That really isn't true as certain airlines (Singapore, QANTAS, Emirates, Qatar, et al.) are still flying them as they fill a niche that no other airliner in production can. They're very good at transporting large numbers of people from hub to hub over long distances, London to Singapore for example. Singapore airlines runs 6 flights a day between LHR and SIN (and another two out of LGW) and half of those are A380s, the A350s they fly to and from Gatwick have half the capacity of the A380, the A350 in the long haul configuration holds 253 pax, the A380 holds 471, 343 in Economy alone... And I'm using Singapore as an example because they're the most spacious of the carriers, Qatar operates A380s with 460 economy class seats (and another 46 in higher classes).

This is not to mention the flagship suite products this airliner hosts.

The B747 is dead, the 8i never took off and it looks like the next generation 777 is dead in the water too. So airlines running the A380 are interested in keeping it running.

I took "sophisticated" to mean "needlessly complex" and it's deliberately kept so to keep out competition. Such complexity is also why it's primitive in comparison to all other developed economies and many developing ones.

Also, isn't "facilitating interstate trade" the purview of the US federal government? If so, they seem completely unwilling to do anything.

Complexity is the problem with the US banking system, it's being deliberately kept that way to keep outsiders out. There aren't any US based challenger banks and the big bois have been killing off the old local banks and building societies.

The US government isn't powerless, but gormless to stop it and do what other countries have done and create a seamless system for interbank transfers. They're quite happy to turn a blind eye to it to keep the donations from the big banks coming through.

I can send money between Australia and the UK or even to someone with no bank account in Colombia easier than Americans can send money to each other.

These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.

It has been my experience, sad to say, that online stores aren't above selling consumer credit card information either, and I've grounds to think Amazon is one that does this.

I have an industrial air conditioner for my home. (It's a small home, but summers are increasingly severe.)

I don't recall being asked a damn thing.

My suspicion is that this is scaremongering.

Well I can tell you're not in the GTA where it's been in the 20s for a while, and last year most of the summer felt like one big heat wave, where it was technically 6 back-to-back.

It's not even a good joke, it's a Gutfeld-grade groaner.

Pretty sure this was hand crafted algorithm if it happened in 2011.

It's more of a lesson in the difficulty of communicating business logic when creating a project (which will obviously impact AI, but can cause problems for people too).

I have been stress-testing AIs with increasingly complex projects for some time. The Chinese AIs struggle, but actually do a FAR better job of handling massively complex tasks than Grok, and Gemini just rolls over and whimpers at anything above a very low level of complexity.

What I've found is that the Chinese AIs tend to be sycophant but do "understand" complex projects properly in that you can ask specific technical questions and the answers will be generally very accurate. Any sort of critical analysis is beyond them, though. (Ether that, or I'm a mega-genius. Which....doesn't sound terribly likely.)

Of the "Top AIs", ChatGPT is good on basics but is incapable of any kind of detailed generation. Claude is brilliant at detailed generation, but overloads with anything but a tiny data set.

I've been putting up the projects on Gitlab for a while, so anyone who wants to see an AI break down and cry in despair is able to do so.

The secret tools don't bother me - they'll have long understood how to use Big Data and Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. AI isn't going to find out any more than combinations of those tools will, because that's basically all AI is - a Big Data classification system.

So you're telling Claude something vague and washy, then Claude invents a prompt that might vaguely possibly be somehow related to what you want along with a drink that is almost but not entirely quite unlike tea. Claude then recurses through this until it has a Celtic knot so intricate that it has its own Hausdorff dimension. What burps out is a product that is completely useless and patented to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

They won't be OceanGate-grade. They used PRCF that had already been rejected by quality control. That's a non-starter in aircraft.

As production has ended, if the A380 is genuinely necessary, then the economics shift somewhat. That doesn't mean they CAN be replaced, from the sounds of it they can't* (at least in many cases), but the inability to replace the aircraft would mean that options that aren't rational become necessary.

*I have to be careful here. If the wing is designed to be the absolute minimum weight possible, then I don't see how they could be without fully disassembling the entire wing and then reconstructing it from the ground up. And adhesives/welding might mean that just can't be done. At all. On the other hand, there's no obvious reason why you couldn't design a wing to have far more structural support than actually needed AND make spars deliberately maintainable and replaceable. I don't have an A380 handbook in front of me, so can't say how Airbus approached this. But it seems improbable that they're built to be swapped.

Conversely, if a Mac costs you 1 hour per week because it doesn't do something you need it to it costs $5200 in productivity and the cost of the Mac.

And it does cost in productivity as one of my illustrious duties has been to maintain a Windows Server RDS farm solely for Mac users to be able to log on and use the same applications as everyone else in the business. So not only was it lost productivity, it also cost my time (which is worth more than theirs, I get billed at £180 per hour) and a Windows RDS license. All this because the special little sales people didn't want to use a Dell like everyone else.

Apple, the product that keeps on costing.