Lots of pattern recognition, from quality control to medical diagnosis. Granted that is mostly “machine learning” not large language models, so “so last decade”, but extremely effective.

Basically any problem domain where we can recognize a good solution (and it is unambiguously different from bad solutions), but don’t know any step by step process to get to one have had success stories. Him, no there is more to it then that, it seems like we have spent far far longer not getting to trustable self driving cars then my rule of thumb says. We have made significant progress towards it though, it’s just that “mostly doesn’t drive the car into a lake” isn't a great result...so maybe “& has only a modest failure cost, OR humans don’t do it all that great anyway” is a useful addition.

High by almost a third, Apple’s cheapest laptop is a $650 model of the M1 MacBook Air sold only via Walmart.

CA may have made non-competes illegal, but those are the “you can’t work for our competitors after you leave us” non-competes. It is generally considered valid to prevent someone from working for a competitor while they are actually working for you. Like Apple and Google both say you can’t work for a competitor while employed by them. Both consider each other to be operating in the same markets and thus competitors.

The claim Google/Apple would make isn’t that you can’t work 2 places at once, or even that you can’t in general work for Google and Apple at the same time, but that the employee made an agreement that they would not work for a competitor and lied about doing so. An otherwise legal act which is fraud because you agreed not to do so, claimed not to be doing so, and then did so anyway. So they would certionally have to worry about sabotage, and/or theft of work product. -- Ironically you might be able to wriggle partway out of it by claiming you “weren’t really working, just slacking for both of them at once!”, except neither judge nor jury would really find that acceptable...

an area of the system which you can't look at or audit?

You can probbably look at and audit the PCFax area with some sort of enterprise tool, you just can’t write it. Or maybe they will even allow you to erase it and leave behind a “the PCFax report was deleted, so anything could be wrong with this computer! Odometer tampered with! Tampered!!!”

It is not in HP's interest to instigate more trust into a used computer purchase. This serves to help the used computer market, at the expense of the new computer market.

Maybe.

One reason Apple can charge more money then other companies for new iPhones is people believe they can sell a year or two old iPhone for a reasonable amount of money. HP may believe their products will retain more value over time in the used market then competitors even if the sole reason is because “PCFax says it is good” for HPs and non-HPs don’t get a report because they come to the party late and don’t offer the feature for several more years. Once people get in the habit of buying HP “because you can resell it for like half the price of a new one” the prices of new ones can start to creep up. It would make sense to pay $600 for an HP with an identical spec to a $400 Dell if you believe that in two years the HP will sell for $300 and the Dell will sell for maybe $100, or maybe cost you $10 for an eWaste sticker. Even more sense if HP gives you a 2 year repurchase price because they think the used price will be high enough (i.e. you pay $600 today for the laptop, and it includes a $200 coupon for a 2027 purchase of a new HP if you send the old one back...)

Again the actual HP might not be any better then the Dell (or may be somewhat worse), but it has a PCFax listing that says “great shape! SSD 100% ok! Battery 97% original capacity, great for 2 years of use! Never been dropped! Never had the screen replaced! OEM RAM!” while the Dell’s says “no information, anything could have happened to this pile of junk, buyer beware!”

I’m not even talking pre-orders of video games coming out in a few months.

The entire Chicago board of exchange exists to sell products (originally farm products, you know tons of corn, bales of hay, barrels of hog bellies, whole cows) at future points in time. It revolutionized the farm economy. Farmers can sell this fall’s harvest today in order to afford repairs on tractors they need fixed in order to actually get the harvest into the ground, and keep it watered and weeded and fertilized. Oh, plus afford the fertilizer.

CBOE exchanges billions of dollars of futures a day, granted it isn’t all “farm stuff” anymore. Google buying energy that won’t be produced for ~7 years isn’t really any more astounding then someone buying tons of corn from plants that just went into the ground last week and won’t be harvested until October, and that has been happening since 1973.

