It surprises me is that there is much real tension between basic research and application development two exists in Meta. For any normal company, sure. But this is a company that spent over $70 billion dollars on VR that nobody ever wanted. And they can't fund both AI research and, separately, application development?

Pulling repeated hardware platform switches underneath without bothering customers too much is a thing that only a very competent company could do, and Apple is a very competent company.

Apple nowadays is bound to avoid any huge missteps, because it has become a very conservative company.

Granted they blew some on the Vision Pro, but not much, for them. They folded on the electric car project, which now seems like a shame as Tesla is vulnerable.

What revolutionary product has Apple launched since Steve Jobs died? It has been 14 years, and I'm still waiting.

As to VisiCalk being the real OG that started from nothing, there's an interesting comment on a VisiCalc youtube:

In 1969, we had to develop the world's true first electronic spreadsheet (LANPAR) within the limitation of 32k of memory - and we included forward referencing which didn't appear in Visicalc, TKSolver, Supercalc or even Multiplan I. Only in Lotus 13 years later. We even included the ability for sophisticated logic calculations, access to external data base data, and input of data in real time. Timesharing in those days was very similar to "cloud" computing now, except that you knew exactly which remote computer was doing the processing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Also at that scale who knows how much they are paying for each seat, I'm sure it's a bespoke deal. No doubt MS is making money, but I wouldn't just take the retail price and multiply it by 2 million.

I made specific points and your reply did not.

As for my worldview, you interpret posts the same way you interpret the news, exaggerating everything and extrapolating it to absurdity to make yourself upset or say something unreasonable. If you have inferred I was ever an extremist, you were wrong.

thanks

No, Amazon specifically said their layoffs are not due to AI.

Amazon spokesperson said the job cuts werenâ(TM)t a result of using AI, and pointed toward a message in October from Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology, who said they were part of the companyâ(TM)s effort at âoereducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure weâ(TM)re investing in our biggest bets.â

But reporter would like to have a story about AI job loss, so they forge ahead and build the narrative:

Still, the push for agentic AI is arriving as Amazon is reshaping its own labor model, raising uncomfortable questions about whether the tools the company is selling will displace employees, both within its ranks and among the customers itâ(TM)s selling the new software to.

That part isn't news, it's commentary.

So, what is your prediction? It sounds like you think Amazon is going to fire thousands of people in hopes that AI will eventually replace their roles, and then say, "whoops, it doesn't work, we're screwed," and the packages will stop flowing. Is that your prediction?

Anybody have a way to read the blomberg article?

Solving the problem of paying wages is just another way of saying increasing efficiency, which has been the goal of almost every technology and management practice forever.

And people concerned with equality should be delighted if there are meager inheritances, or even if they were simply outlawed. Inheritances are very illiberal. Inheritance is the foundation of a class-based society. Inheritances are also fly in the face of conservative principles, since they in no way reflect merit nor market forces.

Let me tell you about this little detail called CO2...

As a patient with metastatic cancer, my story is on the other side. I was going around to Dr's for a year or more trying to figure out why I was feeling more and more exhausted. (I say Dr's but don't remember if I ever got seen by more than a nurse practitioner). I kept saying I felt like it was something physical, but got sidetracked into psychiatry. I had visible lumps under my skin and everybody said, well it's probably just lipomas. In the end I got undeniable symptoms and was finally given a chest xray, which (unlike an MRI) costs like $99. By then it had spread everywhere. So far I have lived almost a year, which at one point was deemed highly unlikely, but it has cost my insurers well over $1M and counting.

Legally that makes sense. Although, I really think AI's paying content producers for providing access to their information is the right way to go, long term. If NYT is going to hire reporters to go places and find out stuff somebody has to pay for it. AI is great partially because it bypasses the horrendous mess the Web has become, but that's too good to last.

I see the point now, it "took" (pretty much past tense) about 30 years.

I do remember when it came out, and when a work friend got one in the early 2000s. It seemed so freaky. Everybody was like, 'Toyota loses money on every one!' 'You're going to be crying when the battery wears out!' 'It'll break down twice as much as a normal car because it has 2 drivetrains!'