It's strange that they don't separate investment in AI vs operating expenses in the rest of the company to keep and expand the markets they have. It's not like they're financially unable to do both - both AI and keeping the resources they need for operations(*). That said, buybacks are better for some than dividends because you pay taxes immediately on dividends while if the same money goes via buybacks you don't have to pay taxes before you realize the profits by selling the stock. Of course, if like most people you have mutual funds it doesn't matter.

(*) Which means more of a constant optimization up or down in the actual units, rather than large cuts everywhere.

Well, then it should be easy - if it no longer works and it's covered by a three year warranty they'll have to fix it somehow, Or, failing that, they will probably think a refund is easier,

Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

You shouldn't buy that. Not only is it worse by almost every spec (cpu speed, graphics, memory, cameras, battery lifetime, external display support, wifi standard), but it will also have approximately 3-4 years less of updates from today. Per year, it will probably be more expensive than the cheapest M4 air.

Price discrimination is a common strategy. Not only between countries, but also between different customer segments. "Student discounts" and "senior discounts" are other examples.

The tactic is especially useful for products where you have a large fixed cost and a lower marginal cost - e.g. software. Take one example, Matlab. The normal cost of a software seems to be above $2000. Obviously, the marginal cost is close to zero but they have large fixed costs - so if you can sell it to home users for a much lower cost, you're still getting more money total even if that price if applied to business customers would bankrupt the company.

So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine.

If she's accurately executing the programmers' script, I'd say she is a machine. Somebody port Doom to her!

This is a fuckin' awesome idea, but there's an easy improvement over the red rectangle and block symbol. Seriously, dude, you gotta use the sign images from They Live (1988). You know you want to.

If people don't have a government-granted monopoly on their features, they'll have no incentive to have any features at all.

We never needed "AI" or LLMs to think we're nothing more than machines.

Last I heard, Apple sales haven't plummeted and thrown them into bankruptcy, so it sounds like they learned the lesson just fine: it's fine to show people ads. People might complain a little bit, but they won't stop buying. Cost is $0 and ad revenue is presumably more than $0.

If someone is stuck with your proprietary software and you aren't showing them ads, then you're leaving money on the table. What're they gonna do, fork it out?

Yeah, I'm hung up on that too. You can come up with some outrageously huge numbers for mass and angular velocity, but once I multiply them by zero distance... I'm missing something.

the outer edge of the mass exceeding the speed of light

That intuitively makes sense, but I thought part of the black hole cheat is that it doesn't have an edge. I thought they were literally singularities, with a circumference of zero. Apparently not the case?

How a thing with a circumference of zero could meaningfully "rotate" is beyond me, but I thought this (and many other suspected properties of rotating black holes) was supposed to be beyond my ignorant layman understanding!

An adversary can coerce a proprietary software producer to compromise the code. That's what we're going to see here.

An adversary cannot time-travel to when a protocol was invented, and compromise the protocol. (Though I guess the NSA can come kind of close to that, by "helping" as it's being developed, w/out the time-travel part.) That's what we're not going to see here.

Ergo, proprietary apps will remain unable to provide secure messaging, but secure messaging will remain available to people who want it.

AFAIK Peacemaker S02 comes out in August. Of this year!!

Ah, correction fluid. Nice flashback. It also reminded me of an old joke: "Q: How do you know a Swede has been using the computer? A: There's correction fluid on the display."