Whether it's profit or not depends on whether people buy anyway. I've decided "no upgrade this year".

Except time and willpower. However, the McDonald's analogy does hold up -- nobody is ever going to get rich flipping burgers at McDonald's, precisely because it requires so little skill to do that job, making McDonald's workers completely fungible. Since anyone can man a grill, no one is going to command a salary much more than what a high schooler will agree to do it for.

Iovine, the music executive and Dr. Dre's partner in Beats by Dre, [ ... ]

...Yeah, thought so.

Sony MDR-V6 forever, dudes...

The economic problem with having an AI produce music for you is, you never get the opportunity to learn how to produce it for yourself. At the end of the day, you're paying them $200/month for the privilege of remaining unskilled, and you're competing against everyone else who knows how to enter "write a catchy song for me" into a prompt box. You can't make money that way, because the moment you do, the AI companies (who own all of the talent and all of the production machinery) can simply appropriate your income stream for themselves.

It's the difference playing Guitar Hero and taking guitar lessons -- both let you feel like you're a competent musician, but only the latter will ever get you a career as a musician.

You left out informative, but otherwise I pretty much agree with you. The problem is that I expect MANY jobs are going to evaporate. Whether enough new jobs will appear (that are easy to cross-train into) is another question, and I really find it dubious.

We won't find out the answer this year, but we may find out next year.

You may think it sounds like gravitas, but to me is sounds like a desperate ad man.

The methods the summary implies that they use are quite unreliable on an individual basis, but probably pretty good on a population level. So talking about the increase in frequency is probably valid.

https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2025/0...

And DARPA has a whole program for it:

https://www.darpa.mil/research...

The summary implies a very bad wording of the measure. Any requirement that "no AI be used" fails, because you can't tell whether it happened or not.

"It is clear Flock has aspirations far beyond ALPRs to become a digital platform for policing," [emphasis mine]

They misspelled, "Orwellian suveillance and harrassment."

Law enforcement officers are already abusing Flock's existing capabilities for stalking. This will not improve matters one iota.

It's only local to China in the sense that they choose what {packages/CCP poison} go in there.

For all values of u, Linux is local to u in the sense that u chooses what packages go in there.

"Houses" probably predate homo sapiens. They my just have looked like lean-tos, but they did the same job, just not as well. And if you demand mortared foundations, they didn't show up until the very late stone age.

The thing is, when you're mobile rather than settled, a house is a very temporary asset. And they have defects as places that house lice, fleas, etc. So you usually prefer to keep moving. Agriculture is what probably caused what we think of as houses to be created, but the first "permanent" houses were probably organic developments of the pre-existing "temporary shelters".

P.S.: Look into the construction techniques used by Chimps and Orangutans. These are called "nests", but they aren't trivial constructions, and as they're in the trees, their requirements are different from ground based constructions.

Being pro-Iran is, indeed, as silly as being pro-Israel. There's not much moral justification for either. Once upon a time there was a bit of economic justification, but as governments have changed that has mainly evaporated.

Eh? This is incorrect. Perhaps most fictional murders are premeditated, because that makes for a more interesting mystery to solve, but in real life, the vast majority murders are impulsive, spontaneous acts that happen during arguments, fights, or emotional outbursts (often with the help of alcohol and/or readily available weapons).

If likes and boosts are overrated, then is there a way to find others' posts about a topic or to get more replies to my posts?