Fear or corruption?
This isn't some Manhattan style project, with great secrecy over methods, attracting the best and brightest.
It is a MASSIVE wealth transfer though, disregarding law and scrutiny, with some of the most dubious leading the charge.
I would rather that it was fear driving this as there would be more evaluation of how this will play out globally instead of an endless black hole to dump the nation's wealth.
I wouldn't buy anything of consequence from IBM these days. They're going down the transactional "how do I amp up the dollars extracted from you by X% per year" route rather than focusing on what their customers want/need.
It will be interesting to see how VZ positions itself as its market share erodes. These layoffs are a very temporary band-aid to their very high SG&A costs. They still operate like an old school monopolist carrier. Consumers and businesses have more choices these days and VZ is going to have to re-learn how to earn their business.
Those have worked pretty well for me. The downside is that Samsung's longer-term support is spotty, at best. It's disheartening to buy a relatively expensive tablet and then 3 years later it is no longer getting updates from Samsung even though it's perfectly fine from a hardware/speed standpoint. So I eventually just caves and started using an ipad. A little pricey, but it works and I'm not sweating the support suddenly vanishing.
Best,
While I concede that not every person on the planet has a smartphone and not every smartphone owner wants to install an app to manage their boarding pass (frequent flier details and other things as well), it is a LOT easier to manage that way if you're a frequent traveler. The only times I have used a paper boarding pass for the last 15-ish years is when I didn't want to bring my phone to my destination (i.e. China).
I'm guessing that Ryanair has done the math and decided that they don't care if the folks who prefer paper passes choose another airline. Perhaps the cost of supporting that option exceeds what they expect to lose by some people choosing another airline.
I think the Chinese government needs to severely cull the number of EV manufacturers down to four at most: BYD, SAIC, Geely Group and Chery. And give them unlimited resources to make their EV's truly world-class vehicles that comply even with the US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.
But much of what was learned from the iPhone Air will go into the iPhone 18 models arriving in March 2027. This means:
1. The back looks like iPhone 17 Pro but with only two camera sensors.
2. Larger camera plateau will mean most of the electronics will be inside the camera plateau.
3. Will use stainless steel chassis but will be a bit thinner than iPhone 16/16 Plus models from 2024.
4. Wraparound antenna will be stainless steel.
5. Will come in 6.1" and 6.6" screen sizes with just about no bezels, so the 6.1" model will be about the size of the 2017 iPhone X and the 6.6" model feels like a thicker iPhone Air.
6. Full MagSafe support including Qi2.2 support for 25 watt wireless charging.
7. Apple A20 SoC with 12 GB of RAM.
8. New silicon-carbon battery with 3,900 mAh on the 6.1" model and 4,500 mAh on the 6.6" model.
9. C2 radio modem, including mmWave support for US models.
10. N1 (or its successor) I/O chip.
11. Return of better-quality speakers.
12. USB Type C port with up to 40 watts initial charging speed and possible USB 3.2 1x1 5 gigabit/second data transfer speed.
In short, it looks like the current iPhone Pro but with only two camera sensors in back, stainless steel chassis and thinner chassis (but not as thin as iPhone Air). It will be available in multiple colors, including the colors supposed claimed for the iPhone 18 Pro models. Note the rumored haptic touch buttons won't arrive until 2028.
Interesting idea. Not to mention the colonialization of resources that goes with war (to the victors...).
The new model seems to be investment in R&D (cough... AI, cough...) to increase efficiency (which also corresponded with America's manufacturing dominance), but that has taken a backseat to profit taking and hype.
And so we are back to the prospect of war.
but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
The day will come that an AI will learn something that we did not deliberately teach it. When an AI is able to improve its own code, it won't be bound by the limitations of its human creator. It's only a question of when.
LK
Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.
LK
Don't agree at all and I think that's a morally dangerous approach. We're looking for a scientific definition of "desire" and "want". That's almost certainly a part of "conscious" and "self aware". Philosophy can help, but in the end, to know whether you are right or not you need the experimental results.
Experiments can be crafted in such a way as to exclude certain human beings from consciousness.
One day, it's extremely likely that a machine will say to us "I am alive. I am awake. I want..." and whether or not it's true is going to be increasingly hard to determine.
LK
Only if we define consciousness to be a state of awareness only attainable by human beings.
An LLM can't suddenly decide to do something else which isn't programmed into it.
Can we?
It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.
Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.
LK
Quantum Mechanics is a lovely introduction to Hilbert Spaces! -- Overheard at last year's Archimedeans' Garden Party
