Even if we, for sake of argument, accept the theory that Apple products are suffering for want of 'AI'; what's the case for Apple to pay a fairly stiff premium to acquire vs. just taking advantage of the current state of the market; where there are multiple people who will fight for the opportunity to lose money on every sale and attempt to make it up in volume?

Absent a fairly specific argument why Apple needs to own one; rather than just snapping up some of the useful people or commanding the influence that being a customer with actual money tends to provide over suppliers that are in the process of bleeding out, the idea that Apple needs to buy into 'AI' seems sort of like the idea that Apple needs to buy into DRAM, except that it's vastly more evident that Apple's products actually need DRAM; and Apple still doesn't go there because why bother with a capital intensive business whose margins are constantly buffeted by spot prices and on the thin side when you are buying enough that you don't need to worry about your place in line?

It's not clear that that's an either-or. A financial sector metastasizing into the real economy is going to have many of the same symptoms.

This seems more like a "Zuckerberg threatens hundreds of billions for AI datacenters" situation.

In all seriousness; even if you are an 'AI' optimist(perhaps especially so, since you presumably think that this isn't just Zuck pissing away more money after his metaverse successes); would you want Facebook to have a commanding position in the area? It's not literally the worst possible company to potentially have to deal with; but it tries.

One of the reasons The Bear is such a great show is because it pretty accurately represents a lot of the struggles restaurants, that are trying to be excellent, go through to give their diners a great experience. I won't post spoilers, but there are a few notable examples from this season that I can think of.

It should also be noted that the cast of the show were all trained in culinary arts to some degree for the show, and a few of the cast members are actual professional chefs and/or restaurateurs.

When I read "Unreasonable Hospitality" by Will Guidara, I could see a lot of the principles and ideas implemented in the show, and at some of the restaurants I have visited, including Eleven Madison Park (both pre and post vegan), which Will was instrumental in turning into a world class restaurant.

And really, that's all these restaurants are doing - trying to elevate the experience they can offer above and beyond the food, because, to be candid, Michelin has given out too many stars in the Bay Area, and there are too many restaurants competing at that level. In my opinion, a city should have no more than one Michelin-starred restaurant per million residents. Last year, Michelin handed out new stars to TEN, count 'em, TEN restaurants in California, and now there are 85 starred restaurants in the state, concentrated in the LA and Bay areas.

Just within the San Francisco city limits, there are 28 Michelin starred restaurants, and 50 in the Bay Area - a total of 5 for every million residents of the SF-SJ-Oakland CSA. It's a little ridiculous.

The whole point of the Michelin Star is that it's supposed to be hard to get, and set you apart from the rest of the crowd. It loses its meaning when they will throw one into your car if you drive around San Fran with your window down for too long.

The COVID mRNA vaccines were the culmination of decades of research into genetic vaccines that could be in essence engineered to target a selected antigen without the years of trial and error that are required by the methods we have been using since the 1950s. Within days of the virus genome being published, they had a vaccine design, the months it took to get to the public were taken up with studies of the safety and effectiveness of the heretofore untested technology, ramping up production, and preparing for the distribution of a medicine that required cryogenic storage.

It would be unreasonable not to give the Trump administration credit for not mucking up this process. But the unprecedented speed of development wasnâ(TM)t due to Trump employing some kind of magical Fuhrermojo. It was a stroke good fortune that when the global pandemic epidemiologists have been worried about arrived, mRNA technology was just at the point where you could use it. Had it arrived a decade earlier the consequences would have been far worse, no matter who was president.

The lesson isnâ(TM)t that Trump is some kind of divine figure who willed a vaccine into existence, itâ(TM)s that basic research that is decades from practical application is important.

Given the level of commitment it implies; basically the most lightweight of expendable pilot programs even if you are saying that you 'plan to' in a legally binding context; is seems at best exceptionally dubious to treat the answers to "do you plan to adopt generative AI?" as straightforwardly meaningful.

The differences mean something; it's just not obvious to what degree they reflect actual company strategy, vs. personal fascination with the new shiny thing, vs. people saying what they think the audience wishes to hear.

To say nothing of the the 2000+ cases of people stripping out their large intestines with ivermectin who now have to have colostomy bags.

Currently have a project going using Python scripting in Blender using scipy.optimize.differential_evolution and Cycles rendering to optimize the shape of a reflector to match a desired light distribution pattern. It's not a perfect tool for the job, but it seems to be pretty accurate.

Given the rate of "progress" with QC doing prime factorization of arbitrary compound numbers, not only will I be dead by then, everyone who will have known me in my life will be dead. And if you add the criterion that QC must be cheap enough to make it worthwhile to crack my secret messages, there's a fair chance that everyone who would have known anyone who knew me in life in life will also be dead by then.

And no, I do not believe in doomsday prophesies.

Meanwiile, without any form of cheating, a 6th grader will be a lot faster than a quantum computer, and they'll do it for rewards that cost way less than the operating cost of the QC.

Yeah it's so annoying to be able to search my history on Firefox for Android but not be able to remove items. But I can remove them from the history list if I don't search and just swipe until I find them. Very annoying. It is possible on a rooted phone to use sqlite directly to remove things from history, but not terribly convenient.

Add to that he's still talking about how the 2020 election was stolen. I see no evidence he will walk away peacefully at the end of this term. He's looking more and more like Putin all the time, as he has started to use the DOJ to prosecute his political opponents, often for simply doing their jobs. He hasn't resorted to pushing people off of balconies yet. He pardoned all the Jan 6 insurrectionists, and they are now waiting for his command. But most troubling, he has a complete disregard for the constitution, and his GOP enablers are right there with him. I don't see how any lover of the constitution could rationalize this so-called unitary executive theory. Combine that with the GOP's long-standing efforts to manipulate the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression laws, things don't look so good for democracy. I'm really not at all sure what's going to happen at the mid terms, as far as trump is concerned. The fact that it's so uncertain, or that there's even a question of uncertainty is alarming.

It's sort of an interesting mix of goofy hype and actual(but relatively boring) worth-looking-into.

Not so much because of 'quantum' necessarily; it's entirely possible that someone will get an at least somewhat worrisome classical efficiency improvement worked out before the quantum computing types reach anything of useful size; and it's probably worth betting money that particular cryptographic implementations will turn out to be flawed; but because it takes a fair amount of awareness to even have a complete idea of what you are running; and more than that to know the implications of needing to swap it out in some or all locations.

The people selling 'quantum' and 'post-quantum security' are mostly in the business of "forget your boring arduous problems by focusing on our exciting ones!"(good business; bad way to do security); but it's a pretty solid idea to be aware of the boring arduous problem of exactly what ciphers you use, and what implementations, and whether there are any places where you've inadvertently left a compatibility toggle that allows something to be downgraded to some 90s 'export grade' cipher; and have an idea of how hard it would be to change ciphers or update implementations if you needed to for one reason or another.

Shockingly enough, the people with the biggest marketing blitzes and best 'executive whitepapers' with stock photos of shadowed hoodie hackers and chinese quantum AI owning your cyber are not the ones mostly advising that you should do some really boring systems administration and SBoM stuff while waiting for mature industry-standard implementations to become available; so the people selling immature proprietary implementations and dubious silver bullets tend to out-shout the more sensible ones.

Practical quantum prime factorization is all the way up to (some) 2 digit numbers and it only took 20 years. Lately, scaling of quantum computers seems to have hit a wall. MS's meetoo quantum chip turned out to be a mock-up, Google's imminant announcement of the largest QC yet is now a year overdue and silence from the hype machine is ominous.

So I guess this is Aptiv trying to cash in (or perhaps cash out) before the bust.