Meta, for instance, just signed a 6 billion dollar contract with Corning for glass for fiber optic cables.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/2...

System Preferences > Dock > Position on screen.

It doesn't latch to the top right, but it's centered on the right.

AFAIK, it's always been this way in OSX (I've been running OSX/macOS since 10.2).

The equivalent native Mac function is that the Apple menu is always top-left corner, so you move your mouse to the very corner of the screen, and that's clickable. That's Mac Human Interface Guidelines going back decades, There was a kerfluffle at some point because one revision of OSX made it so the very top-left corner was not clickable. That got reverted.

Personally, I've never liked bars on the left or right. But, that's just like my opinion, man.

Mac Minis are solid at running models locally.

I have four kids. I have a very good income, my wife works part time, we own own a nice house with a yard (that has probably tripled or quadruple in cost since we bought it...adding another wrinkle to the mix), my kids attend public schools (both charter and traditional), and we live in an area that, at least until recently, has been lower cost. It's still not easy!

My wife and I got started with our family later than some but earlier than many--after grad school and a couple of years in full-time employment but still in our 20s. It would be much harder had we waited until our 30s to start having kids.

There's immense pressure to have all of your kids participate in sports, clubs, tutoring, music, etc. Many of these are very costly. My kids are mostly a chip off the 'ole block and suck at sports, so that's been a big time and expense saver, but for kids who participate in higher levels of athletics, even at the middle school level, you are looking at multiple thousands of dollars per year per sport per kid and many, many hours per week. It's crazy! Toss on piano lessons, summer camps, daycare/childcare if needed, and all the "extras" add up very, very fast.

Add up preschool and K-12 private schools, which many people feel they must, and you can be paying 15k - 40k per kid per year.

A couple of years ago we were on a family trip to Boston and we popped into a coffee shop. A woman came up to me and said "Three kids?! Wow, it's like the old days. How do you afford that? Are you a crypto bro?" (I am not!)

Similarly, we were on a trip to Italy and multiple people--probably at least 10 over the course of a week--came up to us and said something along the lines of "It's so great to see a big family. I was part of a big family. I would love to have more kids [or any kids at all] but it is so expensive!"

My wife and I both knew we wanted kids and we're very family oriented. Giving up socializing, going out drinking, going to costly sports and other events, was not a problem for us! We also have family nearby, which is another lifesaver. If we didn't have the money, the family, and most importantly the desire, we never would have been able to have a large family.

I completely agree with you regarding subsidies. It takes a lot to move the needle. A thousand bucks here or there is just not going to move the needle.

The idea of neural networks goes back farther than that and originated in pure mathematics. In the computer arena, perceptrons go back to the 1950s. We trained a neural network for identifying handwritten single digits as a simple project in my (only) AI class ~25 years ago. This was nothing special.

One of the themes we keep seeing is that "large" networks behave differently from small networks, and emergent behaviors appear at various points. We don't know why (maybe people smarter and more informed than I am have some clues)

Despite the term "AI winter" which is really more about public impressions (and funding), AI progress has been very steady since the birth of computers. I would suspect it has followed Moore's Law pretty closely up until very recently.

I don't think that's it. Pruning of search spaces has been part of AI since..AI has existed. Generally, pruning and other search methods like A* (again going back decades) are not simply random, but heuristically driven. I don't think you can consider LLMs to work at "random" due to their training and guide rails, nor are they generating infinite solutions and pruning them down.

For the end user, the best description I have heard is to think about LLMs as excellent natural language parsers with strong pattern matching abilities. Discussion about "AGI" or "what intelligence actually is" can go off the rails rather quickly. Sticking to parsing and pattern matching is a pretty reasonable use case. Pattern matching between massive data sets that are too large for humans or other manually programmed methods to do effectively seem like a valid and reasonable use to me.

So, the new student for "is it real artificial intelligence" is winning a Fields Medal? Anything less than that is unimpressive? According to Wikipedia, that's 64 people total.

I *think* gweihir is sincere in his anti-AI and anti-LLM beliefs, but I do have a level of uncertainty as to whether or not he's just running a multi-year long trolling operation.

Star Trek has for decades portrayed "holonovels" as things that are kind of a mix of novels and video games. A human is behind the idea, the writing, the story, and many of the plot beats. The indivduals characters in the holodeck are AI, but they're also programmed to have certain personalities, goals, behaviors, etc. (See, e.g., Picard and his Dixon Hill holonovels, Tuvok's mutiny holonovel on Voyager, the holonovels that Bashir and O'Brien play through together on DS9, etc.)

People go into the holodeck to experience the holonovel. There are series of holonovels. We see some characters going through the same holonovel multiple times to learn the secrets and to see what else might happen.

Now, this is obviously fictional technology, but as a thought experiment, in this science fiction scenario, would you say that the author of a Holonovel is NOT the author because some of the the individual characters in the story are computer generated and have a degree of freedom within the story?

(I'm totally fine with Warhammer banning AI in their products. I also personally think one can use LLM and other AI tools without losing your humanity.)

