Reality is? The places that allow new data centers where they interfere with the existing population are just going to wind up with regrets.

They remind me a bit of the battles over putting in new landfills/dumps. Everyone knows we need them, but it's always "not in my back yard"!

The thing is? The need for more data centers is questionable. If all this AI growth turns the corner and companies decide much of it was just overblown hype? Then those data centers will quickly wind back down again.

Even in "best case" scenarios, they don't employ many people once they're constructed, and they use large amounts of resources -- which tend to be sold at discounted rates as part of the deals struck when they move into an area. Everyone else gets stuck covering any losses by way of rate increases.

A landfill may smell bad, but it's not using up the lion's share of available electric power in my town or using a big portion of available clean water.

I don't understand how the entire concept isn't just outlawed and thrown out? The core reason we have a stock market is to allow business growth/prosperity. Company owners trade off their original ownership of a successful business for a chance to get investor income flowing in to make the business more successful than they could make it on their own.

Prediction markets are nothing more than gambling. There's no "investing" in a business happening at all with this.

To be fair, cellular data is really poor in quite a few places in America, when using ANY of the "second tier" reseller carriers. (Won't speak for other countries.)

EG. We have Spectrum Mobile right now (mostly due to a bundle deal with our broadband at home), and while voice calls work pretty much as expected, anywhere I go? The data is terrible! They say they're using Verizon's towers but it's obvious Verizon is throttling the heck out of them and/or only allowing them on SOME of the towers in a given area.

When I had T-Mobile for a few years previously? It had bad holes in coverage areas, but it worked quite well where it was built out (usually your bigger cities).

I don't care how much "cost savings" they claim it brings to eliminate retail stores. As one of only a few "major carriers", it's pathetic to offer only online interaction with customers. And honestly? I'm not even sure I would have a big issue with the FCC pulling some of the dedicated frequency spectrum they were allowed to purchase. I'm pretty sure there was an assumption made that as one of the "big 3" cellular providers in the USA, T-Mobile would ensure any potential customer had the ability to buy a phone with them and get the help needed to use it. I imagine there are quite a few elderly or handicapped people around who don't find it very functional to do all of that via an app.

I don't do a lot of traveling, but I remember when I last worked at a job that involved some travel? The ongoing "wisdom" was a realization that the cheaper hotels had the most usable/reliable wifi. The expensive ones tended to use Internet as a service to upsell, with annoying portals trying to bill you a daily rate and generally interfering with your applications. (They might, for example, lock down just about all ports except 80 and 443, meaning you couldn't get software updates to complete or connect a VPN, or ....)

The basic chains, by contrast, all seemed to used "canned" wifi setups sold to them by third party vendors, and as long as you got a decent signal in your room, you were good.

In any case, I never trusted a hotel wifi to be super-secure. Heck, I remember on a Vegas trip one time, they had it set up so wifi was capped at a slow rate unless you paid a premium. I was curious about a wired jack I found behind the bed and plugged into it. Turns out, it gave me a full gigabit network connection and bypassed their sign-in portal and everything. They seemed to just not realize or expect guests would still carry ethernet cables with them and try to use a wired connection.

Well as you said FRAND is one reason private companies would fund research and then donate it to a standards body, and a “good” one.

Not the only reason though. A lot of things are driven by adopting standards. If you make your very own technology and other companies need to adopt it they tend to want to deal with standards not a single source product, so you get wider adoption by publishing “your thing” as a standard. It does basically burn most or all of the money you invested R&D, but in exchange you get to enlarge the market. You also get to be the first company that can supply a product that uses the standard. So investing money into a new radio strategy and having that be part of the next WiFi standard you are trading that R&D money for being one of the first companies with the “new” WiFi in your basement station (or sort phone, or whatever).

You also get to shape the future direction of a market. So for example (sticking to radio technologies again) if you contribute a low bandwidth low power long range mode for WiFi you can make WiFi more applicable for things like location tags.

SANDisk I think makes FLASH but not RAM, so from their point of view high bandwidth FLASH displacing some HBRAM demand is a huge win for them, any hardware that decides to use this and less HBRAM makes the market SANDisk participates in larger. SKHynix doesn’t get that same boost because I’m pretty sure they also make RAM. SKHynix however gets a boost because unlike say the other 15 companies that will eventually make high bandwidth FLASH SKHynix (and SANDisk) will be making it from day zero.

Yes, there are long running complex lawsuits about all manner of things you might think are intuitively obvious, however just because the last lawsuit was long running and complex doesn't mean the next one about the same thing will be. In theory if the prior court found that header files are public interfaces and don’t have copyright protection the next lawsuit involving copyright on header files will have the defense lawyer point at the prior judgment and saying “we don’t need to litigate this, it was clear two years ago, and nothing has changed to make this any different, we should do that again” and the judge doens’t have to do the exact same thing, but most will, unless the other lawyer has good counter arguments why it is different in this case (and NOT arguments about the original judgment being incorrect). Sometimes the “good arguments” are merely “that case was decided in Californian and we are in Texas, and the laws are different here!”.

