Does Best Buy even sell CDs or much music at this point, is audio equipment even big segment for them now, it does not seem to get much floor space.

So no I would not want them to change their name back, they are not a music store..

Waffle Iron said

And that is really the point isn't it. If we have been at war in 81 years WTF have been doing? Right 'police actions', 'nation building', 'kinetic actions', 'troop surges', 'anti-insurgencies' endless euphemisms all because it is some how more palatable than admitting we are/were engaged in warfare, or perhaps worse to try get people to engage in really over the top connotative dissonance and accept stupid arguments like 'we are war with Saddam not the people of Iraq.'

I sincerely believe this type of avoidance is really unhelpful, there is plenty of moral, economic, ethical, practical, security, and other arguments to be made about any situation where the American military is firing weapons at uniformed fighters of a foriegn nation without having to pretend that inst 'war'.

The military is right.

The entire value of AI for them is decision speed. Independent of if that is sorting thru 1000s of people/structures/vehicles and identifying which are targets, having selected a target determining if it is currently worth sending a round, of what type, and deciding if the collateral damage will be acceptable.

Mostly whoever does that faster is going to win any major conflict, that isn't immediately resource/supply constrained.

Just look what modern fire control has done to naval warfare. Drones and AI will have the same impacts on the battle field, and even more so in urban conflict.

The DoD would just be wasting its time working with any AI vendors that tie their hands, American's enemies will follow no such restrictions. Arms races are always a function of you better build it because the other guy certainly will. Doing anti-proliferation here is also not very practical, there is nothing to 'see' from orbit, no way to make sure the other guy isn't cheating.

You know it was originally the war department right?

They changed the name at the start of the cold war to reflect a national security strategy based on deterrence.

However that 'strategy' lasted what five years until Korea? Since then the DoD and the political animals that direct it have rarely seen a proxy war, or direct confrontation they haven't sought to be a part of.

Honestly I think congress should officially change it back to the 'War Department' because we all can think, act, and make better choices when we start with honest labeling. Wankers indeed!

Well Jordan is correct and you're not. So there is that.

I know the whole goal of the console world is a restricted set of hardware, that simplifies testing of games and ensures a consistent experience but really some major components like the GPU and storage should be made swapable.

What would anyone want in Ps6 or another PS5 refresh? Native 4k is still a tough/expensive even in the PC world. Technologwise right now what will be delivered is most likely better frame-gen and super resolution. The games mostly are not memory or CPU bound on current kit.

They make money on current kit at least the pro-line, that is my understanding anyway so it isnt the Gillette model anymore and they really do have some incentive to sell you new hardware, but they could custom package the GPU modules and just sell those at significant markup. This will still be more 'affordable' for the consumer not buying a base unit all over again. I guess the only thing that does is take units off the used market which might hurt the long tail, sales of games to people who bought used last-gen consoles, who might then have still purchased 'new' games but I can't imagine that is big part of the revenue picture, because those folks probably also buy the games used, though maybe with digital distribution it is now.

WAT?

Phone numbers are not private. We used to print and distribute large books of them to anyone who wanted one.

TL:DR
I don't need or really want my phone number to be a secret, actually I'd like anyone who has a legitimate reason to contact me to be able to discover it easily. What I really need is for some kind of proof of relationship so I can decide and more specifically have a *reliable* automatic system deny or accept calls based on my preferences.

Long version:

Its just an identifier, it should not be considered any more a secret than your name. Now coupled with other datum that might turn them into private information. Ie if you number appears in a customer database that leaks from some organization, now we have information that you associated with them, which may or may not be private.

Now I know there is a history of private and unlisted numbers. However that a combination of a cash grab for telcos, they used to charge for that, and a shabby solution to the problem of SPAM, before that was really understood. Basically the phone system after having been upgraded to automatic switching/dialing vs operators making connections, there was no way to throttle the rate of calls or reject unwanted callers. Rather then fix it telcos naively allowed some secrecy around the identifiers. They also in most cases made the really terrible mistake of using the phone number as natural key for their accounts/contracts complicating all future fixes.

TBH throwing numbers in unstructured data used in ChatGPT prompts probably isn't a big deal. There are bazillian places they could buy if from pre-correlated with all kinds of other information anyway. Privacy and security need to be take seriously a lot more seriously than most of society currently is, but lets not get distracted trying to keep information that everyone and their brother already has like phone numbers secrets that should not be secrets in the first place.

there is always opportunity for more hierarchy

portable water guys -> service water guys -> drain and grey water guys -> sewage/waste water guys.

If only this could be solved with like a solenoid...

Well what should states do as far as secondary ed?

I think we can all agree that ensuring all graduates can in fact read well, posses some number sense in the form of statistics, be able to do common algebra, and perhaps basic differential calculus, and know some things about the natural sciences.

Most states are failing pretty hard at that and our education-industrial-complex finds all manor of excuses ranging from more-inflation-adjusted-spending-per-pupil than at any point in history just isn't enough, to algebra is racist..

However, I still think secondary ed should be attempting to graduate students more than pure liberal arts backgrounds, they should send people out the door with some immediately employable skills, right?

