In all your life, have you ever gotten an email from someone in the middle of a trip saying that your pre-arranged hotel stay is cancelled, and you need to leave the room ASAP? That's not something anybody would ever expect to get legitimately.

Moreover, something like this would be *massively* disruptive to the person's vacation, possibly literally forcing them to live out of their cars, depending on when it happened and how busy the hotels were at the time. Even if you didn't ignore it, if your only option was to leave — especially if you had already paid for the room — you'd be more than just furious. You'd be filing a lawsuit against everyone involved.

No, it absolutely is on Marriott. Either the booking is prepaid, in which case you have paid for the room, and it isn't your fault that Sonder screwed you, or the booking is not prepaid, in which case you're paying Marriott, and it doesn't matter that Sonder screwed Marriott.

I am therefore assuming it is the former, which means you've pre-paid for the room, and you are legitimately entitled to service. Them breaking their contract with Sonder might excuse them for preventing future bookings, or even cancelling bookings beyond a certain date if they are not prepaid, and providing a way for the customer to pay directly, but it does NOT relieve them of responsibility for honoring any existing prepaid bookings, nor any active bookings that are already in progress.

In all likelihood, a judge would conclude that the people staying in the room are a party to an implied contract the moment they entered into the agreement with Sonder, and that Marriott is REQUIRED to honor those bookings under the principle of promissory estoppel. The liability for failing to meet those obligations would absolutely *DWARF* any possible savings from being able to rent the room to someone else. Think "million dollar pain and suffering claim" here. And because Sonder is not the one who kicked those people out of their hotel rooms, that liability falls on either the individual hotels, who would then sue the hotel chain to recover those losses, or directly on the hotel chain, whose only option would be to try to sue the defunct Sonder to recover the cost of those payouts.

Moreover, anyone who experienced this would not care in the slightest whether Sonder and Marriott had a falling out. They would only care that their vacation was ruined because a hotel room that *THEY PAID FOR* was suddenly yanked out from under them, kicking them out into the street. So those people will never trust a Marriott hotel again as long as they live, and they will tell all of their friends not to trust Marriott. This level of breach of trust is how companies die.

What Marriott did is so far from okay, whether you mean ethically, morally, or legally, that IMO, heads should roll at the C-suite level within the next week over it.

Why? Those companies get a discount for bookings. They pass those savings on in different ways. Some use reward points. Others give a discount up front. Why would you deliberately pay more for a hotel booking than you have to?

Like I said, Marriott had an implied contract with you, the person staying in the room, and that became binding on them when you checked into the hotel at the absolute latest, if not the moment you paid for the stay or any portion thereof. What they did is not only unethical, but also blatantly illegal, and whatever executives authorized or were in any way aware of the termination of the contract in this way should be fired for it, if not outright jailed.

It's sad that people think that such flagrant abuse of individuals by giant corporations is okay. It isn't. It is illegal, it is immoral, it is unethical, and it cannot be tolerated in a decent society.

ARM's TrustZone is definitely more secure than the alternatives on Intel/AMD, but TrustZone is also subject to side-channel attacks. To a first approximation, it's impossible to run two workloads on the same CPU and keep them perfectly isolated from one another.

However, I don't think any of these secure enclave concepts are relevant in this case. The way you'd build a private AI cloud is not to run it in enclaves (which are essentially just security-focused VMs) on CPUs that are running other tasks, the way you'd do it is to devote a bunch of CPUs solely to running the private AI workloads. Then your isolation problem becomes the traditional ones of physical access control to the secure machines and securing data flowing into and out of those machines over network connections.

My eyes are not 22 years old anymore. So yeah, I really do need the Pro version.

• Modern sheet music is usually printed on 9" x 12" paper. This is the equivalent of a 15-inch iPad, if Apple actually made such a thing.
• The largest iPad Pro, at 13 inches, is about the size of an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper, give or take. That means in many cases, it is only 92% as big as the original, which makes it noticeably more difficult to read music than at full size.
• The largest non-pro iPad, at 11 inches, is only 82% as big as a standard 8.5" x 11" piece of paper in its smallest dimension, or 74% as big as the original. That's a *lot* smaller.

So even the largest iPad Pro is smaller than I'd like, and is a noticeable compromise, but any standard iPad would be considerably worse.

Also, half the music I play on organ is some poorly scanned public domain music off of IMSLP, and that stuff is hard enough to read even at full page size, even after laser eye surgery. The last thing I would want is a screen that makes things smaller than 8.5" x 11" paper. So from my perspective, anything smaller than the largest iPad Pro model really is a non-starter, and if Apple made a 15-inch tablet, that would be even better.

And I'm guessing you still did not spring for the iPad Pro.

If only they didn't keep sending away people who weren't gang members based on false accusations and thinly veiled racism.

The problem is that an iPad Pro is mostly only useful as a portable streaming device, but costs as much as a laptop ($1300). Meanwhile, you can get an Android tablet of similar size for under $200, which is about what one would reasonably expect to pay for a portable streaming device that is going to get mistreated by your kids and eventually broken.

The product just doesn't make sense at its price point.

More the point, when it came time to find a tablet for use on my electronic organ, the iPad Pro wasn't even a serious consideration. To use it for that would have been a minimum of $1300 for one, and would have likely meant wanting to have two side by side, for a whopping $2600, and trying to figure out a way to control them both simultaneously would have also been infeasible.

