I call bullshit. They're never going to slow down due to ethic's sake. Either they're running out of room to actually improve their models and looking for an excuse for a disappointing string of releases in the pipeline....or they're posting this and are still going to actively develop their models and hope their competitors let their guard down? Altman doesn't care about humanity. If he did, he'd be fired. There are no ethics in AI. If the frontier models got ethical, their Chinese competitors would surpass them...we DEFINITELY know Musk doesn't care about ethics of any sort, given his lack of concern on the child porn grok generates.

Your mind goes at roughly the same pace as your body. There's no biological reason for that, but it just so happens. My ability to adapt and learn has been compromised, despite my best efforts to avoid it. I acknowledge this and do what I can to be better than most, including most young people, but I still see it. I could pick up a brand new programming language in a few months when I was in my early 20s and now it takes me 4x as long, despite more experience...or just the difference in learning Spanish in high school vs now.

This parallels the changes in our body. Similar to being a lifelong learner, I've been staying in shape all my life. I'm in better shape than I was in college, but it was difficult to workout to failure back then. I could walk for 4h (and did often) and be a little sore and grumpy, despite being in pretty bad shape because I didn't have time to workout between student jobs and difficult courses. If I walk 4h today, I probably would have to take off work the next day. I can do more pullups than at any point in my life today because I've been working at it for so long....but recovery time is now measured in days, whereas in my early 20s, it was in hours. It's just biology, it happens to all of us.

So yeah, being old sucks. I'm not necessarily worse than someone younger, but I am worse than myself at a younger age in my ability to adapt to change. The best an old person can do is to defy nature and do what we can to be a better version of ourselves than when we were younger, but we're fighting biology and entropy. I am leaner now than in my 20s, but it takes 4x as much work. I am smarter than my 20s, but I have to work a lot harder and be more focused and disciplined to be so....

But most importantly, I remember all the old boomer greybeards when I started my career...telling me the internet was a fad, no one would ever do real business like banking online, Java is a joke and no one will use it, etc. EVERYONE knows someone like that. EVERYONE heard some old person say the iPhone was stupid. I'm now as old as many of those old guys when I started...I work very hard to not be that greybeard...but I am also aware that just because I don't understand something, doesn't mean it will be a flop.

Since posting this comment, I saw the reviews of the phone and was impressed with the IOS UX on it...but criticism still stands....it may be "cool," but novelty wears off and you're stuck with a laptop-priced phone with a visible crease and hinges that no longer line up that is a lot more likely to break on the next drop than the regular iPhone Pro, which I happen to love. It's tedious to put a phone twice as thick in and out of your pocket constantly. The hinges trap dirt and pocket lint. It's a viable phone...if it were 20% more expensive, it would likely have a huge following, but it's VERY expensive for some features that seem pretty gimmickey. It's a worse phone and a worse tablet in one. I'd rather have a nicer tablet and a nicer phone. It's like a cargo bike. I have a bike...a very nice on that's perfect for when I go biking. I have a car. It's perfectly suited for me carrying cargo. A cargo bike? It's a slow, heavy, and clumsy bike (even as an ebike) that's not fun to ride. It's a poor hauler of groceries or kids or anything I need to haul. It's worse than my car for hauling and worse than my bike for exercise and getting around quickly in the city. Similarly, the iPhone Duo will likely be a worse phone and a worse tablet for me and most others, but hey, I'd love to be wrong and this brings a lot of joy to well-heeled customers.

Foldable phones have been around for 7 years. I've seen precisely one in the wild. I know the guy personally who bought it. He got rid of it in 6 months because of some issue he had with it. According to Gemini, they represent 2% of the total sales, in 2026, globally.

I kinda figured Apple would make the iPhone duo their own and fairly unique, so I avoided the Samsung comparison. However, it's a very small marketshare and I am not confident the folks who bought them love them. There's always a sucker who will be something new and novel just to "give it a chance"...the "more dollars than sense" crowd. The guy I know is famously that way and chases lots of fads and has legendary levels of credit card debt.

Like many I've known, that one customer loves shiny things and doesn't think things through as well as he should. We all like nice things and spend money on stupid things. I am just honestly baffled at Apple's strategy with this.

I wish them luck. I don't like seeing them fail. I just can't picture this going better than the Vision Pro....which honestly, I thought had amazing potential (were it done a little better), which I definitely don't see in this. But then again, Apple has surprised me. I never thought any sane person would spend $550 for a pair of apple headphones...and a LOT of my coworkers own them.

