There are already first-level companies that no longer require a degree for entry-level positions... Google among them. This is only going to accelerate. There will be more things like 3rd party certification programs that to some extent replace traditional degrees. Colleges can either adapt to this change, or be wiped out by it.

You get two stories a week because the current model of education we have is broken beyond repair, and to some extent, obsolete, and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. You don't need to go away to a campus at a debt of six figures (or a cost of six figures to taxpayers) to get an education anymore. If anything, the Internet has revolutionized and democratized education to an extent undreamed of in human history. From the freely available works of the greatest minds in history to real time or recorded remote instruction, people now have everything they need for a first class education at their fingertips. It's all about personal motivation at this point. The resources are there, often at little or no cost. How hard is one willing to work to get the education? That's what it comes down to now.

The old model is going to have to either adapt to this reality, or die out and be replaced. I think some of both will happen. You already have 100+ colleges a year closing in the United States. That will only accelerate with AI now in the mix.

Fortran has some optimizations involving pointers that are invalid in other languages like C. So it can be the absolute fastest outside of hand optimized assembly (which is very difficult to do better than a compiler these days). It also has advanced math libraries which are highly tested and optimized. So its niche is highly performant math and scientific programming.

I don't expect Netflix pricing to stay the same.

But the main reason this is happening is there are too many streaming services for them all to be viable. This isn't a merger of equals. HBO Max isn't sustainable right now. Not enough people are willing to pay their asking price to keep it going.

You merge the services, cut your operating costs, and raise Netflix prices a little.

And maybe we see Netflix take advantage of Warner's distribution systems and get more Netflix content in theaters and on DVD/Bluray.

5090 isn't a bubble.That's just a low volume, high margin niche product for people with a lot of money.

32 bit OS's coming back because no one will be able to afford 4GB :-)

Crucial was always my go-to for RAM upgrades. I'm getting my son some upgrades for Christmas, and when I saw desktop memory prices, I was stunned. It's the same thing everywhere. "AI vendors are grabbing all the RAM they can get their hands on, dramatically driving up the price".

Syria says "Hi".

We're the United States. The world's most powerful country. Outside of Russia and China, all countries are "small".

And Russia and China... they have nukes. Attacking them means WWIII. If you think this is a good idea, by all means, run for President on your End Humanity platform.

That the main result of giving kids laptops was that it prepared them to be better consumers of Facebook? Lots of people called that early on.

Did you get one of the high end iPads?

I've got the 2018 base model, and it hasn't received any software updates in 2 years now. We got to the point of getting a new one about a year ago because it was too sluggish, and the limited RAM was causing problems. We still keep it around for simple tasks, but not for anything remotely demanding.

Sounds like you're not from the US.

Most people get their phones from their service provider. And the major providers offer a free phone upgrade every 2 or 3 years if you trade in your old one. It's structured as paying for the phone in monthly installments, and they give you a credit each month to cover the installment. They give you the option of paying upfront for the phone, but you don't get the credits that way, so it's almost always a terrible idea to do.

They are very, very clear about what the full price of the phone is. The catch in all of this is if you cancel your service before the term is up, you lose the remaining credits and have to pay the remaining balance.

The result of this is upgrading more frequently than the 2 or 3 year cycle is very expensive. You can keep your phone longer than the cycle if you really want to, but it rarely makes sense to because there usually isn't any benefit to turning down the upgrade offer.