Legal matters can be counter intuitive, but more frequently they actually make sense. Early cases about things are complex and long because the legal process tries very hard to make sure they have a good answer, and that they clearly explain the reasoning behind the answers they give, and the limits of the answer. The results of legal battles that reach a verdict are not just a judgment about how a clash between two parties will be resolved, but about how all similar cases should be resolved. Think of a verdict as something that has cached results (but in a system that can do fuzzy matching on cache lines). A settlement on the other hand produces a result between two parties but no new cache entries.

I’m a lot less sure. I would think a lawsuit could start based on object code, and during discovery get source code and continue if the source code looks similar enough. Doing a whole lawsuit on object code would face significant issues convincing a judge/jury that object code is “expressive enough” to manifest copyright. With the defense arguing that wholly independent implementations of something compile down into the same (or substantially similar) object code.

It should be “easy enough” if you think you have some highly similar object code isolated to convince a judge to allow a civil suit to start and to compel discovery of the source code so you can examine how similar actual code (which has already faced court scrutiny about weather or not it is expressive enough to receive copyright protection) is. Even there you can get some suprising results. Like can a Google Employee who was previously an Apple employee and implements the same function at both companies in basically the same way commit copyright infringement? (In something like a topological sort where the algorithm is a known art, it is entirely possable that writing it from scratch for the Nth time produces a line for line identical copy including variable name choices and the bulk of the comments even if the author doesn’t actually consciously remember prior version of the code!)

But the first thing I thought of when reading this is how "sales" seems to constantly involve managers over teams who think all their employees have to be treated like kids, or at least assume simple-minded "motivators" actually work.

Have any real studies been done on ANY of this? Because whether it's negative reinforcement like this public shaming/pie assault, or it's insanity like ringing bells each time a sale is made and some bozo interrupting the whole place with loud announcements? It all feels primitive and pointless to me.

Just because code quality improves doesn’t mean the code looks like what a human writes. Currently AI code seems to not favor writing lots of functions, do it’ll basically expand out the same code in multiple places. Which I admit is also what jr programmers tend to do and maybe you can quality that as something that is code quality and will improve. You can frequently use a prompt to make it “don’t write the same code multiple times, define functions for anything repeated (maybe over a specific complexity)” & that reduces that issue.

I’ve noticed AI generated Swift tends to not use default arguments much, almost never uses custom operators, and uses unnamed method arguments way more frequently then most human written code. Sort of. A lot of example code and people showing things in forums and doing toy programs “in public” are similar which makes me guess those end up in training data sets more then signifiant works that do most of that stuff. Or I write atypical Swift, and have worked at places that do the same (in part because I get to set the coding standards at some of those companies!). At any rate I think _some_ AI code has “tells” which is largely independent form bug rate if not actually “code quality”.

As a practical issue commercial software is almost always closed code, so nobody can see the source and simply search for anything that might share code with anything they have copyright on. The open source code isopen. So if you have anything copyrighted you can search the open source to see if anything looks like it is worth filing a lawsuit over. Especially if you have a competing product. So if you are say Intel you can check to see if any of gcc is similar to Intel’s commercial compiler and sue claiming any recent declines in sales are directly related to gcc’s “blatant” infringement. Or if you have a non-compiler you can sue and just complain about common stanzas of code but not establish specific damages so it might be a less valuable lawsuit.

You could even sue if your closed source code got that line from AI as long as the employee that the source code control system claims they wrote that one themselves, and as long as your source code control system says that line was written before the open source project had it’s equivalent code (or if your lawyer doesn’t think to check those things, and the OSS’s lawyer doesn’t think to raise it in defense), so at least chances are rare that the OSS code invents the line and commercial closed source steels the line (via AI) and then claims the reverse happened.

Winner! Winner! Chicken Dinner!

Yep, even when AI generated code is human reviewed to determine that the code does what it looks like it should, and has no subtle issues (or only very very subtle ones!), you still have the huge legal issues (the exact ones you identified).

Yes, as if nobody could feed some photos into a genAI chatbot and have it generate a video of that face performing those actions on command. Right, nobody could possibly do that, not in our lifetime... wait a minute, I'm getting an update from the studio...

The worst part isn't that now anyone who can get a few pictures of your face off the Internet can log in on your account. The worst part is that you can't recover from it. You can't change your face so once they've got it all you can do is disable this feature completely, and hope Google doesn't re-enable it.

The problem I always had, historically, with games on DVD is they'd kind of "beat up" the optical drive, seeking all over the disc constantly while the game was loading and then being played.

It wouldn't have been so bad if they simply copied everything onto the console's hard drive or SSD when first installed. But games like God of War on my PS2 are what I blame for the drive wearing out so it got constant I/O errors trying to run anything.

I had the same experience with a couple of PS3s that our kids used and "wore out". It was always the optical drive failing. If you played only downloaded games, they'd run fine.