This comment for the win. It's important to remember that a hell of a lot of amazing advances were made in the 20th century when the population started out at about 1.75 billion in 1900 and ended at about 6 billion in 2000. I really doubt there's an advantage to having 8 billion instead of 6, or even 4 - it doesn't drive markets or innovation any faster, except that perhaps people are suffering *more* due to malnutrition and inability to access medical services; but those calamities don't appear to be driving innovation at all, so perhaps we'd be better off with a lot fewer suffering people and a healthier ecosphere?

Big difference: the $20K cost per student is paid by Apple; the students pay nothing and in fact receive hardware and a modest stipend. No ripping off of the gullible and foolish here.

I'd say the situation is more that the tools and frameworks are available, it's just that they are now platform-specific. One of the reasons the QuickTime file format was adopted for the MP4 container format is that QT was engineered to be cross-platform and endlessly flexible – it didn't include any platform-specific garbage like a lot of the formats coming out of Microsoft at the time. This continued for a long time as QT offered plugins and players for multiple platforms, but eventually Apple realized that maintaining a cross-platform framework as complex as QuickTime wasn't a winning strategy for the long term and didn't really serve their platform (see also OpenGL).

Since then, QuickTime has slowly been sidelined in OS X and replaced with a newer framework that is OS X-only. The new framework is more performant on modern hardware, naturally, but outside of supporting modern codecs, I'm not sure it actually improves or expands upon QuickTime's overall capabilities, and of course it omits support for the more esoteric interactive media types. QuickTime was very mature and largely solved the problem space it occupied.

It is a shame that there isn't today a single pipeline for interactive media where you can just define a view in your app or webpage that can present almost any kind of media, from audio to video to 3D models to interactive flythroughs. However, one could argue that we're better off having multiple options that breed innovation, and specificity is often better than generality.

You magnificent bastard.

What are you ranting about? AirDrop is on the Mac.

Whatever you're smoking, I want some.

Who, exactly, will win if the workers take on the 996 schedule?

Hint: it isn't the workers.

I've heard the squeals. In my experience, they can happen if the bottom of the pan isn't flat to the cooking surface. Sometimes, merely reorienting the pan or slightly adjusting the power level will make it stop. Once, a metal spoon was the problem and removing it was the trick.

However, also in my experience, the squealing is very, very rare. Perhaps you've just been unlucky in hearing it so often. ðY

Fortunately, the L-glucose isn't alive. The fear is someone will create a L-e. coli that will destroy all life on Earth.

Totally agree that this should be controllable by the user. Until Apple does so, try using a USB-A cable with that power bank - they don't support reverse charging.

Reading around, it seems to be an issue with some but not all power banks. Perhaps there is a chipset out there that has a quirk.

100% this. If you want to know how AI is going to be used by big companies, this is the prime example: to reduce headcount. Any claims to the contrary are either misinformed, delusional, premature, or outright lying.

Have you even read Asimov's works that incorporate the Three (or Four) Laws? He makes it clear in excruciating detail, over decades of writing, that no such simplistic framing of ethics could ever be applied to a system capable of human-style consciousness. He proposed the rules in the 1940s or early 50s and spent the next 40+ years disproving his own hypothesis.

Sure, it's science fiction and not reality, but the ideas transcend the medium.

Relax. These are specialized battery systems that are centrally managed by the power company. The system you built is completely under your control and cannot be hijacked.

Not quite. It's more that the airlines' business model is, oddly, no longer centered on actually providing travel: the loyalty partnerships they have with credit card companies are now more profitable than the airline operations.

Airlines have for many years operated on extremely slim margins. That's why you've seen reductions in service and lots of market consolidation. The thing is, people still want to fly in the United States because it's faster than anything else for long hauls, so there's a market, just not a very profitable one - until you tie in with a credit card loyalty system that incentivizes people to use these cards (which often carry membership fees). Then, the kickbacks from that partnership make the "airline" actually make money. Essentially the airline's ability to fly you becomes a perk of the credit card and can be safely operated at slim margins or a slight loss. Ticket still cost money, so they're not giving it away for free, but the combination of the ticket price and the kickback makes the business model stay in the black.

This seems to me to be a pretty odd situation for a major market, and one that isn't ultimately sustainable. Businesses suffer when their primary product or service isn't tightly coupled to their profitability, because they become too focussed on the side hustle and neglect what should be their primary focus.

Huh? They aren't accessing anything secret. Everything they are getting is publicly available to any human surfer. It's just that the content has been marked off-limits to crawlers and they are masquerading as human to get around the restriction.