In terms of free speech, the TikTok platform was already yanked out from under you before you ever tried to stand on it. It is easily the *most* heavily narrative-shaped social media platform ever to gain widespread adoption in the West. (Douyin and Weibo and WeChat are even worse, but nobody in America uses those platforms except to talk to family members who are located in countries with extreme levels of government censorship, where everything else is blocked.)

What we should've done, about ten years ago, is put ByteDance on the entity list and make it illegal to conduct financial transactions with them, block their access to Swift, etc. That wouldn't have had much impact on the platform's growth, but it *would* have made TikTok's main source of funding far more obvious to the casual observer, which would simplify certain aspects of this argument.

Web developers have no problem with the less-well-known browsers. We never have to do anything to support them, *they* support the relevant standards and everything just works. It's consistently whatever browser has the most market share that is a perpetual thorn in our collective sides (or to a lesser extent the browsers in the #2 and #3 slots), and that's been true ever since the #1 browser was Netscape Navigator. The people who make the leading browser never think they need to do things in the standard way, because everyone will bend over backwards to make websites work with their browser *anyway* and unfortunately most of the time they're right.

I used to test in half a dozen browsers. I stopped bothering, because I never found any problems with the lesser ones. Ever.

I have to disagree for one very important reason, this device could have potential in the education market specifically because it's not a full-featured computer.

One of the problems with general purpose full-featured computers in the hands of students is the ability to get off-task. The student may have one assignment that they're supposed to do, but that student may have dozens of things that they would like to do for their own entertainment on said device. It requires self-discipline for the student to stay on the required task, and many students simply don't have that discipline.

When the electronic device has only a very limited number of functions then this makes it harder to go off-task due to the nature of the device itself.

And for those who are skeptical, think back to the days of using a simple calculator or even a scientific calculator versus switching to a Texas Instruments graphing calculator. After typing in 5318008 a few times there wasn't a lot of off-task use of the simpler calculators, but for the graphers we had even rudimentary text-based computer games as far back as the mid-nineties.

A color e-ink reader with some basic applet capability that doesn't support side-loading could make for a useful educational tool if textbooks are loaded on it and if it can do basic worksheet editing and submission.

I am seeing more people using their phones as their primary, if not only, computer device. If it's not a phone, it's probably a tablet, or maybe a laptop.

The trouble is there are a lot of truly terrible human drivers on the roads as well, and those terrible drivers' issues driving end up manifesting when traffic is most congested. Sure, there are occasional single-vehicle accidents or accidents between vehicles in uncongested areas from time to time, but it's usually when tensions are highest due to the stress of traffic that bad human driving results in collisions.

What they're going to need to work out is how to handle situations when the 'correct' process isn't possible, and how to determine if a technically-incorrect process would still be safe, and if that would be the way to solve it. Because in-practice we see this sort of thing frequently, things like going around double-parked vehicles by crossing a double-yellow for a short time, or determining when a failed signal means one should proceed after some waiting period, that sort.

I would like to see autonomous driving on highways and freeways where the limited-access nature of the road or long stretches without cross-traffic or pedestrians might make it simply safer and easier on the human operating the vehicle.

To pay a living wage to a cab driver would cost around $75,000 per year accounting for payroll taxes, benefits, and other employer-born costs, if the drivers are employees of the taxi firm rather than true independent contractors that basically rent the cabs and then receive dispatch from the company as part of the cab rental.

If the cab company can do away with the drivers then that's a huge amount of money that they're giving up. That's why they're pushing for autonomous vehicles.

The whole point of reintroducing the Cruise cars with human drivers is to get us used to seeing them operating again, where we're not instantly thinking of them as dangerous road hazards. Likely the intent is to try to shift back towards autonomous driving again, slowly as their developers actually get the software to work properly.

Yeah.

Windows should probably also have a VM system that isn't total pants. I'm sure Microsoft will get right on that and have a fix ready any day now.

> Why would I want to sacrifice performance by restricting how much memory my browser is using?

Your question presupposes a couple of things:

1. You are actually using Edge as your web browser. For a lot of people this is not the case.

2. Your computer actually has the necessary amount of physical RAM. On a lot of low-end systems (especially cheap laptops) this is not the case.

There are people out there who were scammed into trying to run Windows Ten on a system with 16GB of RAM. (I've even seen one system that had Windows Ten and only 8GB of physical RAM. I was appalled.) Used-computer sellers have been refurbishing/renewing secondhand computers that are appropriate for running Windows Seven, and of course they've been putting Ten on them instead, and a lot of budget-minded people are buying them like that. This results in a LOT of page swapping. Like, really a lot, even by nineties standards. Under these circumstances, a simple action like trying to access the Start menu, can easily lead to a 10-minute wait while virtual memory is shuffled around. It doesn't help that the virtual memory system in Windows Phone/Eight/Ten/Eleven is even more pants than the one in NT/XP/Vista/Seven. But when even the OS itself won't fit in physical RAM and then you're trying to run memory-hungry things like Edge, while simultanously there are endless system updates downloading and data indexing and whatnot forever happening in the background, a better VM system would only help so much; there's going to be a lot of swapping regardless. The only way to make performance any worse than that, would be to put the swap file in the cloud.

