I don't disagree in spirit, but not everyone is a middle-class geek. Per the 2024 US ACS, one in seven US households lacked access to a PC at home. And the "have-nots" here are disproportionately members of various under-served demographics (young, old, poor, uneducated, minority).

Here's where it gets crazy, though - Only one in three Gen-Z'ers have (not lack) home access to a PC - And they largely don't want one.

Assuming everyone can just do it from another device is chasing a trend that's already peaked and started to reverse.

I've been on google fi for... I dunno, probably at least a decade now? Maybe more. They just mail me a phone, I turn it on, and it figures everything out. I get a new phone ever 2 years or so. I couldn't tell you what the inside of a phone store looks like because I've never needed to go into one.

PG&E thanks you for your loyalty.

That said, I'm not seriously challenging your assertion - Rather, if we presume you're primarily correct, that's been the case absent financial motivation up until now. Pyros aren't in it for the money, they're in it for the show.

If nothing else, I'm sure investigators would love the short list of who bet on fire-X.

Let's ignore for now the obvious issue of how you solve a problem with an app that requires the very device you have a problem with.

How do they expect people to become new customers in the first place? The #1 reason I go to a cell provider's physical stores is to pick out a new phone, have it activated, and my current phone (if still functional) cloned to it. Are they seriously expecting 100% of new customers to be BYOD Verizon defectors?

I have to suspect this is the "anchoring" opening bid in trying to sneak through a far less obnoxious change, hoping we'll all thank them rather than reaching for the tar and feathers when they announce whatever real change they're aiming for.

This isn't about gambling in general, or even the risk of arsonists making good on their bets.

This is about not making the geriatric scientophobic morons in charge of the country look bad. Their go-to response is always that disasters are unpredictable and there's nothing to be done for it. Meanwhile, the actual experts can all predict wildfire patterns pretty well.

Tough for the degenerates in congress to keep feigning ignorance if the experts are allowed to start raking in $$$ calling their bluff.

No doubt it's the rounded corners on their standalone pocket-GPT appliance.

And given the explicit mention of Jony Ive, that's most likely in the right ballpark rather than purely a joke.

You're entirely right, but Fixed vs Variable costs are a well understood distinction that OpenAI's bean counters aren't merely glossing over here.

If your up-front investment is $1M, each unit of output sells for $2000, and costs $1900 in operational expenses - Your profit is $100 per unit. Once you sell 10000 units, you've broken even and every additional sale is $100 in pure profit. Presuming you expect to sell significantly more than 10000 units, the initial cost is literally irrelevant over the long term.

For a more physical-manufacturing analogy, consider a modern chip fab costing double-digit billions of dollars to build, just to sell fancy chunks of melted sand for a few hundred bucks each. Yet TSMC is one of the most profitable companies on the planet, with net margins slightly over 50%.

Not sure what you think is or isn't subject to being disproven here. "Security" isn't some monolithic "do X and call it a day", it's 100% situationally dependent.

If the situation requires radar, we use radar. If the situation requires strong passwords and MFA, we use strong passwords and MFA. And if the situation calls for giant concrete acoustic mirrors - Yes Virginia, that's why the UK coast is dotted with exactly those.

You're the second person confused by this detail, so let me make it clear: Browse anonymously, log in to post/comment, then log back out.

Isn't that how most of us use Slashdot? Reddit is no different.

For the same reason you can't just drop in at your former childhood home to dig up Sparky's corpse: Not yours anymore. It sucks what happened to Hawaii, but the opportunity for the people to say "yeah, not happening" and send a handful of American stuffed shirts on a long trip in a short canoe expired 130 years ago.

The idea that we're sacrificing basic science in the interest of not offending ghosts is utterly insane. Mauna Kea is uniquely suited to ground-based observatories; if we were talking about any other group, that land would simply be taken by eminent domain and there'd be nothing to discuss. Case in point, did you all know there's an eminent domain case going on right now in North Dakota where ranchers are fighting a pipeline going through their own land... Which in turn was seized from the Sioux? Guess which group isn't even at the table.

While performing mod duties, you're right.

Mods are still regular users of the site, though and not everyone wants /r/PonyLovers in their viewing history.

Reddit's problems have nothing to do with Google and everything to do with gross incompetence.

I've been a prolific Redditor for some 10-15 years. That ended overnight when they stopped allowing anonymous access to old.reddit.com. If I and a handful of fellow geeks were the only holdouts against their god-awful "new" experience, that wouldn't matter. Problem is, the vast majority of Reddit's mods are - were - in the same camp.

Accordingly, Reddit has effectively rolled over and surrendered to the bots, and now Spez wonders why their stock price is tanking? They have bots policing bots posting for bots learning from bots and arguing with bots. Far from improving the situation, AI has made the whole mess even harder for the rapidly dwindling pool of humans to deal with.

MMW, a year from now Reddit will be nothing more than playground for AIs. Whether or not it remains viable as a company largely depends on how long they can hide that information from investors and advertisers.

You appear to be violently agreeing with me.

Yes, those articles all say we need better managers. Why? Because the current crop largely suck at the actual task of managing, conflating oversight with line-of-sight. And some aren't even interested in managing in the first place, only in maintaining their micro-fiefdom to stroke their egos. What part of that disagrees with my stance?

If you're taking issue with my choice of quantifiers, yes, I'll readily admit good managers can absolutely make most jobs easier. Good managers are rare, and Covid gave us the receipts. None of that has anything to do with whether or not the work itself can be done remotely - If a car's steering wheel is broken, do we punish the tires?

Observing that some people aren't responsible enough to work without someone breathing down their neck is a wildly different claim than saying the work itself couldn't be done remotely.

Any task that doesn't require physically interaction with product or customer can be done from anywhere on the planet with internet access.

OB car analogy: Some people really shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a steering wheel but the rest of us drive 10-20k miles per year just fine.

The UK was using "listening ears" to detect incoming attacks before radar existed.

I don't think that's really needed in this case, however, because:
1) We do have radar now and human visual tricks don't really matter to it, and
2) Purely optical detection is still trivial for non-humans, this hits exactly one intended blind-spot tuned just for us.

This is a one-trick pony, albeit that trick is very cool if you happen to be a deaf human without access to a variable frame rate camera (e.g. any cheap modern phone), and the payload isn't subject to being centrifuged into oblivion. Most small mammals will still see it just fine; cameras running at a multiple of its rotation rate will see it as a stable if somewhat blurry image. And a high enough shutter speed (given enough light) would just plain show it as it is.

For spying on protestors in a noisy urban environment - This is perfect. Against any military targets with better tech than longbows and armored cavalry, not so much.