You're right, they'll run the numbers and take whichever path maximizes their net profit -- but shuttering (or even heavily modifying) a facility that they've just invested $$$$ into is unlikely to be found to be their most profitable option. More likely they'll try to sell memory chips at a profit of +$.25 per chip in large volumes, because when you've got is a giant hammer, hammering lots of nails is what you can do best.

I wonder if anyone will start selling home systems capable of using cast-off data center RAM? It might be worthwhile if there's lots of that sort of RAM floating around for cheap.

Sure, a company could use an increase in productivity to allow their workers to work fewer hours while getting the same amount accomplished... but capitalism doesn't work that way. Instead, the company will use the increase in productivity to get more work done in the same amount of hours as before... or if they don't, their competitor will, and thereby obtain a competitive advantage over them.

This is especially true for salaried employees, where the cost of the employee to the company is the same regardless of how many hours the employee works, and it is therefore in the company's financial interest to maximize the return on its salary "investment" by getting as much output from the employee as possible in any given pay period.

I've got a co-worker like that; every email I get from him is just him copy-and-pasting text from his pet AI, and when I reply, he forwards my email on to his AI to read and generate the next reply for him.

Which raises the question... exactly what value is my co-worker providing there? Sooner or later management will notice that they are paying six figures of annual salary to what is essentially just a very slow meat-based email relay, and they'll lay him off and just have me communicate with the AI directly instead. There's a fine line between "all in" and "all redundant".

It all depends on one thing: Will your speech-driven AI agent reliably accomplish the tasks that you told it to do? If so, great, we've entered the glorious Star Trek future. OTOH if it screws up, even just 5% of the time, it'll be kicked to the curb, because a "timesaver" that you have to stand over and supervise to make sure it doesn't go wrong is no timesaver at all.

If the weather is bad enough, people choose not to go out in it. Unless someone has a gun to your head, you always have a choice.

Heh, there's some validity to that. Human drivers are a daily rolling disaster that society tolerates only because there hasn't been any reasonable alternative. If-and-when autonomous vehicles actually become cheap and reliable enough, I suspect that human driving will gradually start to be curtailed -- not necessarily by banning it outright, but by making licensing requirements more restrictive, by making insurance costs more onerous, and/or by "nerfing" the cars such that they simply refuse to perform dangerous maneuvers.

What this country needs is a good two-dollar red-team AI, that will try to create an exploit based on a submitted bug report and use the exploit to compromise a Mac in the QA lab. If it succeeds, the bug report is definitely genuine and should be prioritized.

I agree that has historically been the case, but OTOH Trump is deteriorating so rapidly (both psychologically and in terms of his level of popular support) that after November's bloodbath (and whatever Trump's unhinged response to that will be), the remaining Republicans may well decide it's in their own interest to get him out of office sooner rather than later.

We've reached the "Pope is selling indulgences" phase of the American government's decent into blatant corruption.

I suppose they could do that, but I don't know what it would accomplish. Telegram is already written and functional; murdering Durov wouldn't uninstall it anywhere. I suppose it might intimidate the next guy who is considering writing a secure messaging app, but I don't think Russia is playing that kind of decades-long game anymore. Their main goal now is short-term: figure out how survive the Ukraine debacle without getting strung up by their own citizenry.

This could have been avoided; instead of erasing the drive, the duress password could have been set to load a "clean" partition with nothing on it that the defendant didn't want the US government to see.

... but Dear Leader will keep us safe from the dangerous and corrupt outside world. Juche!

Just wait until you try to download the bootleg video and end up with a copy of Musk's AI-generated "historically accurate" version instead. D'oh! :)

The key point here is that data's security isn't enforced by the OS, but rather by the encryption algorithm itself. A non-OS forensics terminal would see the raw contents of the hard drive, which is to say, blocks of random-looking bytes that might be encrypted data or might just be truly random; without the corresponding password, there is no way to to tell.

Without any password (and assuming a robust encryption implementation), that's as far as they'd get. With a password, they'd be able to decrypt the blocks associated with that password and view the files for that account, but not any of the other blocks/accounts.

At that point, the FBI's nerds might well suspect that there are other accounts on the phone that they don't know about, but short of coercing the phone's owner into providing additional passwords, that's as far as they could get.