And would that be 'wrong' if they did? If someone starts using a cane, because they realize they don't have the reflex and balance they once did something anyone objects to?

That is the trouble here as is often the case. This could be a really useful tool. Just having immediate basic intelligence in a lot of settings would be valuable.

Imagine your a middle-manager at multinational. You've traveled from your office in Toronto to headquarters in Atlanta. Would it not be super helpful have this thing tied to the company directory, and be able to look down the hall and immediately recognize that is James Robins the high-ed cost accounting team lead, you need to speak to about your project. It would great if you could have a hallway conversation before the big meeting and get on the same page.

So being able to attach something like this to personal contacts or contacts you have some single degree of separation with like, they are my fellow employee at ACME, might be neat but obviously yeah a lot of people if allowed to will go super creeper and wire the glasses into every public records database they can. Companies like Meta will store the match information and the geo-location for every inference their backend makes, and in the best case use it for more weird ad targeting engagement driving society twisting dark pattern nonsense, next best case sell it to all kinds of bad actors, most likely case get hacked repeated lose the data so we have no idea who has it or how recent it is.

it all depends on how it is structured.

It can be a way of managing project risk. You create a new company to build a thing, with the existing organization as stake holder, and planned primary or only customer. If the project succeeds the parent company acquires the rest of the equity in the child and by extension becomes responsible for the debts, if it does not work out the child company declares bankruptcy and the bond holders are left bag holding.

A lot of people find this objectionable but honestly as long as its all disclosed, it is just basically VC money for a startup, even if the start up is effectively a puppet controlled by an established organization. The creditors should be getting a coupon rate and discount on the face that reflects their opinion of the risk or they should not be buying debts.
   

LOL

None of that changes the parents point of view. The issues is that journalists have been wildly irresponsible for a long time, and the scientist doing the interviews let them get away with it because the probably thought it meant more grant money in the next round.

For decades we went round and round on things like eggs and coffee and every last one of those articles that ran in the Sunday paper would have had a line like "scientists now believe two or three cups of coffee a day will keep your heat healthy" or and very often just a few weeks later "scientists now believe even small amounts of caffeine lead to increased risk of heat attack." It filled pages, held readers and sold ad space.

Then we get the lobbyists involved who are paid to advocate for their industry like the media would latch onto any study that seems to suggest their product had social value of some kind. They next thing you know we have a USDA food primid that turned a nation pre-diabetic. Sent them to their doctors who they did/do still trust only for them to say "yeah I know what the poster says but maybe lets try not eating a whole loaf of bread every day m'kay" - This is the lived experience of the typical American born between maybe about 1960 and 1990. Then around 1996 or so they started going on-line but did not fully understand anyone could post whatever garbage they wanted on geocities and angelfire. Suddenly they could find someone to validate every fringe notion they'd ever heard and nobody had the authority to talk them out of it any longer.

I know everyone wants point the finger for our loss of faith in institutions etc at one specific thing but really I don't think it is actually explained by any one thing besides maybe an explosion of communications technology coupled with an open-society let things move a bit faster than humans can really deal with.

which is probably reasonable for a hyper-scaler deployment a company like Meta would consider. Most of the hardware is pretty reliable. Everything running on it will be highly fault tolerant. If anything goes wrong nobody local does any actual fix, they pull replacement unit out of stock, swap it, and it boots from SAN and rejoins the hive..

The failed unit is either shipped to some central recovery facility or maybe directly the recycler.

This is what state and local pols NEED to understand about these data center projects, once the construction phase is over they don't mean that many jobs even in the context of a rural county. So they need to be really really careful about any tax abatement schemes etc. You are not going to see a bunch of new housing demand, new economic activity, payroll taxes etc. Just existing residents angry about noise, and their wells drying up.

COLLECT THE PROPERTY TAXES or deny the permits.

Indeed this is highly suspect because it is absolutely the wrong layer to do this at. We are very close if not there already to being able to do TTS -> translate -> STT with in the power and compute envelopes on a handset.

Doing it there would make it super easy for the user to turn the feature on and off on the fly. Doing it there would make, privacy and legality concerns around recording and multi-party disclosure a lot simpler. There are a lot of other experiential and legal reasons it seems way better to do this at the edge.

Which makes me wonder if this isn't a case of 'lets invent a feature to justify doing something we have already been doing that largely would not be seen as acceptable'

Of course it is all for show, just like saying you're going to build underwater data centers powered by SMRs is for show.

If you are president of the United States or CEO of a trillion dollar company the expectation is that you have "big ideas". If you go around making practical proposals based on hardware or infrastructure that either exists today or that we know how to create without exhotic materials and entirely new regulatory frameworks, people will start saying things like "i could have come up with that"

These don't exist to solve problems, they don't even exist to have what most of us would consider 'good ideas' or anything resembling a 'real plan.' They exist to define the ultimate ambitions, inspire if we are lucky, and importantly sanctify the actual actions of the people under them as being consistent with the overall objectives for the believers or put another way make their actions 'acceptable'.