I wager this is disco. I don't see the practical benefit. You're taking a well refined design and adding mechanical failure points and replacing a glass screen with a comparatively flimsy plastic one. Now you're making it cost more than a laptop and it has a weird form factor that won't fit nicely in your pocket. Your only benefit? You now have a $2000 unfolded phone that's almost as big as an ipad mini...just don't drop it!!!

But I'm getting old and grey. I remember everyone saying the similar shit to what I said just now about the iPad, the iPhone, the internet, etc. So is this a solution looking for a problem?...or am I just an old out-of-touch greybeard bitching how I don't understand the new world? (or both?)

They're going to have to do a LOT better than they did with the Vision Pro to create a market for this. I wouldn't use one of these if you gave it to me for free. My life isn't calm or simple. My phone gets dropped often and I have to rely on parent-grade thick cases and a screen protector...not to mention I'm constantly using it and putting it my pocket. Having a smooth design makes it robust and not collect lint or dirt. Having a hinge would do the opposite, I wager .

I wish there was, then I would have a lesson to learn from it. It was far out in the middle of nowhere....definitely a state I hope to never visit and few people live in anyway. Reading the responses here, plenty ACs are getting schadenfreude from the story "urban prius driver gets car ruined by shithole state road"...the road would have damaged most SUVs and trucks as well...unless you have one of those extreme ones. So it can definitely happen to them as well....but yeah, I guess shit happens....not sure if the state or Google is to blame, but vehicles should not have driven on it. Even if your car had the road clearance, there were lots of overgrowth and such that would have hit a larger car.

Almost 2 months ago, Google sent me on a Class 6 Road in another state. I'm not from that horrible state, so I didn't know what it meant. It means "eats priuses" or according to them " a public right-of-way that the state or municipality has not maintained or repaired for travel in five or more years" This road was not only closed, but had GIANT rocks that destroyed my car (at 10MPH). LOTS of them, embedded in a dirt road. It literally was totaled according to the insurance company and had to be replaced. Is this relevant to the post? NOPE....but I am angry about it and have no other recourse than the scream into the void. There was no warning. The only good part is my car was already 15 years old and I have the cash to replace it. I pick up my new car arrives later this week.

However, what keeps me up at night is that I don't know what I did wrong. How am I supposed to know a road isn't a road? Why would Google send me through there? How will I know next time?

Again, I'm screaming into the void, this is off topic. However, I really have no faith in Google Maps and am not sure Apple Maps would have been much better.

WTAF Dude? Have you been so burnt by the past that you can't see when the industry does something right for a change? Rust gives nearly indistinguishable performance from C with memory safety and nearly equal efficiency. Isn't that what greybeards have been clamoring for since Java arrived (PSA: Java is nearly as fast as C for long running processes, like servers, but a HOG for RAM)? While I am too new at it to find rust intuitive or pleasant (I still understand C more), you can't argue with the results.

Ruby was a massive failure because arrogant hipsters coupled a pretty good idea (rails) with a dogshit arrogant language that traded masturbatory elegance for performance and usefulness. You already know this, I wager.

Rust delivers. Now regarding nVidia? Well, I am not GPU driver dev, but I would wager that it's not going to be manipulating memory registers. However, the nVidia driver download is nearly 1 GIGABYTE. I am sure a LOT of that code is not manipulating memory, but high-level functions that could benefit from Rust.

Because it's nice to have a guest over and just watch something on a streaming service than some weird piracy menu...nor teach your kids to steal. Kewl...you hacked the system. I just worked a job and pay the monthly fee for Disney+ so my kids can enjoy the movies they want to see. I don't judge it if you want to...but why is it so unfathomable to you that I'd rather pay a small amount not to steal?

The fact that you think that's a flex says more about you than your realize. We've all heard it before, it's fucking tedious and shitty. You're worse than a vegan who won't shut up about being a vegan.

Not owning a TV is not a virtue. You're not superior to anyone who does. Also, if you couldn't find a single thing worth watching on Netflix...again...you're the issue. There's a fuckton of good Netflix content on there. If you can't find ANYTHING in Netflix's decades-long production run as well as all the content they license....well you either didn't look very hard or you're an insufferable hipster.

NO ONE has ever heard someone say "Ackchyually....I don't own a TV" and thought..."What a great guy!" "I bet he has something interesting to say". "Please, wholesale reject a MASSIVE form of entertainment that nearly everyone enjoys to some degree". That is why you're better than those of us who enjoy Netflix from time to time, good sir!

You can admit to failing in business and customers getting sick of your enshittification as well as facing economic headwinds due to interest rates, chip-prices, and tariffs and all your bad decisions in the past....or you can layoff folks and proudly claim you're super-good at AI and riding the AI wave of the future!

