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.

Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

Well, your buying power would be crippled.

How about deporting him for lying on his citizenship application?

He entered the US on a student visa, didn't enrol or undertake studies (the purpose behind being on a student visa) and focused on his start up instead.

Clear violation of his visa terms. But because he's famous with money and has been perceived as an entrepreneur he's been able to avoid the same consequences as other people who have violated similar visa terms, i.e. citizenship stripped (as it was fraudulently obtained) and deported.

---

I have no dog in this race though as I'm not a US citizen, nor do I live in the US. In fact it's quite funny to see the US speed run an empire collapse. I just hope it happens without an all-out war outside US borders.

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...

If it's any consolation, my 3-digit UID and five bucks might buy me a cup of coffee. I didn't even get a lousy T-shirt.

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

enjoy your enjoyment of 'sound'.

as you get older (GOML) the sound of the sound matters so much less.

there were times that listening to a single speaker fm pocket 'transistor radio' was good enough to enjoy the songs.

have your fun with your rumble and explosions. as you get older, that shit becomes SO much less important, you wont believe how irrelevant all that hype really is.

I have not been to a theater in - 20 years? more? I cant remember.

its been unpleasant for decades. and with home theater, unless you're a teen trying to escape home and get 'privacy' somewhere else, theaters have long outlived their usefulness.

I think I stopped theaters around the time I cut the cable.

all around, what passes for entertainment is just plain rotten and/or boring.

you can keep it.

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

climate alarmism always has a home on Slashdot.

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.