When it gets to this point, the choice of the population is to starve to death or create a new, parallel system that serves em. It's normally what happens in communist dictatorships etc..., so you can bet the elites are trying to not get to this point, or the system will just get away from em.

Sadly the elite tend to believe their own propaganda about exceptionalism and think they got to the top because of talent not luck, and that what happened elsewhere and in the distant past is irrelevant because they are just too awesome to fail, get pulled out of their limos and beheaded by the ignorant lazy masses of unachievers. Which just increases the chance of history repeating, or at least rhyming.

Sure it is insane to bet that in 7 years fusion will be working...if in fact Google is relying on this as opposed to that purchase being a fancy way to fund some long term work on reducing power costs and take advantage of tax breaks to basically fund that with tax payer money and not their own.

So it is basically Google spending someone else’s money on something that has a chance of directly benefiting Google. Which I’m sort of ok with because if it does manage to produce that energy (even if it takes >7 years) it’ll also produce energy for the rest of us (either directly as in one big ass facility, or indirectly when they publish a million papers “here is how we made it work” and spin up companies “we built that one over there, give us a billion dollars and we will make one for you too!”). Maybe some day we will actually get electricity that is “too cheap to meter” out of it.

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.

$50 million? That is a good tee shirt budget! Like “spot something evil, report it and get a fancy tee shirt!” If it were $500mil it could be spot bonuses...

Google’s email (when I was there, I was a layoff victim ~2 years back) has something like a year long self delete policy, and anything you apply an archive tag to gets kept “forever”. So it is modestly durable. Plus of corse if Google gets sued and you or a work area you are involved in gets identified as a discoverable asset you get to be on discovery hold and all the mail gets retained until that process is over (and it can last years or decades).

Google’s chats self deleted in more like 45 to 90 days. Seldom long enough to survive into a litigation hold. The chats didn’t have an archive hold tag you could apply (one of the chat systems had a possibly accidental loophole, groups had their own retention policies settable per group, so if you had stuff you wanted to save you could make a group to discuss a document or design and set a year retention policy or whatever).

Google also quite deliberately had internal communications about “communicate with care” and pushed employees to discuss things in person and via chat and not email if it was business related as opposed to purely technical. It was very obvious we were being told to communicate anything that might be the topic of a lawsuit over chat (or in person) and never email. Durability of the messages and discoverability was mentioned. It wasn’t “do all the illegal stuff in chat”, it was “be aware that business practices can be very legally sensitive and are best conducted in person or if by electronic means in chat and never in email”, very nudge-nudge-wink-wink.

I mean nothing strictly illegal about reminding people what forms of communication work how, and all the documents had a retention policy, it just happened that the policy was generally “burn in a month and a half” which for a typical business would be very very suspicious.

To give Google a little break though with the volume of business Google use to conduct via email it is extremely different from companies that one would accuse of being shady with a 45 day burn policy: most traditional companies have “some” email, Google like many tech companies and especially tech companies where most of the management layers were ex-technical did communications relentlessly by email. At most phone companies if it would have been a phone call it would be an email chain. Meetings well, google still has way too many, but meetings got summarized in email (frequently by several people). If it happened it was probably in at least 8 if not 300 emails.

Post chat change though, things got memory holed. If it happened maybe there is an email, maybe. Likely lots of chat about it, all vanished into the mists go time (45 days back). Aruments about the 300th time a button name got changed? Chat, maybe a little email. Discussions about who a “target audience” for a product was? Absolutely in chat, never in email. Never never, never ever in email. What kind of user does a proposed feature appeal to? All chat, never email...

A vital part of alcohol production.

The problem is the shareholders want Google to be profitable. They are owners, and generally owners with the hopes that the value of the shares will go up, and they can sell at a profit.

