It's not that the US government is bad at it. Privatization is inherently bad. For profit companies by definition care about profits. Those who run them, in addition, care for short term profits. So give them an infrastructure that cost billions to build and tell them to manage it, do you think they are going to put serious effort on maintaining it or going to lengths to serve the least profitable customers (that have already paid their share towards building the infastructure). The worst example where I currently live (UK) is water companies who have figured out it is cheaper to pay the penalties for dumping raw sewage into rivers and seas rather than maintain and expand the infrastructure that prevented this. Of course governments make it even worse as politicians get kickbacks. There is no other explanation I can think of for the privatization of ONLY profitable airports in Greece. The ones that make money they sell to (usually German) companies "for stimulating the economy and attracting investment", the ones that are not making money are bankrolled by the taxpayer. I would understand the "attracting investment" part if they at least bundled some unprofitable ones to the 14 they gave to Fraport on the first round for example...

I am not sure they are destroying functional devices though. You just can't buy new books from Amazon directly. Calibre will work as always, you can copy over any books from any other source as you wish...

First of all, I can get garbage from Gemini just fine (although it is a very useful tool if you are aware of the limitations). I've never used copilot, but I am pretty sure it is not deterministic. AFAIK all such models are probabilistic, and since they use randomness for generation, you can also call them stochastic, but definitely not deterministic. I don't know if I am missing something about copilot in particular, so correct me if I am wrong, but it does sound like a garbage post ;)

I develop apps on the side as a hobby. Apple takes 15% if your annual income is under 1 million. They also provide a lot of infrastructure and good development tools. I would say it's a bargain.

I remember my company developing BREW apps (Verizon's Get It Now), which was basically the only way to make apps for the majority of US phone users. I have forgotten the cut Verizon took, it was over 30% IIRC, but what's worse you could not just publish an app, it had to be "selected". For it to be eligible for selection, you needed to support the majority of their devices (you needed about 40 phones). To "support" a phone you needed to submit extensive documentation (we had to write programs to generate them) and pay $1000 PER DEVICE. So you made a $40k payment FOR A CHANCE to be in the app store, where Verizon would take a 40% cut or something. And programming for BREW was horrible too.

I am sorry, I was never an Apple fan, especially in the pre-Apple Silicon days, but the App Store is like a utopia for developers compared to the past...

I mean it may be a valid explanation of why they take longer. The fact that their checks are useless is a separate issue...

I find it amusing that you categorise "waste and abuse" separate to military spending ;)

It is not a problem of theoretical physics though, which is what I was replying to. It is a matter of engineering, technology and some applied physics. As I was saying , it needs lots of resources thrown to it. And, yes, using the Sun more in the meantime is not a bad thing, but it's not nearly as transformative.

What are you talking about, we are not even maxing out newtonian physics by spending all money on wars instead of exploring the solar system and you are asking for theoretical physics? There won't be a theory that will discover "magic" so we can make things appear without spending resources developing them. We don't even spend significant money to develop viable fusion which is a surefire way to solve most of our energy problems, again that's physics well established for decades.

No tracking, just answer a question that prove your age!
Who recorded "Tiptoe Through the Tulips"?
"What would a physician do if he were on an island with Bo Derek"
"Who was Sergent Pepper"

I only go on 1.43:1 giant IMAX presentations. I am fortunate to have one near me (Manchester UK) that can play both 70mm and the full 1.43:1 format with their dual laser on a huge screen. Other cinemas (including all but very select IMAX) - except maybe 4DX - don't offer a better experience than home IMHO...

Is this "Adam Back" alive? Yes? Well, he is not satoshi then.

Ok, I don't mind Jobs being considered more influencial than the Woz - Apple would not be a success without either of those two, so even if I personally appreciate tech more than marketing, Jobs alone saved Apple in the 90s so that's fair. But Tim Cook higher than the Woz when any semi-competent CEO could have done about the same at the point he was put in charge?

When prices of electricity first went up a few years ago, I calculated my 2010 was using £50 per month. Replaced it with an M1 Mac mini at £5/month. Sad to turn off that beast but it's so expensive to run (and so very slow compared to Apple Silicon). It was all maxed out, including USB 3, eSATa expansions.

Interesting, this does not seem to be the standard server CPU with Intel calling them "efficiency" cores. I wonder if they feel they have fallen behind the performance game to AMD and trying shift to "efficiency". Their Sapphire Rapids was disappointing, the next one Emerald Rapids was also not great (ok performance if you did not use all cores, which did not make a good solution for cloud providers), but Granite Rapids seemed to be a meaningful improvement - just AMD's Turin came out and was so much faster (I published a comparison of 44 VM families over 7 cloud providers recently and it's pretty consistent).