Obviously they aren't going to say so; but their 'AI' marketing was not so much 'confusing' as 'fucking stupid and actively irrelevant'. You bother me with a video of a parent and child watching video on a laptop on the couch and tell me that Dell means longer battery life with AI? And the one with a generic small business owner sitting in front of a Dell, which acts intelligently so you can run your business. So, what do you mean by that exactly? Auto-dimming backlight based on ambient light? Nothing in particular? Seriously? Sure, if you take a suitably expansive view there's probably a bit of DSP in there somewhere, pretending that the built in speakers suck less than they do, which you could call 'AI'; but that's really reaching.

Nobody is going to be honest enough to do so; but they weren't 'confused' so much as you just dumped non-sequiturs in front of them and pretended that you were delivering some sort of profound and delightful insight; which you were not. I realize "Dell: a new laptop's battery will probably be less fucked than your old ones' is" is not an exciting slogan; but that's basically what you actually had to offer, so obviously pretending that the NPU was magic left everyone puzzled.

I think that would depend on how the numbers work out: the current situation is one where there isn't UBI; but there are programs aimed specifically at dependent children, certain classes of disability that preclude regular employment, and some supplementary assistance for people who are working but earning below a certain amount.

If anything, a switch to UBI would seem to make spawning for profit less attractive: as it stands dependent children reliably qualify for certain welfare benefits; while working age adults without substantial disabilities typically qualify for relatively little unless they are working but earning a pittance(eg. the food stamps as a de-facto subsidy for walmart payroll situation) or they can prove an active but currently unsuccessful search for employment, in places that have some sort of job-seeker's allowance. In that case someone who thinks that they can parent on the cheap does potentially have an incentive to pop out a bunch of dependents.

If you qualify for UBI just because the "U" in "UBI" stands for "Universal", though, pumping out children looks like an arduous real job that you no longer have a direct incentive for: unless UBI is a cardboard box and 1500 calories of nutri-gruel a day, you can skip changing diapers and listening to screaming children and just UBI whatever hobby you actually enjoy, since now you automatically qualify without needing to make some dependents.

If it turns out that (contrary to what we've seen basically worldwide once people get a little money and some options) it was really just work-life balance depressing fertility rates and UBI makes people breed like rabbits into a populationpocalypse then perhaps we have an issue; but, in terms of breeding just for the welfare money, the fact that you can get the UBI without the hassle seems like it would actively discourage anyone who doesn't specifically want children from having them for financial reasons.

"His first objection: if AI can truly do everything, then everyone can have everything they need, making the question of who owns the robots somewhat moot."

Ah, of course. Because a wealthy society is automatically an egalitarian society; as anyone who takes a quick look outside can clearly see.

If anything, the threat of utopian abundance rendering wealth nigh-irrelevant will probably encourage people who wish to retain the feeling of being wealth to double down, since the only way to know that you are ahead will be the option to look down on the huddled masses being kept in line by securibots.

It's not like there's a history of microsoft interlinking technology being a festering security issue that should trouble us when they report on ChatOLE or GTPCOM.

"Deloitte report found that less than 6% of local government practitioners were prioritizing AI as a tool to deliver services."

Any word on whether that report had to be corrected after the embarrassing discovery of bot slop in it; as a number of other Deloitte gems recently have? They insisted that the case in Australia was on the up-and-up; though not so much as to refuse to refund some of the $290k they took for the job; not sure what the final outcome on their fine work in Canada ended up being.

The trouble with simplification isn't merely that it's a pain; but that there's only so much of it you can do without promptly wandering into the delightful world of undefined behavior; where the problem isn't merely that people don't understand what the law or the spec says; but that it doesn't actually address whatever the matter at hand is, even if you had an expert to interpret it.

When that happens you inevitably get moved to a more complex state: in jurisdictions that are serious about precedent, or markets where one implementation gains a commanding lead, whoever winged it most successfully at the time of ambiguity becomes(de-facto or de-jure) part of the new codification. In cases where it's more of a mixed result people might end up recognizing two dialects of a protocol or there will be a 'test' named after whatever judge pulled it out of nowhere because it sounded good that you then say you are applying in future cases to choose which of the uncodified behaviors to go with in a given instance. In some cases it remains more or less unsettled and the outcome is basically a surprise over and over and then the codification is basically that you just wing it; which is not ideal.