An admission of guilt is a legal artifact that can be discovered in other lawsuits and used as a bludgeon. So having a “yeah, we totally admit we violated a whole bunch of laws” document signed by the CEO and board means Google is going to all but automatically lose lawsuits that turn on those facts. Like “please skip the guilt phase and proceed directly to the penalty phase -- how big a check do we need to write”. This is fantastic if you were impacted by some illegal behaviour of Google’s and are currently suing them and would like to skip the least certion 90% of the process and skip directly to the part where you convince judge and jury that a multibillion dollar company should write you a check big enough that they can feel it and will stop doing this to others.

It is pretty awful if you are a shareholder and absolutely don’t want Google to write any checks bing enough to notice let alone feel. You want huge profit piled into more R&D or advertising, or dividends, not the pockets of harmed parties suing Google!

So no, no way the shareholders want this at all. It isn’t a matter of letting them get away with it, it is a matter of making sure they don’t get punished in the future for it. The most reliable way to not get punished for a thing is to not do it a bunch more, and to not brag about having done it in the past, and to not get caught checking to see if the bodies are still securely buried. Google’s share holders absolutely don’t want it marching into court and yelling “I did it! I did it judge! I killed them all! It was me! It was me all along!”

Google’s shareholders are better served by a coverup and future improvements (either not being as evil in the future, or merely hiding it better). Google’s shareholders are not your ally for justice, don’t look at them to improve things for you except by accident.

You also get a streamlined setup in a lot of cases. I run a small business ($200k to $400k/year revenue). I personally know how to set up servers, I like geeking out about things like ZFS and spool and RAID-Z. On the other hand for the business I write iOS apps, and that means Macs with MacOS. They have a backup system (Time Machine) that is fiddly to set up a NAS to support. I know because I’ve bought commodity Linux hardware, set up file sharing (I have tried both NFS and AFP) and attempted to get my little Linux system to be a target for Mac Time Machine, and invariably the Macs don’t see the Linux system after a while and stop backing up.

I know how to debug tech issues, and expect if I spent a few hours a week on it I would eventually figure out I have something configured wrong, or one of the 20 packages involved have a bug and a fix (or a bug I could fix). Except if I do that those are house I’m not billing. “A few hours a week” rapidly becomes much more money then paying to buy a NAS.

I’m not likely to buy any subscription stuff for my NAS, and if I outgrow my disk space and can’t put commodity drives in to expand I’ll give commodity hardware and a self install another run. Maybe it will “just work” next time. That would be cool, I like ZFS and I could set it up to resilver every month I know I would feel better about that then even a RAID-Z that isn’t set to resilver.

When you are making money paying someone else money in order to get time can cost a lot less then spending the time you need to get the service (NAS and/or backups in this case) for free.

The word “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. That isn’t a trivial operation for a lot of people. Consider someone running a photography business who buys a NAS so they can have all their work product backed up locally. Yes, in theory they could follow some canned instructions on how to install and configure TrueNAS, but it is going to take them a lot of time, and they may get derailed at any point and not manage to complete the process because the software they loaded is maybe slightly newer (or older) then the step-by=step they are using, and the UI has changed in some way _you_ might find trivial and take 15 seconds to adapt to, but the part of the brain you use to interpret UI and figure out what it means they have “wasted” on understanding color temperatures and how to adjust focus depth. Which to be fair to them is much more valuable in their day-to-dayand to be fair to you, you have a lot less need to understand color tempatures then a photographer.

So the value of all the stuff TrueNAS offers v having a user friendly UI and support channel differs depending on who you are, and what you are good at. Even my solution of “put the disk in the old NAS and format it first” isn’t exactly easy for some people. Not because they are dumb, but because they are going to add drives to it every what five years? That is a long time to remember an extra set of hoops to jump through. (It won’t be too hard if they think about it in advance, and put a sticky note on the back of the old NAS “format all new disks in old NAS first!” And on the old NAS “don’t throw out, needed to format new disks before using in new NAS!”)

Don’t discount how important “easy UI, phone support” is to some people.