Hawaii does not need the telescope and American scientists don't need it to be in such an expensive location should they choose to visit. There is no reason to want that hardware to be in Hawaii which will only become more crowded and more expensive to visit and live in.

Isolation on the Canary Islands is pure win for all concerned.

It would be interesting to know what the numbers look like in terms of schools that are actually doing something at least modestly Apple-specific vs. ones basically reusing chromebook-focused plans on Apple hardware.

Anything you hand out is going to be 'a platform' and normalize it for the students(not necessarily a point in its favor; people tend to resent the deliberate limitations of hardware that IT has been told to at least try to make less useful for porn and cheating); but there is a potential difference in versatility and vendor flexibility between people actually adopting some macOS stuff and people concluding that chromebooks have been getting more expensive at an alarming clip, without feeling any less cheap, so Apple is now genuinely competitive even if you are just going to slap managed chrome on there and reuse your existing, chromebook focused, IT and curriculum stuff.

I learnt orienteering in ninth grade because the outdoors demands to be taken seriously. My class quite enjoyed it. We hiked parts of the Appalachian Trail on our own without worry because we knew what to do and where we were at all times. None of this was difficult.

If/when it does there will be mass layoffs because the ideal business has no human employees.

The purpose of AI is to replace humans by facilitating legal constructive dismissal. Businesses are willing to invest enormous sums to be rid of workers.

The point is that there's no defense against prompt injection, i.e. users of agentic LLM have to be trustworthy.

Still overkill but not remotely impractical. Sending a "whole computer" would be no more difficult than shipping tiny PCs to Ebay buyers who often buy several at once for our "home lab" style setups.

A typical tiny PC plus power brick and its cord easily fits in a flat rate box (though for Important Stuff best sent next day air).

I suspect that Microsoft, not unreasonably, thinks that the value of their AI slop will be enhanced if they can use an existing property to get people to classify particularly grating AI slop so that they can tune their copilot-related stuff to produce less grating or less obvious slop in the future.

Maybe someone in the org actually cares about linkedin's reputation as a hellscape for aura-farming lunatics; but I'd be shocked if the incentive that MS is actually motivated by is anything but the chance to get a dataset of text ranked by how unpleasantly bot-like it is to try to make their bots less visible.

Looks like Microsoft is trying to convince people to classify more and less distasteful bot slop for them so they can tune copilot outputs in the future.

The winning move is not to play.

Once the supply of customers flush enough to buy under more standard arrangements is saturated you are basically left between ignoring the demand for growth forever or deciding between handling...subprime...customers yourself or keeping the arrangement at arm's length.

This 'restricted mode' that Apple is vigorously denying will be used for lease enforcement suggests that the metaphorical arm is not that long and that Apple seems to be doing more than merely being willing to sell devices to whatever resellers; but it's not a huge surprise that they'd want the risk related to the debt and any shaking down handled by someone who isn't them.