Which is an unfair comparison as people in developing countries often devise new uses for junk we throw away, that coke bottle can be turned into a water purifier. Devices made from discarded PET plastics are being used to create clean drinking in Africa.

AI execs on the other hand couldn't tell what's useful from their sisters left tit. Hence they're trying to sell the tit.

People just don't think of their own security. My mum is in hospital a lot these days so I've been running errands, this means paying bills as most of them are not set up to be done online so I now know her PIN because one of those bills was take $100 out of card A and put it on card B. She didn't even think twice about giving me the PIN (and it's a stupidly obvious number that gets given out a lot).

Fair enough that it's my mum... but people just don't think of security at all. In fact most complain about it. I've had to stop my sister from telling me her PIN in a crowded shopping centre before.

Just look at how many people donate to Trump whilst he screws them over.

We may end up having a shortage of many things, fuel, food, housing... but one thing we'll never run short on are morons. PT Barnum was quite the optimist to think there was only 1 sucker born every minute.

What disclaimer? The one locked in the bottom of a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door that reads "Beware of the Zeptosaurus"?

Build what, exactly??

What they promised??

Cure cancer. Solve world hunger. Fix climate change. Etc.

They can't even be profitable, whereas my niece can make money from selling lemonade on a hot Saturday.

AI execs are a waste of space.

You will not replace us!!!

But with a little stretching of English grammar, we might replace us.

Nonononono. Build prosperity. Build progress. Build civilization. Build job... Uh, timeout on that one.

Please don't look too closely or ask what any of it means in practice, because we can't have you standing in the way of prosperity and progress.

There is no alternative now, and there won't be an alternative for years.

Globalstar is far too low bandwidth for Ukraine's needs. Amazon doesn't have the ambition or nerve to risk building anything that approaches Starlink in the kind of time frame that is relevant to the Ukraine conflict, and they don't have the vertically integrated launch platform with the airline-like capacity and reliability of SpaceX to make such ambitions affordable, and they don't have the ambition or nerve to build that either.

Love him or hate him, for better or worse, Musk has the ambition and nerve to do these things. That fact is everything: the essential, exclusive ingredient. And Bezos et al. don't have it. You may wish they did, and regret they do not, but don't kid yourself.

The valuation is what mystifies me. Maybe, before Starlink, a constellation of 25 communication satellites was worth a few billion. Maybe $10 billion with IP, lucrative contracts and whatever spectrum they hold. After Starlink?

No. Just no.

Globalstar equity holders have played this one well.

No thanks on the light-up Apple logo for me. I think it started with the Powerbook G3 (I had one, it was a great computer) and it was sort of obnoxious even then. I'm not paid to be a light-up billboard everywhere I go.

No thanks on the laptop touchscreen, either. I understand it on something like a Surface tablet -- almost -- but most of the time I used my Surface with a keyboard, like a regular laptop, and never touched the screen. I think ramming touchscreens down everybody's throats was just a gimmick Microsoft came up with, both to A.) convince everybody that Windows 8 worked equally well on laptops and tablets (it sure did); and B.) once again, everybody needed to go out and buy a new laptop, even though their current one worked and served their needs just fine.

Well the answer is of course they are out of touch and I don't actually have a 'right question', I just wanted to fit in.

It's supposed to be a benefit: better competitors that aren't governed by shiny-object leadership are supposed to take advantage and punish such clowns. That's the real cost of centralization, IP law and regulatory balkanization: the clowns rely on these to insulate themselves from the wolves that would otherwise end them.

Makes me think of the "bad faith" trope we see with some frequency from certain folks.

Recently some blowhard Reddit mod(s) went ham on AI in open source, and essentially outlawed discussion of any open source projects that are not purely organic from their little Reddit sandbox. When it was pointed out that this is pretty unworkable since significant open source projects, including Linux, Mesa and others are allowing AI generated code, they backed up. And that's all fine I suppose, except they characterized the response to their stupidity as deliberate "bad faith" misunderstanding of their original announcement. It wasn't that at all; it was exactly what you should expect when get all chesty with the world and can't handle the blowback, but they've adopted the cop-out of calling these self-inflicted episodes as some sort of "bad faith."

I see this often enough now that anytime I see someone claiming "bad faith" I assume I'm dealing with another nasty little shit-bird trying to cry-bully their way.

No, it's just the sort of thing that the UEFI design kind of does.

You load a bunch of stuff that all initializes, just in case it might be needed. One of the key optimizations in some UEFI implementations is trimming down the things that get loaded based on an early assessment of whether this or that would be relevant to the expected boot. For example, hit key to enter setup and suddenly it has to load all the things to make sure all the various menus work.

Kind of like setting up the NIC in the OS before anything asks for network access, so that every network access isn't burdened with having to set up the network access. If the driver is already loaded then a variety of potential UEFI network code could just use it (PXE, HTTP, iSCSI, various crap from vendors like pre-OS firmware download)

We will see, but *so far* Ford has not been as aggressive about that sort of thing as BMW or Chevy. The BlueCruise requires actively curated lidar maps, so at least they have a rationale for that being an ongoing subscription. The other subscriptions are similar, updating GPS maps (who needs those with phone) and data connectivity (but if you have a phone, you don't need it). So far they haven't charged for remote vehicle services which arguably could be charged for the SIM service and/or server infrastructure they have.