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'm sure that someone is running an AI agent on Office right now. Word and Excel are the real enemies of switching.

It isn't that hard to separate. That's why we developed the cryogenic method in the first place. Hydrogen and fluorine are much harder to keep stored and process.

Simply stating: We Do Not Accept DOCx or XLSx formats, forces compliance. Since MS can produce ODF (allegedly), that's how you get compliance.

Excel isn't done until the macros won't run (on anything else).

My father in law used to do design work in Excel. No kidding. He claimed Publisher et al didn't give him the precision he wanted, or something like that. It was amazing what he could put together in Excel.

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.

Why would I do that? Shouldn't there be at least minimal Government oversight?

Oh wait, now I get it, this is "racist" or something. We can't have oversight that would leave businesses without the under the table wages Americans won't work for.

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.

Because one thing is exactly the same as the completely unrelated thing, except topically. That's why.

Yeah, and their whole argument is irrational. $1500/$30 = 50 months. A four-year ROI isnâ(TM)t irrational. Whatâ(TM)s irrational is companies expecting to make back their costs in a year, and expecting that because their service sucks so much that people wonâ(TM)t stay past the promotional period.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

We went from "Reusable rockets? That's Nuts!" to "who can stop Elon" in about 10 years.

Rocket reuse wasn't a real thing until Falcon did it in 2017, Starlink came in 2018. It was a chicken egg problem, people just don't realize how close the rocket reuse was to the first Starlink.

Getting stuff into orbit is one thing, rocket reuse is another. Lots of people are still trying to get reuse, and SpaceX is slowly retiring Falcon 9 for the Next Big Thing, reuse of two stages of rockets. Three years ago, that idea was still considered nuts. V3 Starlink can't ride on Falcon 9. They (Starship/V3 Starlink) are tandem projects.

Light is light.

Starlink V3 is not using radio, it's using Lasers. The coherent beam is the key to Terabit speeds. Which they already have. Multipath Terabit Low Latency World Wide Network? Nobody has that right now. Earth bound pathways are limited, especially across the huge H20 Holding tanks between land masses. Space offers nearly unlimited pathways, redundancies unimaginable using earth based fiber.

Here's an article explaining some of the problem: https://arstechnica.com/gadget...

"What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak" - Agent Smith