Was anyone looking to build a data center in Seattle in the first place? Unless they were going to build something small, there's not enough space to build a new one and repurposing existing buildings for a data center might not be possible even if the rent weren't prohibitively expensive compared to building outside of the metro area. Even if a company like Microsoft wanted to build close to their campus, they'd be building a data center in Redmond instead of Seattle proper. There's still have a much easier time building outside of town because finding a few hundred acres that aren't already developed in a metro area is difficult as well as hideously expensive.

Forget the medical emergency stuff. Every pervert on the island can now helicopter their dick in full view of children knowing that there's no way that the kids will be able to record the crime and expose the exposers.

Some of those things are probably profitable if they can gut most of the staff and centralize the maintenance work while cashing the cheques from old people who signed up and keep paying. AOL has been coasting on that for decades already, so it's little wonder they and similar sites have wound up on the island of misfit internet companies. They're not making very much money for the valuation they're after though. The notion that the dozens of millions in profit will be able to turn into hundreds of millions or billions is a pipe dream. This IPO is the private investors trying to get out before the customer base dies off and the cheques stop clearing.

Maybe this is better than the Google approach of killing it off entirely even if it could eke out a meager existence, but it's a business that has no future. Dead or dying internet platforms don't come back. This company is just a hospice for websites and tech companies some people remember from years ago and haven't used in almost as long. There might be money to be made there, but it's not a billion dollar company.

He's probably using the term more loosely, but it is impossible. The human brain works in ways that no Turing Machine and therefore no algorithm can replicate. I think that it's possible to build something that can function that way using existing computer hardware that's really just simulating a human brain if such can't be directly implemented in hardware, but we're a long way off from being able to do that even if the current crop of LLMs have fooled a lot of people into believing they can already replace a human.

Assuming that he or anyone else does succeed, they'll have no better understanding of how what they made actually works than we do of how our own brain actually works. Whatever it is that's going on up there, it certainly isn't algorithmic in nature.

And give up on all the potential revenue they can suck out of these students through the student loans they receive just by being admitted. The universities will kick out the ones that are just there to party, but they'll gladly string along those who can just barely make it. Those are the students who fall into a sunk cost trap and will spend six years getting a degree so it's even better. The universities don't have to deal with the financial consequences and because they're all doing it to some degree it never causes serious reputational problems.

The universities will not fix the problem themselves because it would require the administration taking an axe to the university administration itself. If you look at the graphs the ratio between students and professors has remained stable over the last several decades as U.S. universities expanded, but the size of the administration has grown disproportionately and keeping it fed requires ever more revenue to support the ever expanding administration.

It's anything that will cause a strong enough emotional response to get you to turn your brain off for long enough that you click on a link, call a number, or something else to fall further into their claws. Amazon orders are common enough that the scam doesn't need to be tailored. I've seen others recently reporting to be from the city about unpaid parking tickets or from the state motor vehicles department. I used to get regular spam calls and texts about fraudulent activity on a credit card I didn't have from a bank I've never done business with. They don't need to be particularly good if the 1% that they successfully target fit the criteria and panic at the request for immediate action.

You presume that taxes are spent wisely. The reality is that more taxes simple mean more for bureaucrats to squander. Consider the state of California which spends increasingly more money on homelessness to poorer results. The bureaucrats don't make more by actually fixing anything and have no incentive to solve the problem they were tasked with and by taking the problem entirely under the wing of government they eliminate any chance of a competitive market forming or even charitable organizations from providing solutions.

You'd have an easier time convincing the wealthy to pay more taxes if the money were being spent well, but when it's not they'll leave. They have more mobility than anyone else and will leave when they realize that their higher tax dollars are only being pissed away. Of course the bureaucrats will not give up anything so you will get to pay those higher taxes yourself when the birder gets shifted to the middle class to make up the difference. Don't expect to get more for your higher taxes though.

No one is going to do that for free. Anyone who could pull it off is going to want to get paid and in time will become just as bad as Microsoft.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

If the technology advances enough (which it will do in time) there will be commercial products. They may not be as powerful as the commercial ones but that's no different than any other industry. I can buy a personal computer that's a lot less powerful than ones some companies are sticking in their data center racks, but it's good enough for what I need. I'm not rich enough to own a private jet, but I could still buy one even though it's not capable of hauling as many people as a 747. If I wanted a simple personal aircraft, that is something I could already afford and kit aircraft don't cost much more than a car. Once upon a time electricity and indoor plumbing weren't something that common folks could afford, but now they're ubiquitous in the western world. All technology goes through similar stages. If quantum computers are at all useful to people, someone will make a business out of supplying that demand. It may be fifty years or more away, but in time it will happen if there's a demand for it. Any bet I'd feel confident making is so far into the future that I wouldn't be alive to collect even if I won. Out of curiosity what kind of odds would you offer for commercially available quantum computing by the end of 2036?

