Any good competition for Broadcom is a plus for users. I expect Apple had to wade through a thicket of Broadcom patents in order to make their chip, not a trivial accomplishment.

WiFi patents are FRAND out of necessity, and I believe they're available in patent pool form, so all Apple has to do is take out a license with the patent pool to acquire a license to every patent they need for WiFi.

...of a bus that had an accident to avoid people burning alive inside is bad now?

I'd hope that the fire department can do that with ANY vehicle.

Most vehicles. They have a computer where they can look up where the battery disconnect cable is - it's a bright orange cable with sticker tags with the firefighter logo on it. The computer has documents from the manufacturers on where to cut into the car to cut this cable. Cutting this cable disables the battery. It's not actually carrying battery power - it's a low voltage line that powers the battery contactor inside the battery. Basically a loop of wire where the battery contactor signal goes through. Cut it and the contactor disconnects disabling the battery.

This is advantage of getting old.
Anyone I’d be interested in are either retired or dead.

The land of facades.

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

I think I saw someone swimming in some sewage en route from scraping a bear carcass off the road, let me go check.

1. I got asked once if I played world of warcraft since they say a guy with the name "thegarbz" playing. I said no. By the way I know exactly who that person is because he impersonated me as a joke. I found that flattering and funny, but it has no impact on my life beyond that.

Reminds me of my first email account ;) One of my professors said we all had to register for an email account (this was in the mid-90s) so we could submit our homework to him, so I registered his name at hotmail.com to mess with him ;)

I don't trust single points of failure.

Yeah, this. If I have to sign up to some site that I don't care at all if it gets hacked, I use a throwaway password. Oh noez, someone might compromise my WidgetGenerator.foo.bar account and generate some widgets in my name, heavens to betsy!

Actually, Apple did deliver that capability but developers pushed-back and didn't want it.

Jobs was indeed a dick, but he did not make advertisements claiming features that do not exist.

Her wife was giving him the cold shoulder.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Steve Jobs would not release a product until it actually did what they claimed it would do. I don't understand why this is some strangely difficult lesson for CEOs to understand. I suppose with the success of Musk and his ilk that idea seems quaint.

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

"did not conduct a legal review to determine if the purchase of Americans' travel data requires a warrant." - Whoever made this statement needs to be fired now. Of course you need a warrant to access any citizen's data, of any type. This over-reaching bullshit needs to stop.