Thanks for being the token doomer in the comments section, somebody had to do it.

There are no good android tablets. As an android user I have an iPad for tablet-y tasks, it doesn't get used much, but the iPad is the superior tablet for the average or power user android user. If there was a better option out there, I'd use it.
 
The fact that the iPad finally uses the USB-C standard has been really helpful, when my wife's iphone finally dropped the "lightning" connector we've been able to drop the number of charging cables in the house/car to 1, and drastically simplifies travel logistics.

The number of times I've needed a waterproof phone is zero and I spend a fair amount of time on boats

the security guard at the door wears a stab proof vest and is 6'5" tall. this is not like your neighborhood grocery store, this is downtown literally across the street from a major train station

This safeway is directly across the street from the main "downtown" caltrain station and also two muni rail lines (n judah and ... 4th st? 3rd st?) it's extremely high traffic and they regularly taze resisting shoplifters ,like, a couple times a day. It's both high revenue (mission bay is 14,000 pop/sq mile) and high "loss"/shoplifting. It doesn't surprise me at all that they've had to resort to this. Also "unhoused" encampments pop up along the southern side of the caltrain station on the regular as well as nearby overpasses which.... there's a lot of correlation between that and shoplifting. This is not a bright sunny suburban grocery store, it is part of the ground floor of a huge urban complex building with 600 condos on the 4th-16th floors a couple blocks from Uber and OpenAI headquarters, major genetech offices etc. Context matters.

It's burned into my brain.

Anybody could vibe code an online video game store backed by s3 in about 20 minutes, where is the monopoly? Before steam existed people distributed games on floppies and CD/DVD. Nobody is stopping you from selling your video games mail order, or on your own squarespace store or whatever. There's zero economic moat here. I routinely pay a premium to buy my games on steam because I don't trust the developer to keep track of my account or even keep their store up in 90 days.

I don't think it does, at least not currently.

AI currently doesn't generate whole big projects, just smaller snippets of code. You can't just go "Make me a non-GPL VLC" in VSCode. You can have AI write smaller things, like "Create a skeleton for a Wayland program", but in such usages it's not all that different from copying stuff from Stack Overflow and random snippets from Google.

I'd say in general anything where one would worry about licensing is too large for AI yet.

If we do get to the point where we can just have a LLM spit out a full video decoding library that actually works, then it's fair to say that we're living in the future and any concern about licensing is probably obsolete. If AI gets to that point it's probably now able to do projects of almost unlimited size and the world is being turned upside down.

The published a crude llm about a year ago that if scaled up would be similar to what everyone else is doing, but haven't published anything new since, as far as i'm aware. It's not terribly difficult to train your own ai these days, just that the gpu hours are expensive

Famously, the Coors (beer) brewery in waste heat keeps the sidewalks free of snow and many of the buildings heated in the winter. PG&E built a power plant at the site of the H&C sugar refinery in california and the waste heat is used to make baking sugar. It's not that uncommon.

AI is going to have some safety mechanisms in generation, there's a chance the AI written herbal remedies are actually safer than a lot of what human authors of the genre are saying

> English dominates Common Crawl with 44% of content. Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population. Tamil represents 0.04% despite 86 million speakers worldwide.
 
English dominates because not only are there a lot of speakers, but it is the modern business lingua franca and most anyone who owns a desktop computer today can probably grumble out a handful of statements or questions in english. Hindi and Tamil on the other hand, use completely different writing systems and beyond a couple of clever words have zero vocabulary overlap with "western" languages. Simply due to inertia of 2 billion speakers Hindi/Tamil etc will continue on forever, but I can't see them being targeted by western technology. Americans and Europeans already struggle with cyrillic and it's at least recognizably sorta phonetically similar about half the time. Tamil just makes my eyes glaze over when I see it on street signs in Malaysia or whatever.

What are they even managing at that point? I would struggle to assign a team lead to a team that small. Presumably these were senior IC that needed a pay bump to keep them from going to another company? Maybe they assign a manager to every single internal product?

Have you tried finding a specific app you've used before, perhaps 2 years prior, the good one that's freeware and not ad supported? The play store is atrocious and pushes inferior apps every time over other, better apps. There's 1001 free timer apps but the store pushes garbage on you if you try and search for this. I only use Spotify on my phone, specifically in the car.

Google play store has always been horrific, app search is so intentionally broken as to be useless. I might have bought a couple apps in the first opening years but it's not worth it anymore I don't have any "paid" apps beyond uber and spotify, and I'm working real hard to get rid of spotify.