Eleven has somewhat more realistic specs for what your computer should have in order to run it, and it refuses to install if the system is too low-end. As near as I can tell, Eleven doesn't actually need more RAM than Ten needs; but it *knows* that it needs it, and so it is more realistic about telling people their systems don't have enough system resources and can't upgrade to the new version. If Ten had been similarly realistic about this, a lot more people would still be using Seven, or else they'd have spent more on their computers and got ones that could handle Ten better.

They're afraid of becoming irrelevant, and it makes them do stupid irrational things.

The best example is Eight. Nobody was using Windows Phone, and they were afraid that (with smartphones gaining popularity) if everyone kept not using it, Microsoft would become irrelevant, so they used their majority market share on the desktop to force everyone to use their phone OS, by porting over some stuff and turning it into the next version of MS Windows. This was a terrible idea (Eight was so much worse than Seven you can't even really compare them), and as far as I know, it also hasn't resulted in anyone buying a smartphone with a Microsoft OS on it, so as a strategy, it completely failed to mitigate in any way the risk that inspired it. But that didn't stop them from doing it. Actions inspired by fear don't have to be rational.

Web browsers are a similar situation. Everybody uses web browsers, so if everybody doesn't use *Microsoft's* web browser, they feel like they're in danger of becoming irrelevant. So they think they have to stop that from happening, at all costs, and it makes them do stupid counterproductive stuff that annoys and alienates users.

I mean, the stock is almost certainly overvalued, so at *some* point its price will experience a "market correction". But when you take up a short position, the inevitability of that ultimate outcome won't save you.

When you're short, you need the price to stay level or drop, and you need that to happen *right now* not some time later after you go bankrupt. If the price correction happens somewhat later than you expected, you lose, and the amount you lose depends on the unpredictable amount by which that stock price goes up in the short term. Fundamentally, you're handing the market the right to demand *any* amount of additional money from you (limited only by bankruptcy law), to cover the short if your timing is bad. You don't even have to be wrong about the company being overvalued. If you take up the short position too soon, and the price goes up for a while longer before crashing, it sucks to be you.

Short positions are dangerous.

> Shorts have the potential to lose a lot of money if the stock goes up.

Not just a lot, but an *unpredictable* amount. It isn't just that you can lose money if things don't go your way. That's always true with investments, especially ones that are famous for having a lot of price-motion, like stocks. But a short position is special because the amount you can lose is unbounded, and this makes it risky to hold *even* as part of a diverse portfolio. If you invest 5% of your portfolio in a normal stock, and it tanks, you can lose up to 5% of your portfolio. But if you put 5% of your investment portfolio into a short position, and the stock increases to e.g. 200 times its former value, you could lose 1000% of your investment portfolio, which is probably significantly more than your entire net worth. The 200x increase isn't especially likely, but the possibility of something like that happening is always there with a short position.

The Trump stock is more unlikely than most to have a very very large increase, because the company doesn't do any significant R&D and is already valued at a relatively high level. But it's probably *more* likely than the average stock to have a more moderate increase that would make a short position, not completely ruinous, but decidedly uncomfortable. All it would take would be for a couple more of Trump's political enemies to file yet more lawsuits against him (which does *not* seem unlikely), and his popularity would probably go up again (like it has done the last half dozen times that happened), and the stock price would probably increase as a result. So honestly, I think shorting the Trump stock is probably a somewhat more manageable risk (as part of a diverse portfolio) than a typical short position (but that's not a high bar) but also less likely to pay off. It's not an investment strategy I would particularly recommend.

I expect people are going "This is overvalued; if its bubble pops while I have it shorted, I make money." And that's true, as far as it goes, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Honestly, right now the research currently being done is all incremental tweaking focused on getting things like ChatGPT and its ilk to be slightly less embarrassingly bad at doing the limited range of things they do. None of that research has *any* chance of leading to human-like intelligence, in a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium. It's like expecting to make a breakthrough in space travel by engineering a slightly more aerodynamic bicycle. The more aerodynamic bicycle may be valuable, but it isn't *ever* going to fly through space under its own power at a significant fraction of light speed, sorry, that's just not what it's going to do. Such an advance wouldn't come from that approach. If it comes at all, it will come from someone trying something new that hasn't already had millions of man-hours poured into it.

By 1998, hard drives were either IDE or SCSI, and most new computers also had (usually ATAPI) CD-ROM drives.

Admittedly, floppy disks were also still in widespread use; but it wasn't for lack of hard drives. It was for lack of USB 2.0 and the (flash-EEPROM-based) mass storage devices that it enabled.

If it's Boeing, I ain't going.

Operator of the launch vehicle pays - they're the one directly requiring the ATC support - and it's up to them how they pass any costs downstream to their customers. The operator with the most competetive overll option - which, at least nine times out of ten, will be the bottom line - wins.

That's how the free market the US adores is supposed to work, yes? This seems like a pretty good way of levelling the playing field, as long as everyone is on the same charge sheet - no exceptions.