Is this actually an issue? My iPhone is closing in on six years old and the battery is still good. The software reports it as having 81% of the original capacity, but I can't recall any time in recent memory where I've been running low and needing to limit use to conserve battery. Even though Apple offers security and software updates longer than anyone else, the device is more likely to reach EoL for some other reason long before it needs a new battery. If anything, having user replaceable RAM would make a bigger difference to me at this stage than getting a new battery, but no one is complaining about phone manufacturers forcing obsolescence by not letting users expand their device's memory.

I'm assuming that the device either costs more than alternatives or has worse specs in areas (camera, display, etc.) that leads to consumers eschewing it in favor of other devices. Even for an industrial device I'm hard pressed to identify the need for a replaceable battery. The device either needs to be able to last the work day or can be plugged into a shell to extend the battery life. The only reason I can see companies wanting it at all is so they can replace bad batteries after years of use since they may not care about updating the device more than once per decade.

My point wasn't that upgradable RAM is a good idea, but merely that if you want to mandate all phones have reliable batteries, why can't you do the same for RAM or any other arbitrary component? Having a user replaceable display would be far more useful to consumers as it's the most likely component to need replacement. If there's a market for it, someone will provide it (and this is still true even if the laws make it illegal) so if you or anyone else wants to mandate that something is mandatory there had better be a good explanation that isn't just a case of what's being proposed as mandatory being precisely your own personal preference for what you want in a product.

It still wouldn't work. Eliminating more jobs increases the supply of available labor making it less expensive to acquire. The only way that AI can actually replace humans is if it is more productive. If the machines and factories of the industrial revolution weren't capable of doing more work, people would have quit using them. There are limits to how long a hype train can keep running when it doesn't produce the advertised results. People are waking up to the fact that AI is not the silver bullet they may have thought or hoped it was. In a few years it will settle down and the industry will have moved on to the next snake oil solution to everyone's problems.

What were you expecting? Being any kind of waterproof requires a sealed device and replaceable parts directly conflict with that.

Replaceable batteries for smartphones is a non-issue as far as I'm concerned. It's easier than ever to charge phones almost anywhere and most batteries are good enough to last a day or more even with heavier use. Anyway be using it more heavily than that who isn't near a charger can get a case with a battery pack or carry a charge pack that's not much larger than a replacement battery and works with any device. The one exception to this is replacing a battery after several years of use, but outside of failures most phones' batteries will outlast the software support they get. The likelihood of every needing to replace a battery more than once in a smartphone is quite low.

I'll take having a smaller device with better water resistance over one where I can theoretically change the battery whenever I want. I suspect that most consumers feel exactly the same. For anyone unconvinced should the EU also mandate that the RAM in smartphones be user replaceable as well? I'd honestly be more likely to need that than I would a new battery. If people really want something enough they'll pay for it. There aren't many phones offering the capability because it's so far down on the list of concerns for consumers that even the people who will talk about the importance of having one will often by devices without the ability because they value the other features more.

It probably could over a long enough period of time. There would be small pockets with lower exposure where it could develop and move to the fringes where it would evolve to better survive the harsher environment. Spend enough time rolling enough dice and eventually the likelihood of even the seemingly most improbable events tends towards 1. It may not even take as long as one might think given anything more complex would need the genes to survive in that environment and the more simple organisms tend to roll the dice on the next generation far more quickly.

The original iPhone came out around 20 years ago and while it's heralded as the first smartphone there were earlier devices that could have been considered as such, but that's regardless. Mobile phones were becoming ubiquitous among high school teenagers before then and even if they were primitive compared to what's available now, they were still every bit as distracting. The technology isn't fully to blame as kids have been passing notes in class since paper became cheap and I'm sure they found ways to avoid paying attention long before that.

The education system has been chasing trends for longer than the idea that computers could help with it. I think that to some extent it has an impossible job as there's an extent to which any student can improve. At best teachers can engender a passion for those they teach to continue to improve their own understanding well after their education is over, but even that is asking a lot as there's are some who have little desire for expanding their mind.

My point is that the teacher's union doesn't really care to solve this problem. Like any union they exist for the benefit of their members who are teachers and not students. Expecting them to solve the problem is foolish at best.