Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

Sure. But the suggestion here is that they were specifically inviting it, ostensibly because it would harm competitors.

They are not going to support the idea that "glyphosate causes cancer" for some short-term market advantage.

Agreed that AI (in general) is not a dead end, but any particular implementation of AI might be. OpenAI et al are betting billions that their approach will turn out to be the best one, but it really is a bet; there's not guarantee that tomorrow the next DeepSeek won't come out with a better algorithm that obsoletes all their investments.

Apple can always buy out whichever company they decide has what they want. It'll be pricey, but Apple has plenty of cash on hand.

ya basic, son

Seconded on the Tapo line. I got a Tapo C120 earlier this year and they are surprisingly cheap (currently $28 at B&H) and fairly easy to work with. I found that I needed to initially connect it to their cloud service to get their app working with it, but once that worked, I removed its ability to phone home by blocking the MAC address from the internet on my router. I can still connect to it with RTSP and stream with VLC, replay video with their app, etc. with no need for internet connectivity. Just be aware that if it can't connect to an NTP server that the timestamp in the video will be off... but you can disable the timestamp. It also logs decent resolution video and low bitrate audio to microSD which is handy. I get about two weeks of archived 24/7 footage with a 256 GB card. One drawback is that it is limited to using 2.4 GHz WiFi, which I find to have more interference than 5 GHz in my location. Everyone's situation is different in that regard though.

Why will it be "winner takes most"? AI isn't like the Internet where there are network-effects that make first-mover status a huge advantage -- e.g. if I could write a better Facebook than Facebook today, it still wouldn't get used by anyone, since Facebook's advantage comes from its huge user base and my new platform wouldn't have one.

With AI, OTOH, anything the first-movers do, Apple can (eventually) copy and improve upon, a strategy they have used successfully many times in the past. Stepping back and letting others figure out what the works and doesn't work, on their own dime, seems like a good approach. Why burn money on what might be a dead-end, when others are happy to burn their own money for you?

Apple isn't doing nothing -- it's continuing to do the things that it has always done, like selling iPhones and computers and streaming services. Those things have always been profit centers for Apple, and they continue to be.

The other thing that it's doing correctly at this point is not losing its head and betting the farm on AI. Other companies would be wise to follow Apple's example.

What's the point of having a national military if you can't use it to pump taxpayer dollars into corporate coffers?

*scenario*

"Fox company, we'll airdrop a licensed mechanic and a licensed parts salesman onto your position around 0930, as soon as they finish repairing some stuff the enemy captured last year and make their way back to our side of the lines. Division says hold your position as best you can until then -- and remind the riflemen not to use their weapons as clubs, as that will void their warranty. It would be better for the overall war effort to let you position be overrun."

"No, Davies can't fix the autocannon even if your lives depend on it. Division says to shoot him in the arse if he so much as touches it."

Yes, I'm sure than Monsanto is champing at the bit to be the next Owens-Corning and sued into oblivion, which is why they're working hard to make sure that Roundup has to be removed from the market for safety reasons.

Do you people even hear yourselves sometimes? How do you say shit like this with a straight face?

If true, that sounds like pretty dangerous ground for an alleged scientific journal to be treading upon. "Who cares if the paper is accurate or not, we're retracting to make it easier for plaintiffs' lawyers to sue" doesn't sound very scientific.

no problem.

They're dragging buzzwords through the water, so see whether they get any nibbles.

Your MBA/PHB eats this shit right up.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

If you just do time() you are missing a bunch of other important interfaces, gettimeofday(2), and stat(2) along with fstat(2). The stat calls also interface with on disk data structures...

All something that can be done, but not just one trivial thing.