This is, of course, not to say that all complexity is created equal: the line between 'flabby' and 'parsimonious' is much more subjective than between 'internally consistent' and 'overdetermined'; but there usually is at least a gradient if not a bright line. What gets extra tricky, though, is that law codes (more than some other types of spec) are something that you need to write both for everyone and to cover everyone.

It's basically fine that AS15531or A478-95a(2019) are not really terribly accessible light reading. If you are dealing with now-aging military avionics or stainless steel cables those may well be you problems; but there's not a real sense of societal injustice in the fact that most people just want their aircraft flying and their wire ropes not snapping; so you have the luxury of nerding out however much your circle of professional specialists think is required by the problem and mandating accordingly. Something like probate law is going to end up happening to basically everybody, so the idea that it is impenetrable to the layman seems troublesome; but, because it happens to everybody, it's also not necessarily easy or simple to identify the equivalent of the 1040EZ case: maybe it's super boring and a guy in good health and generally agreed sound mind writes a straighforward will and then gets hit by a truck the next day. Or maybe some dementia patient's declining years see a fight between their children and hey, look at that, now we need a section on how forensic psychiatry will assess 'undue influence' in the context of whether you helped grandma with that will or whether you strong-armed a feeble old lady while she was in your care like your sibling you don't get on with well alleges. That sounds simple and accessible; and not at all like something that will either be completely impenetrable or fairly overtly allow a judge to just spitball it based on whether he hears the dispute before or after lunch and which of the potential heirs looks more punchable.

None of this is to say that Alaska's probate system is not a nightmare accretion, that seems most likely; but it's probably a nightmare accretion with more parts that are actually load bearing than it appears; and possibly one that doesn't have a structurally sound variant that is also simple(especially in potentially adversarial contexts, like probate law: where one of the fairly common instances is "it's as simple as what this will says" v. "actually, there's a complication"; and therefore rules for both what actual complications count and how they work in addition to 'here's how you read a low complexity uncontested will').

The details will differ; but it sounds like the critical distinction between people who can afford good counsel and those who cannot is being retained by this exciting new tool.

Wait. You just put a broken unit back on the shelf where the working spares go? In a story you tell to strangers on the internet about your superior efficiency of process? How do you think the correct supply of working spares come to exist at an organizational scale if people just quietly go and do that? Especially with things that can be broken in non-obvious ways that's basically the single most annoying thing you can do to whoever is responsible for ensuring that a specified supply of spares exists.

As hardware, replacing a phone is only about as hard as replacing a ballpoint pen; so anyone who thinks that the real problem is that an authorized phone technician wasn't on hand to re-seat the connector has a screw overtightened; but would you just silently put empty pens back in with the new ones as a fun eventual surprise who whoever reorders those?

I'd be...worried...about the viability of someone who couldn't learn to read an analog clock fairly readily if they had reason to; but it doesn't seem nearly as surprising that a fair number of people wouldn't know how to offhand. Not only are analog clocks a lot less common than they used to be; my experience has been that a lot of legacy clock installs stop getting cared about well ahead of actually getting removed.

Your basic battery powered wall clock isn't that accurate and needs its batteries replaced periodically; so somebody needs to care reasonably frequently for it to be active, not on the wrong side of a DST offset, and not far enough off correct time that it's not very useful for things like start or end of class(passing periods vary a bit by school size; but you'd really want skew solidly under 5 minutes, especially if you are using similarly dodgy clocks at both ends).

The fancier whole-building setups with wall clocks that get pulse-per-minute or per second from a central control module are more likely to not be skewed randomly; and tend not to get rearranged because they are built in to the wall; but also tend to be comparatively expensive maintenance items that are a facilities problem, because they are attached to the building and some oddball 90s-looking cage of cards you need a weird serial pinout and some garbage software to talk to; rather than a cheap office supply, so when they do fail they often just get left there and ignored.

I remember there being clocks in classrooms for basically the entire time I was going through schools, and the period I worked in one; but in high school things had clearly started to break down(the permanently installed clocks were explicitly non-authoritative; individual teachers did or didn't supply a wall clock depending on their taste; so those were in mixed supply but generally accurate if someone cared enough for them to be present); and in college the wall clocks were essentially entirely vestigial; presence, absence, and function mostly a byproduct of when a particular building had been built or renovated.

