Trying to turn this story into some surveillance state bullshit is just absurd. Read the back of a concert ticket. For at least the past 30 years tickets have clearly informed me I might be photographed and recorded at a concert. They warn you when you're going to buy the fucking things.

Don't take your mistress to a concert, you're just as likely to be seen by a neighbor as you are to be caught on a kiss cam. I don't give a shit about the guy's morals but he's demonstrated he's far too stupid to run a company. I hope his wife cleans him out, she deserves every penny after having to deal with his dumb ass for so long.

Lots of pattern recognition, from quality control to medical diagnosis. Granted that is mostly “machine learning” not large language models, so “so last decade”, but extremely effective.

Basically any problem domain where we can recognize a good solution (and it is unambiguously different from bad solutions), but don’t know any step by step process to get to one have had success stories. Him, no there is more to it then that, it seems like we have spent far far longer not getting to trustable self driving cars then my rule of thumb says. We have made significant progress towards it though, it’s just that “mostly doesn’t drive the car into a lake” isn't a great result...so maybe “& has only a modest failure cost, OR humans don’t do it all that great anyway” is a useful addition.

High by almost a third, Apple’s cheapest laptop is a $650 model of the M1 MacBook Air sold only via Walmart.

CA may have made non-competes illegal, but those are the “you can’t work for our competitors after you leave us” non-competes. It is generally considered valid to prevent someone from working for a competitor while they are actually working for you. Like Apple and Google both say you can’t work for a competitor while employed by them. Both consider each other to be operating in the same markets and thus competitors.

The claim Google/Apple would make isn’t that you can’t work 2 places at once, or even that you can’t in general work for Google and Apple at the same time, but that the employee made an agreement that they would not work for a competitor and lied about doing so. An otherwise legal act which is fraud because you agreed not to do so, claimed not to be doing so, and then did so anyway. So they would certionally have to worry about sabotage, and/or theft of work product. -- Ironically you might be able to wriggle partway out of it by claiming you “weren’t really working, just slacking for both of them at once!”, except neither judge nor jury would really find that acceptable...

an area of the system which you can't look at or audit?

You can probbably look at and audit the PCFax area with some sort of enterprise tool, you just can’t write it. Or maybe they will even allow you to erase it and leave behind a “the PCFax report was deleted, so anything could be wrong with this computer! Odometer tampered with! Tampered!!!”

It is not in HP's interest to instigate more trust into a used computer purchase. This serves to help the used computer market, at the expense of the new computer market.

Maybe.

One reason Apple can charge more money then other companies for new iPhones is people believe they can sell a year or two old iPhone for a reasonable amount of money. HP may believe their products will retain more value over time in the used market then competitors even if the sole reason is because “PCFax says it is good” for HPs and non-HPs don’t get a report because they come to the party late and don’t offer the feature for several more years. Once people get in the habit of buying HP “because you can resell it for like half the price of a new one” the prices of new ones can start to creep up. It would make sense to pay $600 for an HP with an identical spec to a $400 Dell if you believe that in two years the HP will sell for $300 and the Dell will sell for maybe $100, or maybe cost you $10 for an eWaste sticker. Even more sense if HP gives you a 2 year repurchase price because they think the used price will be high enough (i.e. you pay $600 today for the laptop, and it includes a $200 coupon for a 2027 purchase of a new HP if you send the old one back...)

Again the actual HP might not be any better then the Dell (or may be somewhat worse), but it has a PCFax listing that says “great shape! SSD 100% ok! Battery 97% original capacity, great for 2 years of use! Never been dropped! Never had the screen replaced! OEM RAM!” while the Dell’s says “no information, anything could have happened to this pile of junk, buyer beware!”

I’m not even talking pre-orders of video games coming out in a few months.

The entire Chicago board of exchange exists to sell products (originally farm products, you know tons of corn, bales of hay, barrels of hog bellies, whole cows) at future points in time. It revolutionized the farm economy. Farmers can sell this fall’s harvest today in order to afford repairs on tractors they need fixed in order to actually get the harvest into the ground, and keep it watered and weeded and fertilized. Oh, plus afford the fertilizer.

CBOE exchanges billions of dollars of futures a day, granted it isn’t all “farm stuff” anymore. Google buying energy that won’t be produced for ~7 years isn’t really any more astounding then someone buying tons of corn from plants that just went into the ground last week and won’t be harvested until October, and that has been happening since 1973.

When it gets to this point, the choice of the population is to starve to death or create a new, parallel system that serves em. It's normally what happens in communist dictatorships etc..., so you can bet the elites are trying to not get to this point, or the system will just get away from em.

Sadly the elite tend to believe their own propaganda about exceptionalism and think they got to the top because of talent not luck, and that what happened elsewhere and in the distant past is irrelevant because they are just too awesome to fail, get pulled out of their limos and beheaded by the ignorant lazy masses of unachievers. Which just increases the chance of history repeating, or at least rhyming.

Sure it is insane to bet that in 7 years fusion will be working...if in fact Google is relying on this as opposed to that purchase being a fancy way to fund some long term work on reducing power costs and take advantage of tax breaks to basically fund that with tax payer money and not their own.

