...amongst employees forced to use it. :)

I wouldn't even consider them until I feel like they've made progress on their history of getting burgled and losing customer data.

As they try to cram copilot down the gullet of all their enterprise customers. It's laughable.

It would be interesting to know what the numbers look like in terms of schools that are actually doing something at least modestly Apple-specific vs. ones basically reusing chromebook-focused plans on Apple hardware.

Anything you hand out is going to be 'a platform' and normalize it for the students(not necessarily a point in its favor; people tend to resent the deliberate limitations of hardware that IT has been told to at least try to make less useful for porn and cheating); but there is a potential difference in versatility and vendor flexibility between people actually adopting some macOS stuff and people concluding that chromebooks have been getting more expensive at an alarming clip, without feeling any less cheap, so Apple is now genuinely competitive even if you are just going to slap managed chrome on there and reuse your existing, chromebook focused, IT and curriculum stuff.

Humidity is currently 91% in Yangsan.

As others have noted, the "standard of care" for customers engaging with a call center were already pretty darned poor. This isn't likely to improve that, though it may be better at things like detecting the language of a caller outside of the expected norm and adapting on the fly. Ultimately, AI will indeed improve and be sufficient to replace wage slave humans. Probably not a great time to be depending on that call center salary to feed your family and look for ways to skill up. I hear welders, plumbers, electricians, and other skilled trades are in short supply. Start there.

There's that and the bean counters trying to justify why they have thrown money at long-term commercial real estate leases that would be mostly money down the toilet if they admitted that productivity of a remote workforce was "just as good" as forcing people into commercial office space.

The bean counters plus senior narcissists....that's a powerful adversary.

I suspect that Microsoft, not unreasonably, thinks that the value of their AI slop will be enhanced if they can use an existing property to get people to classify particularly grating AI slop so that they can tune their copilot-related stuff to produce less grating or less obvious slop in the future.

Maybe someone in the org actually cares about linkedin's reputation as a hellscape for aura-farming lunatics; but I'd be shocked if the incentive that MS is actually motivated by is anything but the chance to get a dataset of text ranked by how unpleasantly bot-like it is to try to make their bots less visible.

Looks like Microsoft is trying to convince people to classify more and less distasteful bot slop for them so they can tune copilot outputs in the future.

The winning move is not to play.

City Council member of a non-listed Twin Cities suburb I know:

FBI is involved. Most water systems use one of two control/alert systems that are old and make them easy targets.

All they did was shut down components of the systems e.g., wells/sewer lift stations. Most cities were able to cycle manually to get back up and running. There was not messages warning or ransom of which I am aware.

They could have done a lot more damage if they wanted to, rather than just shutting things down.

I live in Plymouth; there was no city communications about this nor did I see any issues. So, I assume there were no physical disruptions to service.

Once the supply of customers flush enough to buy under more standard arrangements is saturated you are basically left between ignoring the demand for growth forever or deciding between handling...subprime...customers yourself or keeping the arrangement at arm's length.

This 'restricted mode' that Apple is vigorously denying will be used for lease enforcement suggests that the metaphorical arm is not that long and that Apple seems to be doing more than merely being willing to sell devices to whatever resellers; but it's not a huge surprise that they'd want the risk related to the debt and any shaking down handled by someone who isn't them.

It's entirely possible that they didn't actually care that much. It seems at least as plausible that the sort of people who would risk this sort of legal exposure over a non-issue were more motivated by an excuse to throw weight around and talk like a mob boss than actual concern. Nice to be able to put a hobby project on the company card.

I see your point, but I find little value in it personally....though I suppose I see little value in people who engage in "traditional" marketing as well.

I find it difficult to believe that 'influencers' are a good sign at a society level; but I'm a little puzzled by the degree of hostility to what is basically a degree for self-employed PR/marketing people.

As much as I'm not happy about it, PR and marketing are absolutely entire fields; and I'd assume that people doing those things whose client is themselves would also benefit from a dash of entertainment related law; contracts and accounting related to dealing with sponsor agreements; and the same sort of low-to-intermediate business stuff that routinely trips up musicians, artists, athletes, etc. who suddenly have some worthwhile amount of money/valuable copyrights/etc. but are either wholly dependent on 'agents' of variable quality and honesty or just end up getting screwed.