The tech industry had a record expansion, but hit a brick wall due to rising interest rates...which lucky for those fraudsters, happened a year or 2 after OpenAI had their first release. I remember Marc Benioff being one of the very first frauds to AI-wash, claiming he didn't need those workers because their AI was soooo good....yet he has no demo and doesn't want to earn a FORTUNE selling this magic AI that can replace so many jobs at an advanced big tech company like Salesforce????

They have a long history of claiming to lay off people due to advances in AI, but in reality, all evidence points to there being none. They simply didn't want to advertise their overhiring in the past and the economic headwinds they're facing...especially with the Trump administration, which has taken vindictiveness to a level never seen before. If a major company lays of 5% of their workforce and blames economic headwinds, most of which were DIRECTLY CAUSED BY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION'S TRADE WAR, then they risk getting on his radar...and no one wants that. Love Trump or hate him, if you're a CEO, it's very bad for business to be on his bad side. It's best to avoid confrontation and wait out until his term ends or all the cocaine and cheeseburgers finally catch up with him.

Life was a LOT better for the tech companies 4 years ago. Interest rates were super low. Globalization and free-trade hit their peak. The economy was in much better shape. Record number of people were falling in love all over again with their devices due to lockdown. The future was bright.

Today, the future is VERY uncertain. Admitting that makes you look weak...so they lie outright to investors....Oh...we didn't overhire...oh no, we're not being DESTROYED by the RAMpocalypse + Tariffs!!!!!....people aren't losing interest in our products due to our late-state enshittification. We're laying people off because we're so amazing at AI.

I use Claude daily. It's cool. It's fun to play with. I can do things with Claude I couldn't do before....but.....not a fucking thing I do with it is related to what I am paid for. For my actual job?...IT SUCKS ASS!!!! I've used it daily for 2 years, by employer mandate. I can say the code it generates compiles successfully more often. Now I get compilation failures weekly instead of daily. But the code it generates is wrong, daily....objectively wrong...meaning it understood my intent and made an objective error. I never count it when it fails due to me giving vague requirements. In the end, it takes Claude longer to do my job than it would have taken me to do it myself...literally....even if it got it right the first time!...it churns for 15 minutes doing a task I can do in like 30 seconds to a few minutes. Adding in the frequent error correction, it does my job much worse than I do. It's good at letting me do other people's jobs...but in there are caveats:

1. I am paid to do my job, not other people's jobs.
2. For other people's jobs, I don't know enough to know if it did the job correctly or not. For example, I don't know how to write a React UI....so having claude make me one...well, I can tell you if it loaded without error, but I beyond that, I don't know if it did an adequate job, good job, or shit job.
3. If you force me to learn how to write a UI in React, I'd get better with time and become a more valuable asset to my employer. By throwing it to an AI, well, I am not learning much.

So is AI helping my team? We don't know. I can't say no for sure, but I am pretty confident it's not helping much. My boss doesn't know either...nor does his boss. We know we want to be super proficient in leveraging AI. But our velocity has gone down, not up...which again, we are not even sure if it went down to AI or just this year's requirements & workload are more complex than last year's. Story points are a very crude estimate...but if Claude was as magical as they say it is...we'd know...the story point boost would be high enough it wouldn't matter if we did a great job at consistently estimating.

People who are heavy pot users? Their brain is FUCKED up. I went to college with many sharp kids who started being cool and intelligent...then got REALLY into weed...and within 4 years?...that amazing kid you met was completely gone, replaced with a zombie version of themselves you can't even hold a conversation with. Yeah, people change and shit, but I don't know anyone who makes marijuana a part of their identity who can keep an intelligent conversation. In fact the more I hear someone talking about weed (It's legal here), the more they say STUPID shit...and I know elite Ivy League educated people who are now total DUMBASSES because they smoke way too much weed. I am sure many can smoke it on occasion or drop an edible and be fine...but most who smoke a few times a day?...well, I've never met a smart, functional one. I am sure one must exist somewhere, but I know of none nor know anyone who has met one. Ever see Tommy Chong interviewed? The dude is BROKEN. Cheech still has it, but Chong talks more like a former heavyweight boxer who kept boxing LONG after he should have stopped.