If you're in the United States at least, the existence of neighborhood grocers, bakers, or butchers, is ... mixed. (Though I did note "neighbour" so I'm guessing you're not American?). Most grocery stores source goods primarily from the same places. Most restaurants source goods and even prepared foods from primarily the same places. Even if you're shopping at a Co-Op grocery store, some sort of boutique or other high-end grocer, they're all sourcing THEIR goods from the same places too, it's just different products! (I've been in independent grocery stories in probably a dozen different states that stock almost identical products and whose stores look almost identical.)

There's no longer much of a tradition of local bakers or butchers, though quite a few grocery stores have pretty decent butchers attached. I do most of my shopping at coop grocery store with a butcher (though I'm told "meat cutter" is the preferred term today) who I'm on a first name basis with, and I'm not going to say anything bad about it, other than the cost! They get fresh baked goods from a few local bakeries and another local coop grocer that also specializes in baked goods and other prepared foods.

What would I say about Costco? They have good price on gas. I will often buy 20+ lbs of flour, big bags of sugar, etc there. The butchers at Costco are quite good, they have a very good and wide meat selection, they will custom cut things for you, and they often have good sales. They also often have great prices on electronics, computers, video games and system, etc., and Costco is very well known for their very generous returns policy. I very rarely buy any prepared foods from grocery stores, but Costco does have a taco tray that's pretty tasty, affordable rotisserie chickens, etc. I'm fortunate to be able to cook large meals for my family most days, but if my circumstances were different, I'd feel pretty good about eating food from Costco.

I get feeling grumpy about Costco as a kind of icon of American mass consumerism, but compared to most of the other big box stores (Walmart, Target, Sam's Club, etc.) Costco is my personal favorite for quality.

Guy Gavriel Kay (who was hired at a very young age by Christopher Tolkien to complete The Silmarillion) frequently writes on the theme of memory. His most famous novel is probably Tigana, which is literally (avoiding spoilers) about the unreliable nature of memory. Kay wrote in an afterword:

Photographic manipulation, and propaganda, and the manipulation of people and their memories, has been going on for a long time! The difference now, as others have said, is the ubiquity, capacity, low technological barriers to entry, and realism.

That's really not true. There are many companies, such as Costco, that have tremendous stock returns and that also, by all accounts, treat their employees and customers very humanely and well.

MBAs = enshittification.

I encourage all kids and college students I speak with to start their own businesses. I've found more and more over the years that starting businesses (perhaps outside of food services) is just incredibly far from most people's minds. If you are a business owner you are going to have to put in a lot of sweat equity, you may not make much money for many years, and you may fail entirely. But, if you succeed, you get to control your own destiny in a way that many people, even highly paid people, cannot. You also get to make decisions like deliberately avoiding enshittification of your products and treating your customers and employees in a way that you feel is just.

This is VERY different between institutions and levels of institution and majors. I went to a top 20 national university. I had one adjunct professor in 4 years (an English PhD student who taught a small 10-person freshman seminar).

I never had a teacher who was hard to understand. My Calc 3 teacher was German, but that was it. Every single computer science professor I had was native American or 100% fluent and clear in English.

My freshman 101 comp sci class had maybe 60 people, and that was the largest class I ever took. Multiple undergrad professors held parties at their homes at the end of the semester for their students. 20+ years later I am still in regular contact with 3 or 4 professors.

My experience in graduate school was identical. My wife went to a small private liberals arts school and her experience was perhaps even more extreme than mine. She never even had a 60 person class!

This all came with a price tag that has gotten worse since then, of course..

My sister, on the other hand, went to a non-flagship public and her experience was wildly different. I'm not sure she really ever had personal interaction with a professor. It was very much what you said--learn from the textbooks, pass the exam, that's it.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/14/new-iphone-pocket-now-available-to-order-but-its-selling-out-fast/

"Many of the iPhone Pocket color and size combinations are already sold out, though."

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/hs8j2zm/a/iphone-pocket-by-issey-miyake-short-black

Since the article was posted, all variations are sold out online.

Not as bad a call as the original Slashdot take on the iPod, but just goes to show that Slashdotters are not an important demographic.

Oh, I don't disagree with that at all. My state is a bit of an outlier, in that our teachers ARE more lowly paid than national averages, but then my locality is one of the higher paying supplements to teacher pay.

Why do I say pay is a problem? I've seen what happens to many good teachers. They get burned out from having to deal with trouble maker kids who if they get disciplined or get bad grades the parents go ape shit with allegations of racism, sexism, abuse, whatever. They get burned out from dealing with helicopter parents. They get burned out from, in most parts of the country, being governed by elected shitty school boards. They get burned out because some miscreant has an IEP and a 504 plan and so his stealing from classmates and being constantly disrupted is considered a manifestation of his disability and everyone else just has to deal with it.

Good teachers have job flexibility. I've seen multiple _great_ teachers go to work for companies like IXL where their starting salaries are always higher than what they were making as seasoned teachers. Others go the administrator route and become principals, superintendents, etc. Others go to teach at private schools where the pay is often better.

What I would propose is basically 3 things:

1. Get rid of habitually low performing teachers--every year get rid of your worst teachers
2. Increase pay for high performing teachers
3. And the kicker that I have no idea how to do--allow schools and teachers to apply standards and discipline without fear of lawsuits.