Gnome-2 has the perfection of 'Angelos David, or  W. Homers LOST ON THE GRAND BANKS.  Perfection within its own sphere.   Nothing needs to be changed for the casual home user. I never left GNOME-2 and now use MATE 1.26 = same thing.

Appeasement through trade was a dangerous game, will it get less dangerous by appeasing harder?

The private data of every naive American citizens an open book to a dictator, what's next? A defacto allied democracy abandoned to the dictatorship? Force an outright allied nation to grant them disputed land?

Kissinger's realpolitik has become real messy.

Hope the DJI CEO cleared that with Pooh, or he might get a special vacation.

Apple and Tesla are only allowed to keep their source code closed, all uploaded data has to go through a Pooh controlled company in clear text.

Project Texas is almost what Pooh forced on Apple and Tesla (except that ByteDance and thus Pooh would still have control over the subsidiary, for hiring for instance, Apple and Tesla have no real control over their Chinese datacenters). Apple and Tesla are special in that regard, China simply banned all other companies with similar levels of access to Chinese citizen data.

You can make money on the stock in more ways than dividends. For example, Alphabet is also buying back stock. People who invested at a lower stock price and now sell back at the higher have made money. Normally, buybacks tend to concentrate control of a company into fewer hands, but, since these are already non-voting stock, in this case, it doesn't change this.

And you are the gauge the whole world as to compare to.

Rights are for citizens, is a foreign owned company a citizen to the supreme court ... outlook is hazy.

The users and the URL, if ByteDance picks a buyer soon enough they can do tests with part of the users with their own algorithm till the final sale.

Yes.

See, I don't know whether it was intelligent foresight or accidental good fortune, but the iPhone got three things exactly right in its initial release: it *didn't* have an App Store, it *did* leave the door a smidge open for people to install apps on it *without* an App Store, and it got a lot of features right that made the phone desirable irrespective of that.

Listening to music on a phone is a default thing now; in 2024 we probably use a phone to do that more than any other device...but in 2006, everyone was carrying around both a phone and an iPod. While the original iPhone has a small screen by today's standards, compared to other portable video players of the day, it was quite an improvement, so watching videos away from home was finally viable (you hadn't LIVED until you tried converting video for WinMo devices). No stylus, threaded text messaging, a web browser that was actually useful, and native support for IMAP email, even for free Yahoo accounts (then dominant because Gmail was still nascent) were all massive improvements that non-techies could appreciate. ...and, roughly eleven seconds after some techies got a hold of it, we ended up with the jailbreaking scene. That's where Labyrinth and Tap Tap Revolution (Revenge) and dozens of others got their start, and it was that underground scene that drew in developers. By time the App Store came into existence, many of those developers just shifted over their app from Installer.App or Cydia to the App Store.

Essentially, the iPhone's success came from the fact that it had plenty of desirable functionality without third party apps, and it enabled an underground scene of developers to get the app ecosystem started by time it was official. The Vision Pro headset had neither of these things going for it...if it's anything beyond the ability to function as a super expensive monitor for a Macbook, I couldn't tell you what it was. Consequently, the Vision Pro *needs* an app ecosystem to justify its existence in the way the iPhone did not...and it isn't there.

Yes, but this whole story is about the USA, where only 43% of the population even have a passport (and don't have access to something like the Schengen Zone).

As this would amout to cutting people off from their ability to make phone calls, and the people aren't at fault in this case, this will not happen. And no, leaving emergency numbers available is not sufficient, because people might have to call their relatives, their lawyers, their physicians or other. non-emergency-numbered contacts.

Even the summary said it was because Spotify is refusing to pay the core tech fee.

It's not because they are advertising prices, it's because they aren't fulfilling the other side of the contract - which they should be doing until the courts say if that is illegal.

Apple has no reason (legal or otherwise) to provide a service (approving an app) without compensation. At least as far as I know - even in the EU, you can't be compelled to such a thing, can you?

Electric cars can be made, from scratch, at a cost of about $12 or $13k in materials, the most expensive part being the batteries.

I've never seen an electric vehicle offered for sale that didn't cost at least three times that amount.

So unless they are giving their salesmen an absolutely massive commission, I'm pretty sure that this claim is nothing short of lying.

In the days of yore, we had first level operators who got an initial description of what the caller was talking about and routed calls. A handful of companies still do that; Barracuda is my go-to example, and their phone support is one of the best parts of their service.

Then, we got menus - sales, press 1, support, press 2, billing, press 3, etc. Not great, but it helped weed out the support calls from the billing questions.

Then, we got voice prompts, where we *said* 'sales', 'support', or 'billing'...and that's when things got messy. For starters, the always-listening system mistook traffic for a person speaking, giving "I'm sorry, I didn't get that" vibes, and made navigating the menu take twice as long.

And then, it continued to get worse, with the "in a few words, tell me what you're calling about". It got even worse, because it's like getting to a bash prompt for the first time, with no 'help' or '?' option...so now we had to distill the description of a problem into a few words, hoping one of them is a keyword...God help you if the issue is "I can't get the app to show me my current balance" - obviously a support issue, but "current balance" is more likely to be a keyword to send to the billing department. Oh, and systems vary as to whether they'll listen the whole time, or if they'll ignore you until they've given their whole spiel. Frequently, with long annoucements that aren't relevant to the situation at hand.

Also, there's a special place in hell for whoever decided to inject advertising into hold music.

As a counterbalance, I *will* give some credit to my cable company, who really went out of their way to make the automated functions actually-helpful. It detects the account based on the incoming phone number, checks for outages in the area, and can reboot the modem and do a connectivity test right from the IVR. Does it take six minutes to get into the queue? Yes. Is that annoying? Yes. Can I appreciate that "reboot the modem and router and do a connectivity test" solves the majority of technical issues for the majority of people, and that streamlining the process to do that is helpful for both the ISP and the customer? Yes, I can.

So, let's move the football down the field and discuss the AI element...In certain areas, it probably *could* be helpful. Tier 1 tech support is probably a great application for it. At our office, we take turns calling Intuit for support, because they seem to be trained in being infuriating, and even our lowest tier techs don't deserve that kind of torture. Would I rather talk to an AI when calling Intuit for support? Yes.

However, I could see areas where this would be bad. Insurance carriers would be my perfect example of this - there's a *need* for both human judgment and accountability when dealing with insurance claims. Having each statement from the phone system conclude with a paragraph-long ChatGPT disclaimer would be insufferable, and they'd all amount to "I'm just a chatbot, you need to verify this information with a CSR..." "then let me verify this information with a CSR" "Before you verify this information with a CSR......", it'd easily devolve into being unproductive...but if 'fool the AI' is the name of the game, some enterprising troublemakers will get the phone system to agree to do some massive payout, which will then make it even more impossible for end users to get their claims sorted properly.

Ultimately, there are indeed places where an AI system can be helpful in a phone system. If the goal is for it to be helpful, I do think it can be. However, if the phone system is intended to be a barrier to customer service, rather than an enabler of it, AI will look great this quarter, and terrible every quarter.

Of course, things will get *really* interesting when an enterprising developer with a grudge and a GPU cluster gets so pissed that he writes his own AI who can call customer service with the express intent of doing what he wants...six hours over the phone and ultimately finding an exploit? Sounds like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object...

This, so much this. It's a shame that reporting is allowed to create (mis)leading headlines.

The articles on this don't even mention that this is standard practice related to amortization schedules of R&D and other capital costs - it absolutely does not mean that the marginal cost of every vehicle is $100k greater than the sale price of each vehicle, and the article writers know it.