros to tunnel into those boring databases, we should launch an investigation.

The problem with that approach is that it heavily disincentivizes research into these areas because it adds additional costs to something that is already very expensive to develop. A better approach is to require that the abandoned systems have any hardware or software source code opened so that maintenance is possible. If a company is abandoning something they shouldn't care if anything related to it becomes free and open. If it were worth anything they could have sold it.

I've heard that the cause was a string of news stories several decades ago about rare but potentially fatal allergic reactions in children that caused parents to remove children from exposure to potential allergens. You can probably already spot the irony in this because the reaction by the parents to try to protect their kids actually made them more susceptible to the problem in the first place.

It's a bit like how the news can run a story about shampoo shortages and within a week the stores will have empty shelves in the shampoo aisle. Not because there was any actual shortage, but because people all thought there was one and rushed out to stock up on shampoo, even if they didn't need any.

More generally, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

During the protests in Los Angeles earlier this year protestors kept setting Waymo taxis being summoned to the area on fire until the company stopped allowing them to go there. Waymo will be far more incentivized to solve that problem than someone herding robotaxis.

It may not be now, but it's not a bad idea to guard against that potential future. Would you prefer that someone 20 years from now not be able to snoop on your past messages because quantum computers suddenly became good in the same way that LLMs made major advancements even though AI research has been around for over 50 years as well?

There are many avenues where they could use AI to assist them in their efforts, but they need not even use it directly themselves. If they know that programmers at some company are using it, they can try to hide instructions in a email or something else an employee might expose the AI to that prompt the AI to write insecure code or to inject other vulnerabilities into code. If the programmers aren't looking at the AI's output carefully then they won't notice even blatant exploits that have been added which can be used by the attackers at a future point.

At 2013, the disks in question were spinning disks. I didn't understand from the article whether the stats for 2021 and 2025 were about spinning or solid state drives.

Comparing reliability over time of spindles to solid states is almost meaningless. The failure scenarios are just not the same.

No, that is completely wrong and utterly stupid. What happens in reality is that creating all of this new money leads to inflation. The economic activity and wealth of a country exists independently of the money supply. You could halve or double the amount of money and all it does is change the purchasing power of a dollar. If everyone woke up tomorrow with twice as much money the only thing that would change is that soon everything would cost twice as much as it did the day before.

You should ask yourself why all of the debt issued by Venezuela (or Zimbabwe before it) failed to produce the desired outcome of increased economic activity. The best way to encourage economic activity is for the government to get out of the way of those who want to engage in it and to lower taxes on those who wish to invest in creating new economic activity. The money only exists as a convenient medium of exchanging goods and services. Rapid inflation removes the ability of money to do an effective job.

Printing your way out of debt has never worked and the countries that have tried it suffered greatly as a result.

TED or TEDx? I haven't watched a TED talk in almost a decade, but even then it was apparent that there was a huge difference in quality between TED and TEDx. The latter was almost entirely midwits with an inflated sense of self-importance. The only one I ever saw that as worth watching was a comedian satirized and mocked the entire idea of and the sort of people who give TED talks in his presentation.

Most of the proper TED (i.e., non-TEDx) talks I've seen were interesting if not also informative or enjoyable. Today though anyone can just make their own YouTube channel and put anything worthy of a TED talk there so the format itself isn't as useful as it may have once been.

Well that's certainly a ballsy move. I think he ought to foot to bill for his client to receive competent counsel, because I don't see how the court could allow this attorney to continue with the case (or his ability to practice law) after this. His client has no reason to trust that his lawyer is capable of representing his interests going forward.

This guy has done the improbable and somehow managed to lower my opinion of lawyers. It was already a low bar, but this man is the new limbo champion. The only saving grace here is that this is a civil matter and no one will be going to jail for this man's failings. Perhaps he should though, if for no other reason that to dissuade anyone else from acting as foolishly.

I could be convinced to pay a dollar to watch something that an AI shit out that was packaged as a feature film. I can't say they would get a second dollar out of me, but it would be one dollar more than I've spend on Indonesian films otherwise, so it does represent an incredible amount of growth for the industry.

What good does a union do for them exactly? They're not in control of who can produce movies any more than Fox, CNN, ABC, et al. can prevent someone else from starting a new news station. Do you believe that if the telephone switchboard operators had formed a network union that they'd still all have jobs or even consider the notion that they might a good thing.

Is this a troll post? I can understand why a poorly programmed autocorrect would use "a union" instead of a union, but mine doesn't and I can't imagine anyone would actually type that twice intentionally if they were being at all serious.