Instead, I bought an Android tablet for $450 that is big enough to show two pages at once, controlled by BTLE buttons in the piston bar and USB foot switches mounted for easy knee control. The extent to which Android works better than iPad for that purpose was jaw-dropping.

And if and when I decide that I need a more portable tablet for reading sheet music and my choice is between a $1300 iPad Pro and a $199 13-inch Android tablet from Walmart, you can safely assume I will buy the latter as well. Why? Because it's a single-purpose device, and an iPad provides no obvious second purpose that isn't already fulfilled WAY better by my laptop. I can run 100% of the software that I need to run on my laptop. I can run 5% of the software that I need to run on an iPad.

The iPad Pro, as currently designed, is a waste of money for most users, and cannot fill any large enough niche for a majority of users to justify its price point, with the possible exception of people who use a computer only for browsing the web. And truthfully, most of them don't want to pay the price of a good laptop for something that's only a half-a**ed toy by comparison, but at least they *could*.

Yeah, Apple missed the mark. Very badly. And we've been saying it for more than a decade.

At this point, it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that they should have made limited use of all Mac apps possible on iPadOS, and also made it easy to write apps that mix UIKit and AppKit views arbitrarily, so that Mac apps can be converted to UIKit a piece at a time, adding gesture-based controls and floating button palettes and other approaches for making the app usable on iPadOS without a mouse, while still using the rendering code for their complex views and stuff, rather than forcing app developers to completely rewrite their user interfaces from scratch for iOS.

And at this point, it should be obvious to anyone with the slightest clue that not having support for 100% of Mac apps makes iPad Pro unusable as a laptop replacement for a majority of users. The folks who could switch mostly already have, but the problem is that the vast majority of users have a few apps that they run that don't work on iOS, and they are *different* apps, so you can't even point at a few dozen or even a few hundred apps and apply pressure on them to convert their apps and make major headway.

Open up iPad Pro or delete one digit from the price point. Those are the only two options that would make it a real contender in the market, IMO.

We do look elsewhere. There's just not anything else on the market that has any real potential, either.

iPad could have been the laptop killer. Instead, the iPad peaked back in 2013, and sales have been pretty steadily declining since then. The problem is in part that the only thing they are really good at is media consumption, and once people buy one, they don't ever need to replace it, because the new ones aren't meaningfully better for that purpose.

And when they do replace them, they often end up buying some cheap Android tablet to replace them, because the iPad isn't meaningfully better for that purpose than Android tablets costing a fraction as much.

Profitable? This could be expensive for Apple. Apple has given iPhone a sock. iPhone is FREEEEEEEEEEE!

However, most people who ask that do it while pointing to people who are actually quite important producers, such as financiers. Be careful not to conflate "don't produce anything of value" with "do something I don't understand the importance of".

Of course there are people in every profession who get paid a lot more than they're worth. This is less true of manual labor jobs where the output is easy to see and measure, but it's true across the board. Even in manual labor jobs you can have people whose output is negative. They may pick X apples or whatever, but they might do it while making everyone around them work slower.

Just to complete the description of the "empty chair" tactic, this is why lawsuits typically name anyone and everyone who might possibly be blamed, including many who clearly aren't culpable. It's not because the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney actually thinks all of those extra targets really might be liable, it's so that the culpable parties can't try to shift the blame to an empty chair, forcing the plaintiff to explain why the empty chair isn't culpable (i.e., defend them). Of course this means that those clearly non-culpable parties might have to defend themselves, which sucks for them.

So... you didn't actually look at the size of WikiMedia Foundation's bank account.

WikiMedia absolutely has enough money to run Wikipedia indefinitely if they treated their current pile of money as an endowment and just used the income from it to support the site. They don't have "billions upon billions", but they do have almost $300M, and they spend about $3M per year on hosting, and probably about that much again on technical staff to run the site, so about $6M per year. That's 2% per year. Assuming they can get a 6% average return on their assets, they can fully fund Wikipedia forever, and then some.

So, what do they do with all of the donations instead, if the money isn't needed to run Wikipedia? It funds the foundation's grant programs. Of course, you might actually like their grant programs. I think some of their grants are great, myself, and if they were honest about what they're using it for I might be inclined to give. But they're not, and the fact that they continue lying to Wikipedia's user base really pisses me off, so I don't give and I strongly discourage everyone I can from giving, at every opportunity.

Me too, but it took a lot longer and I was a lot less thorough. I would skim a half-dozen links from the search result, the LLM reads a lot more, and a lot more thoroughly.

I do. I tell the LLM to always include links to its sources, and I check them. Not all of them, but enough to make sure the LLM is accurately representing them. Granted that other people might not do this, but those other people also wouldn't check more than the first hit from the search engine, which is basically the same problem. If you only read the top hit, you're trusting the search engine's ranking algorithm.

That seems like a potential risk. I have't actually seen that happening in any of the stuff I've looked at.

Adverts pay for the web. And also clutter it up. Both of these things are true. Without advertising, there would be very little content that isn't paywalled, and there would be far less content than there is. Slashdot wouldn't exist, for example. The key is to keep advertising sufficiently profitable that it can fund the web, but not so intrusive that it make the web awful.

How do we do that? The best idea I've seen is to use adblockers that selectively block the obnoxious ads. But not enough people do it, so that doesn't work either.

This. There seems to be a widespread assumption that random genetic changes are somehow less problematic than carefully-selected ones because they're "natural" or something. It's not like cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals, transcription errors and other sources of random genetic mutation are somehow careful not to make harmful changes. Engineered changes might not be better than random mutations, but they're clearly not worse.