I'm honestly a bit surprised that the classrooms still have enough wall clocks with low skew to be able to assume that students are getting time from them.

Iâ(TM)m curious whether it will be viable to extract HBM. BGA packages are absolutely doable; but HBM seems potentially more challenging.

No disagreement here. Asus is a totally logical party to be raising retail prices because component prices are going up. I was specifically responding to the claim that 'they' would find 'some other convenient excuse to raise prices, just because they can'; for which Asus seems like a much poorer candidate.

As a basically commodity vendor I'd assume that Asus is very poorly suited to try to mask component prices, because their margins just aren't all that exciting; but as a basically commodity vendor they are in an equally poor position to 'because we can' any price increase that their competitors don't have basically the same reason for also making; since you can just buy from someone else unless ROG RGB LED compatibility is just that critical to you.

It will be interesting to see how that shakes out. Given the downright absurd debt levels and negative margins it seems unlikely that this gear will avoid the fire sale forever; but it's a lot more specialized compared to what came out of .com bust era equivalents. Even 'normal' GPU compute servers are aimed at relatively specific purposes(and all but the low end ones that are just ~8 PCIe GPUs in a row are even fairly topologically quirky, bunch of nvlinked GPUs and a PCIe topology that depends on GPUs RDMA-ing directly to ethernet or infiniband NICs without keeping the CPU in the loop); and the 'rack scale' or hyperscaler custom stuff is quite likely to be a liquid cooled monster with custom dimensions and atypical rack weights, 'modular' mostly for service purposes, not just pets.com's xeon pizzaboxes that can be unracked and auctioned off in an afternoon.

I don't doubt that people will come up with something; if the discount is steep enough all sorts of retrofits or technically-inefficient uses become viable; and there will presumably be some post-crash inventory in things like HBM and GDDR that was contractually locked up but not actually soldered down yet that will be easier to find a new home for; but it will be a lot more involved than the mostly fairly conventional stuff from the .com bubble period.

Asus seems like a pretty weak candidate for just pulling off a price increase for fabricated reasons. They aren't a small shop; but I can't think of a single product of theirs that doesn't have a fairly ready substitute from another PC OEM or component manufacturer. It's possible that some of their stuff has a reputation that could support at least a modest price premium, I definitely don't know what their reputation is across all areas; but there are more or less direct cross-vendor substitutes that they would need to worry about if they tried to bump prices.

... detailed in a book with many citations written "by liberals, for liberals": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Abundance is a nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025. The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. It became a New York Times Bestseller.
        Klein and Thompson argue that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development. They write that American liberals have been more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development since the 1970s. They say that Democrats have focused on the process rather than results and favored stasis over growth by backing zoning regulations, developing strict environmental laws, and tying expensive requirements to public infrastructure spending.
        Klein and Thompson propose an "abundance agenda" that they say better manages the tradeoffs between regulations and social advancement and lament that America is stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention. They present the abundance agenda as a way to initiate new economic conditions that will diminish the appeal of the "socialist left" and the "populist-authoritarian right". ..."

https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...
"The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix).
        We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository.
        You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web. ...
        In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on earth is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space.
        The heart of any community is its library, which stores a wide variety of technological processes, only some of which are used at any one time in any specific environment. If an independent community is like a cell, its library is like its DNA. A library has many functions: the education of new community members; the support of important activities such as farming and material extraction; historical recording of events; support for planning and design. And the library grows and evolves with the community.
        The earth's library of technological knowledge is fragmented and obscure, and some important knowledge has been lost already. How can we create a library strong enough to foster the growth of new communities in space? How can we today use what we know to improve human life? ..."

Instead the USA ceded most of its technological know-how to China over the past quarter century. Given that, perhaps I should hope China at least will eventually work on such a library and someday make it available to the rest of the world under a free and open licence?

A recent related comment by me on "On DOGS (Design of Great Settlements)" as an answer to "What's the Best Ways for Humans to Explore Space?": https://slashdot.org/comments....

Of course, Bucky Fuller was there first with his "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science" idea.
https://www.bfi.org/about-full...
"In 1950, Buckminster Fuller set up an outline for a course in Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science. Taught at MIT in 1956 as part of the Creative Engineering Laboratory, this course by Fuller probably served as one of their more unusual offerings. The students who took the course, all engineers, industrial designers, materials scientists and chemists, represented research and development corporations across America."