You can buy super cheap wifi devices that doesn't phone home from Ali or similar. Much cheaper than the ones that phone home. A wifi thermostat is super cheap. What you can't buy is plug and play software which doesn't phone home. That's what's costly. Not the device itself. The software infrastructure.

Russia and China are not allies. What they are, are not overt enemies. China still wants Siberia, and Russia still wants to be seen as a major world power in its own right. There are very few things they are in agreement on other than that they want to see Atlanticism collapse.

Eye size. Larger eyes suck up more neural capacity, leaving less for other tasks.

Neanderthals had larger eyes. That will mean they need more of their brain to process vision, leaving less brain matter for abstract thought. Whether this made a material difference is hard to determine, but it points to that homo sapiens ended up outsmarting them.

A shame. I would prefer to have superior vision to having nuclear weapons. Not that I have any nuclear weapons.

Ideology is a fancy form of tribalism, and many animals will set their group before other groups to the point of hunting and killing them.

It's not like the PCIe lanes have anything else to do on a typical laptop. And it's not like I've ever managed to use more than two USB C ports anyway.

Then use a cable. Either directly to the offending peripheral, or to a hub. Much less force applied to the port, meaning it'll hold up better than a USB A anyway. I put a magnet ring on the lid of my laptop so I can attach a hub designed for Magsafe, with a short flexible wire to the USB C port. That's a lot more robust than any USB A solution I've ever used, including using a USB A wire.

I have a dirt cheap little 10" super portable. It has two USB C ports. Both can do PD charging, both have displayport out, both have 10 Gbit. A single dongle with PD passthrough, RJ45 Ethernet, HDMI, dual card reader, and a slew of USB C and A ports provides all the connectivity I need in a super slim and light package, and it works in either of the ports, or I can plug one into each if I need two external screens or even more interfaces of any kind.

I doubt that even the cheapest devices will have less functionality in the ports. The silicon will have all the functionality anyway, not even a need to add any extra chips or lanes to have it.

It is very likely there is debris packed into the bottom of the USB C port. I've had that happen. Cleaning it out made it work as good as new again.

I've found USB C to be a lot more resilient than any other small port, and as resilient as USB A gen 3.x port. Old USB A gen 2 ports are more resilient, but also vastly less capable.

Get ONE dongle which has all the ports. Ethernet, USB A, USB C, HDMI, VGA, 3.5 mm audio, they come with a selection of that, or all of it, and can have an NVMe slot for external storage as well. All connected on one USB C port for both power and data. And speaking of power, they can pass through PD as well, allowing charging through them.

USB C to micro converters are cheap and work well. But for the pesky things I have which need micro, I have a travel adapter kit which is a flat case with all adapters I need. The single dongle and that box is enough to handle everything I carry or encounter, using a single USB C port on my laptop.

In the end, this saves me a lot of stuff to carry compared to before. And it's so much more convenient to simply keep mouse and USB stick connected to the dongle hub all the time.

That's a horrible idea. I don't want to have to pick the laptop and check what port is what when plugging something in. All USB C ports should be full featured. No amount of labeling will make anything else convenient, or even tolerable.

That's exactly it. In the US, a lot of job losses are attributed to the rise of LLM's, but that's correlation, and not necessarily causation. And given the number of factors currently hammering the US economy, highly unlikely to be causation.

This is automation of the lowest tier of support. The people who are expected to follow a script, and not deviate from it. That also happens to be the entry level into the profession for a lot of graduates, but that will shift now.

As you note, the higher tiers will at best get support from LLM's, as there is no way to make an LLM flexible enough, and also because that's where a friendly voice is important.

I expect that the same thing will happen that has happened every time we've had automation enter a field. The demand for the service provided will skyrocket, meaning the end result is even more people employed than before, though in roles where they are supported by heavy automation. That will take a few years, but it's been the norm, and I see no reason to expect it to be different this time around.

At that time, the new entry level for graduates will be higher up in the chain, or in something new that grows out of an abundance of automation. Hard to say at this point, as this is all new, but considering that we're still building software as if it's the 1960's, we're overdue for a massive shift.

Marx model is that socialism is built on capitalism. Doing away with money is something else, which isn't socialism, nor Marxism. And some countries have tried an actually Marx inspired model of socialism, to great effect. None of those countries have been called "communist", other than as slurs by the uneducated.

OpenAI makes a lot of claims it can't cash. And it's not a pigeon hole, it's experience.

So checking multiple slop hallucinations against each other will provide you with... what exactly? How does that save you time from actually learning? Especially since if it's important, you have to learn anyway to be able to ensure the slop you've generated isn't too badly off.

You're not using "AI" to translate between those things. You use different slop generators, trained in different way and with different algorithms on top for each one, doing specialized tasks. There's nothing general purpose about that. Other than that they can all hallucinate, of course.