NO, NO, NO, NO...alcohol is just the default drug. Nearly everyone has been exposed to it. Until recently, mostly cool kids were exposed to weed, by a cooler friend....the rest of us?...we had our first sip of beer from our dads or something like that. Recreational Drugs are not good or bad. I have many addicts in my family and have known many in life. It's NEVER the booze that made them an alcoholic. It's an underlying disorder: depression, impulse-control, autism, learning disabilities, OCD, etc. It's sadly not common knowledge, but simply denying the addict the drug won't make them much better. You need to treat whatever caused them to drink in the first place. These addicts? They get sober...then they repeat the same behavior in a healthier way: Mel Gibson famously went from drugs and booze to Jesus and bigotry and it's safe to say he took both too far. The addicts I know well? Some go to religion...one went to sex addiction...one went nuts on self-help....one went nuts on fitness...one went to weed....I know one who got addicted to video games...he's been fired more times than I can count. It's not the video games or the drugs....he had issues...compulsions, etc. People stop their addictions once they address what caused them to use. Most just redirect from illegal ones to better ones. I met someone who literally was institutionalized for heroin addiction multiple times. Now she's obsessed with working out and masturbating....still unemployed and living with her mom in her mid-40s. She won't leave her house, look for a job, etc. Every addict I know is similar in many ways.

I know some who have stopped their addictions, but it always takes WAAAAY to fucking long and they hurt too many people first. They address the underlying issues with therapy, resolving their family relationships, finding new careers, etc....they're still not fully functioning adults, but they're functional enough to get by with only a little help from family.

However, every horrible alcoholic you've met? They'd by pretty similar under any drug. If weed was the only option, they'd be just as destructive...maybe less fistfights?...but otherwise....just as fucked up. Lots of families have been destroyed by weed abusers...it's not the drug, it's the person. I agree that alcohol would be banned if it were discovered today, but mostly because it's ABSOLUTE poison. There's no safe dose. All doses wreck your body. Most drugs, like opiates, are fine at the right dose, administered expertly. Alcohol has no therapeutic value. It just poisons you and gets you buzzed/drunk. I don't honestly judge drinkers. I used to drink regularly myself. I just felt like shit after doing so and now realize precisely why. I wasn't doing it wrong...it's just bad for you, even in the modest amounts I was drinking in my 20s. If people enjoy the feeling and don't care that they're poisoning their body?...who am I to judge?...I do plenty of stupid things myself....I just am not timid about calling people out on their bullshit when they try to justify their drinking.

However, every shitty alcoholic?...they'd be just as shitty or nearly so if they were abusing weed instead.

We definitely got better at detecting and treating cancers. So yeah, before you just died of cancer and no one noticed...figured it was something else related to alcoholism. Also, since we're better at treating everything, 50 years ago, if you loved drinking and smoking and didn't manage stress, you'd drop dead before you hit 60. Now?...with the statins and ace inhibitors and various pills and many treatments, you survive or avoid your first heart attack and advance to the next levels in life. I don't think something is causing more cancer, I think it's just that easier to prevent causes of death are being sharply reduced, especially among the working class.

The drinking has gone down, generally. I think people are dying less from smoking and heart disease and automobile accidents. That's also my theory as to why obesity rates increased so much. We got a lot better at helping people manage or treat heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, many cancers, etc. Back in the day, if you loved food, booze, drugs, and hated exercise, you Chris Farley or John Belushi-ed yourself off the planet. When I was a kid, it was not rare for 50 year olds who loved to smoke and drink "drop dead" of heart attacks. I don't think I ever saw a fat man over 60 until I was a teenager or maybe college.

So my theory is not only do they survive longer, but also the drugs make living less miserable. You can be active and out and about instead of a shut-in thanks to modern medicine. Before these drugs, if you didn't die, you'd just feel like such shit, you'd either go off to die or be forced to make a change so you can interact with your grandkids.

China exports to the entire globe. They don't have a navy strong enough to protect those freighters leaving their ports. If the US continues it's path of withdrawing from patrolling the oceans, do you think China can ensure their vessels don't get seized by pirates or hostile nations? Look at what's going on with the Strait of Hormuz today. Remember, they're more dependent on that strait than we are. We're an oil exporter today. China NEEDS us. We NEED China. The same is really true of the whole world. They need the goodwill of the entire world to maintain their current lifestyle and admirable growth.

Also, the US exports a lot to China. We don't sell toys or consumer devices, but we sell industrial agricultural and industrial equipment. I'm told American beef and pork is highly regarded there. In fact, I read from many sources that's why our costs went up so much about 10 years ago...because the Chinese market was buying our beef and pork....although I've found the reporting inconsistent, FWIW.

However, bottom-line, invading Taiwan is VERY illogical. Pissing off anyone is illogical for the Chinese. They're making a killing being in the world's good graces.