So it is basically Google spending someone else’s money on something that has a chance of directly benefiting Google. Which I’m sort of ok with because if it does manage to produce that energy (even if it takes >7 years) it’ll also produce energy for the rest of us (either directly as in one big ass facility, or indirectly when they publish a million papers “here is how we made it work” and spin up companies “we built that one over there, give us a billion dollars and we will make one for you too!”). Maybe some day we will actually get electricity that is “too cheap to meter” out of it.

I've been using a Konica Minolta MC7450 for over 12 years now. It's been the most reliable and cheapest (per page printed) printer I've ever owned and will probably ever own. Also, this one happened to be A3 sized (Tabloidish in freedom units) and I've been using that much more than I'd initially expected. Not saying you should get this one (it was a lucky find) but I'd definitely aim for a networked color laser printer meant for office use.

What utter nonsense. Only totally unrealistic scenarios could still limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. As in: we stop using fossil fuels today and stop eating meat today (both would collapse the economy). In reality we have known about this for a long time, starting really talking about it in 1979 and launched IPCC in 1988. We're now 46 years in the future and apart from some hiccups due to COVID and the odd economic/oil crisis, each and every subsequent year we have increased our emissions and destroyed more forests, accelerating the problem. Humanity should be ashamed of itself and no longer deserves to survive on this planet. And probably they won't.

Also, the idea that 1.5 degrees is still feasible is based not only on the unlikely idea that we will stop burning fossil fuels anytime soon but also on the assumption that the boatload of "unlikely" tipping points and feedback loops that we routinely leave out of models because of uncertainty don't do what they usually do: make things much worse than our models predicted.

Humanity and many other species are absolutely fucked. The most "extreme" action currently taken is what Extinction Rebellion is doing and that's embarrassingly little compared to the horror we're facing. It's a matter of time before some desperate people are going to do things that actually help and it will probably involve removing the culprit from this planet, which almost certainly includes you, assuming you're complicit because you're still driving a ICE car, eating meat (routinely left out of IPCC scenario's for political reasons!!!), heating your home with gas and perhaps even flying planes. If so, you're actually consciously murdering future people and the consequences WILL find you. Good riddance.

There are some attempts. Actually, there are many. Some are moderately successful (notably OVHCloud and ScaleWay) but most are amateurish at best. I think the trouble here is that the existing megascalers (Google, MicroSoft, Amazon) originated from companies that revolved about software development. For some reason, European cloud attempts are run by traditional hosting companies. They lack the software engineering culture/skills/vision required to develop well integrated and automated solutions; they approach the problem from an traditional operations-perspective, focusing on offering hosted existing services instead of the fully integrated whole that a cloud should be.

It's probably quite difficult to make the paradigm shift from a hosting company with a bit more automation to the software development company that's capable of achieving the level of integration and automation we'd expect from a cloud provider. At the same time, those half-assed cloud providers make it difficult for a more innovative software-development-driven company to enter the market. Likely, only Big Tech companies can break through this. And the thing is: Europe simply doesn't have any of them.

Due to this combination, Europe is stuck in a local minimum it will likely never escape from.

$50 million? That is a good tee shirt budget! Like “spot something evil, report it and get a fancy tee shirt!” If it were $500mil it could be spot bonuses...

Google’s email (when I was there, I was a layoff victim ~2 years back) has something like a year long self delete policy, and anything you apply an archive tag to gets kept “forever”. So it is modestly durable. Plus of corse if Google gets sued and you or a work area you are involved in gets identified as a discoverable asset you get to be on discovery hold and all the mail gets retained until that process is over (and it can last years or decades).

Google’s chats self deleted in more like 45 to 90 days. Seldom long enough to survive into a litigation hold. The chats didn’t have an archive hold tag you could apply (one of the chat systems had a possibly accidental loophole, groups had their own retention policies settable per group, so if you had stuff you wanted to save you could make a group to discuss a document or design and set a year retention policy or whatever).

Google also quite deliberately had internal communications about “communicate with care” and pushed employees to discuss things in person and via chat and not email if it was business related as opposed to purely technical. It was very obvious we were being told to communicate anything that might be the topic of a lawsuit over chat (or in person) and never email. Durability of the messages and discoverability was mentioned. It wasn’t “do all the illegal stuff in chat”, it was “be aware that business practices can be very legally sensitive and are best conducted in person or if by electronic means in chat and never in email”, very nudge-nudge-wink-wink.

I mean nothing strictly illegal about reminding people what forms of communication work how, and all the documents had a retention policy, it just happened that the policy was generally “burn in a month and a half” which for a typical business would be very very suspicious.

To give Google a little break though with the volume of business Google use to conduct via email it is extremely different from companies that one would accuse of being shady with a 45 day burn policy: most traditional companies have “some” email, Google like many tech companies and especially tech companies where most of the management layers were ex-technical did communications relentlessly by email. At most phone companies if it would have been a phone call it would be an email chain. Meetings well, google still has way too many, but meetings got summarized in email (frequently by several people). If it happened it was probably in at least 8 if not 300 emails.

Post chat change though, things got memory holed. If it happened maybe there is an email, maybe. Likely lots of chat about it, all vanished into the mists go time (45 days back). Aruments about the 300th time a button name got changed? Chat, maybe a little email. Discussions about who a “target audience” for a product was? Absolutely in chat, never in email. Never never, never ever in email. What kind of user does a proposed feature appeal to? All chat, never email...

A vital part of alcohol production.