IMO, people are making too big a deal out of the touchscreen functionality. It's not really a big reason someone would buy this new Macbook Pro. It's simply something Apple said they were finally able to add to a good OLED display without adding weight or thickness to the machine.

I had a Lenovo ThinkBook 14" laptop my workplace issued me that had a touchscreen display, and I basically just forgot it existed on it. That said? It was finally useful in one situation where I had it on a docking station with dual external displays. I configured our VoIP softphone to use the laptop's own display so I could tap to call people from the directory.

This is just the latest, greatest iteration of Maxbook Pro with the latest ARM processor in it and a number of small design improvements. (EG. It has an audio profile now for listening to music with the lid closed on it. That's a feature I'd actually use sometimes and wondered why none of my other laptops ever had it.)

Objects in Mirror Appear Smaller Than They Are (*)

(*) Astronomical telescope joke.

Only in the most utterly pedantic sense of the word "different" wherein you mean that by definition, infant mortality occurs early and wear occurs later. But they can both stem from the same root cause, which is a component not built with adequate tolerances. In other words, they can be the same fundamental issue, just expressing themselves at different times.

Most products don't have an MTBF. And things that do have MTBF are based on accelerated wear testing on a small number of units, and can have almost zero basis in reality. There was one model of major brand hard drive about twenty years back where a couple of RAIDs where I used to work got lost because the drives all died after such a predictable number of powered-on hours that by the time you could re-stripe the RAID, the next drive would die. They ended up making sure the drives had a high variance in powered-on hours before using them in RAIDs after that.

It's an example that proves or demonstrates a point. And the point it was proving was that the same root cause can be responsible for both catastrophic early product failures and premature deterioration-related failures.

Wear-out failures aren't always different from infant mortality failures, though. If the defect is caused by a design flaw in a component resulting in a structural weak point, that same weak point could fail after one use or a thousand, and it could just be a ticking time bomb. Someone could get very unlucky and find one that is slightly weaker, and it could break much sooner.

Case in point, I recall a machine where some people would have to have their laptops replaced every couple of months for motherboard failures, while others lasted for years, and it turned out to be dependent on how people closed their laptops at the end of the day and whether they pressed on the bottom of the case in a particular spot that wiggled the GPU. But if you handed one that had been working for five years to someone who used their left hand under the laptop while closing it, it would be dead in two or three months. If you replaced it with a brand new one, the brand new one would be dead in two or three months. And so on.

I would assume places felt unsure they'd really get their data back by paying the scammers who locked their files down in the first place.

There are plenty of stories about people who paid the ransoms and never got their data unlocked afterwards.

If someone came along, pretending to be the good guy who could break the lock for you or your business? Wouldn't you prefer to pay THEM, rather than rewarding the criminal who created the problem in the first place?

It's at least notable that the plastics industry documented the possibility that microplastics were accumulating in the human body. But with there being such limited knowledge on what harm they do, if any, just by being there? I don't see why this would have sounded any alarms back as far as 1974?

Comparing this to cigarette manufacturers is a little disingenuous, IMO. That's an industry that encountered mounting evidence that smoking was doing harm and even killing people, yet they doubled-down, paying off researchers to try to find as much contrary evidence as possible to deny it.

It seems pretty logical that ANY substance we're exposed to can enter the human body, and many of those substances could stick around in a microscopic scale. The more important question is whether or not it matters from a health perspective. We developed some of our plastics BECAUSE they were inert materials, deemed fairly safe to use in the medical field (surgical tubing and so forth). Maybe that was a big mistake, but most of the concerns I hear voiced right now amount to wild guesses. "Look at the increase in things like obesity, or cancer! Maybe it's the microplastics!" There are MANY other possible causes in play, so jumping to the conclusion microplastics are the next cigarettes is .... unreasonable.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

The market will kill it naturally

Yes there's a mechanism for that. It's called destroying a part of your life. Maybe you lose your job "naturally". Maybe you lose 10-20 years of your wealth growth "naturally". Maybe crime goes up in your neighborhood "naturally".

No. There's nothing "natural" about market repricing mechanisms, they are destructive, and many people get hurt. In the case of the AI bubble, those getting hurt are not the billionaires early investors, unless we actively resist it.

You're either with us or against us, like one of your compatriots used to say.

One of the things people keep overlooking with skilled trades is the physical labor required. I know quite a few people with an I.T. career they're in largely because they have physical issues or limitations (bad back, for example) and it's not realistic for them to just hop over to a skilled trade like a plumber, where they're going to have to crawl under cabinets or into crawlspaces under porches all day long.

If you're still young, absolutely. It's not a bad time to consider a skilled trade to make a good living and escape the AI threat. But for the middle aged and older folks? Not always realistic.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

AI slop is a completely different kind of slop from bad human programming. You can't mix up AI slop and bad human programming into one single category. That's an oversimplification which hinders intelligent discussion.

And it doesn't use MongoDB.

MongoDB is webscale.

Also an additional question: If AI writes most of your code today and god forbid if both Anthropic + OpenAI close shop tomorrow, who will write most of your code then?

That's right, my point is exactly that. Humans live in the human world where herd mentality is the law and your job as a child is to master enough social patterns so that you can thrive during your lifetime. That game is a lot more complex than trying to pass off an LLM text as a human text.

On your second paragraph, I would merely indicate to you that the high water mark is not the same as the low watermark, or the median or the mean. Pointing to a few instances of "excellent writing" is statistical noise if the bulk of normal LLM written instances does not also qualify as "excellent writing". But if most or all instances of LLM writing objectively constituted "excellent writing" then it would be very easy to spot, as it would stand out against human "average writing". Either way, the in-crowd can recognize the out-crowd.

Excellent! Luckily I have a life outside of slashdot :)