While I agree that I don't understand how this is price fixing, I'm not sure your argument is valid. Standard Oil is a pretty well-known example of producers colluding to keep the price up, but they still kept it low enough that people found a ton of ways to make use of oil from transportation to heating to labor productivity. Using the "loss of demand" measurement we would probably have missed it.

I think the issue here isn't collusion per se, but rather that an information disparity exists and disadvantages tenants and is being perceived as "price fixing" because there really isn't any other mechanism currently to deal with the problem.

One alternative solution would be to level the playing field by finding some way to make tenants and landlords alike have access to the same level and quality of information. I would suggest perhaps all rents and rent offers should be published in a way that anyone can apply their own algorithm on either side of the negotiation.

Why have automated calls at all? Sports are social events where people got to see other people who have trained to peak human performance compete against each other at popular games.

I don't want to see perfect play by optimized automatons, I want to see the earnest best effort on the part of the participants and argue about different plays with my friends later. The players will make mistakes, and so will the officials. That should just be part of the game.

Yeah, needs a ton of oversight, etc, I have to read it carefully...

So I wanted to do a thing, and I could easily have made a working prototype of this thing in a couple of days, maybe a week tops. So I had claude do it and spent nearly an entire afternoon fixing things or making claude fix them because I understood the problem better.

But at the end of the day, I'd spent an afternoon doing something I would have expected to take a week.

Only if you don't live near a Staples, CVS, Walgreens, etc. You'll get even better results because (at least CVS but probably everyone) has dye sublimation printers, which are vastly better for photographs than color printers.

For other color prints, Color laser printers are not that expensive, but I haven't had much success. I'd recommend stick with B&W, and outsource color stuff to office supply / pharmacy type stores.

B&W laser is so vastly cheaper and lower maintenance, particularly in a sporadic use case, that it's not even a competition - Last time I bought a laser printer, the starter toner was good for 1500 pages at 5% coverage, and it worked fine even if I last printed something 8 months ago. Compare to a typical inkjet in which a full toner pack is good for 200 pages at 5% coverage, has to run ink through every so often to keep the tubes clear, and (for the last HP inkjet I owned) prints black text using all colors despite having a full black cartridge.

Caveat: if you are planning on printing addresses on envelopes to be mailed as a substantial use case, go with the inkjet. Toner fuses to the outside of the paper, so it can get stripped away by the sorting machines.

Any other purpose would certainly be suspicious.

But are they trying to sell the latest phones, by having it, or clear out their stock of older phones by not having it?

Read up on Kathryn Tewson's investigation of them. They're 100% a scam, they were never legitimate, they weren't even trying to use actual AI originally, and nothing they say is true. They've already been fined by the FTC for some of this.

This is like Slashdot running a piece on how a nigerian oil exec has twenty million dollars to donate to you. Absolutely unconscionable.

To sequester zinc and a small amount of copper in our nations landfills? Why not just.. leave it at the store where they gave them to you? Drop them in the take-a-penny tray[1])?

[1] The existence of a take-a-<thing> tray should be more than enough evidence that its time to retire that unit of currency, as it means people are willing to round up to not deal with the burden of carrying them around.

The last iPod before they started the iPhone had some form of all of the major features of the iPhone except the cellular radio, so one could argue that the iPhone continues the iPod lineage, including having less space than other devices at the same price point.

Every basic income pilot program does this, it's not surprising anymore. The first time it increased employment it was counter-intuitive, anyway, but ten or twenty experiments in, it's just not weird or surprising anymore.

this doesn't sound right, there's a bunch of benchmarks that i see in lots of announcements/model cards/whatever. some of the oldest ones aren't in use anymore because everyone aces them and they're boring, but a lot of these are sort of standard things that are the same benchmarks openai and meta used in their recent announcements?

there's a lot of standard "evals" that things are scored on, and the claim is that it performs better on a lot of those tests of functionality. that seems like a really easy and straightforward thing to find out, since it's right there in the article and in all the other news coverage about this.

This feature doesn't actually affect most people - it currently requires specific hardware - Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite - so it seems like you might have to go out of your way to get a machine infected with it. Those people aren't going to complain because they're buying the machines to get that as a feature.

I'm sure they will keep salami slicing until it covers everyone, but every step of the way it will only be a minority who are actually affected so there won't be enough outrage at once to get something done before apathy and "industry standard practice" kick in.

Your theory that there are "far more slackers" is interesting, but not supported by data. Your anecdote isn't really related.

You're right that in theory this could support outsourcing abroad, and having coworkers in quite a few time zones, I'm actually pretty hyped about this having good potential in the future. That said, time zones are sometimes important...

I'm a bit concerned that we are now using the term "ransomware" to include situations where data have been exfiltrated. It used to only mean that the data were encrypted in place, and the ransom was for the decryption key (which you still can't trust, btw. How do you know that the data weren't altered during the encryption or decryption process?).

A case where data are exfiltrated is more properly referred to as a breach.

Are we just being sloppy with language, or does calling it ransomware give companies cover to avoid penalties and responsibilities associated with breaches?

This might even create a market for the older hardware, if that's the only way you can prevent being upgraded....