"fewer managers per employee" - Who needs managers when these 7000 employees are going to eliminate their own jobs with AI anyway?

"make us more productive" - Your job is to make the AI more productive. Everyone has a $250K token budget you must spend or you're fired. PROMPT, PEASANT! Eventually you'll be laid off (a nice phrase for "fired") anyway. Welcome to the new high tech plantation.

"make the work more rewarding" - Our shareholders are demanding better returns. And your unvested shares? Eh, you'll be laid off before you can cash those in.

"we appreciate you showing up for each other" - You're all equally screwed. Start helping each other brush up your resumes.

... is more like it. Laptops are the teacher's equivalent of using a TV as a babysitter.

Folks, you got to live high off the hog for years. But the power dynamic has shifted back in favor of the employer. It's the way of things. I know that's little consolation to the people affected, but it had to happen at some point.

AI is only as good as the sum of human knowledge. It only appears to reason. And it certainly can't tell truth from fiction. So, it's all smoke and mirrors.

There is value in the social sciences. It just gets bury in the highfalutin word play that academic papers use these days. I remember looking at one paper recently that was complete word-salad, but ultimately just said "things that are aesthetically pleasing are preferred over things that aren't". Duh.

A good way to "dumb down" the academic drivel is to copy/paste the abstract of a paper into your LLM of choice and ask it to summarize in layman's terms. Most of the time, you'll find that the academic paper comes to some obvious conclusion and just buries it in fancy words.

Honestly, it depends on the use-case. For everyday use or gaming, Windows. For development and hosting, Linux (vanilla Ubuntu). I used to be very into Gentoo Linux, but I'm at an age where I want the OS to get out of the way so I can get actual work done and avoid unnecessary tinkering.

I remember back in the day when plastic bags were all the rage. "They're biodegradable", they said. "This will be better for the environment", they said. Nope. Definitely not the case. They break down, but into microplastics. They don't really biodegrade. And they leach harmful "forever chemicals" into the water.

I'm not an environmentalist by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I will often choose convenience first. But in this case, paper bags are both more convenient and better environmentally. They've got some structure to them, so your stuff isn't rolling all over the trunk of your car. They actually biodegrade since they're plant fiber. And the paper industry (at least in the US) does a good job with forestry and sustainability.

I wish I could believe that's the intent of SocialAI. But it seems like most people these days (I recognize I'm speaking anecdotally) don't want a dose of reality, to be told there's a better way or to make the changes necessary to fix their own problems. They just want to be coddled and reaffirmed.

I hate everything about SocialAI based on that description. It doesn't help lonely or rejected people. Instead, it supplants healthy lifestyle changes with an AI that acts as an emotional crutch. If you want to feel seen and heard, then go build real relationships with real people.

Somebody else mentioned that LG made a very similar ad years ago. So, I think this is just a smokeshow by Apple to justify removing the series of ads because they realized that the idea was stolen from another company. It only marginally has to do with the backlash from creators, I think.

"we don't want you to see our algorithms because it would expose our bias, give proof of the data mining we do of our users and put a spotlight on how TikTok amplifies addictive and dangerous content."

Agreed. This isn't about chemtrails. This is actually targeted at atmospheric geoengineering. For example, seeding the atmosphere with chemicals or other particulates in the name of fighting climate change.

I share the concern, honestly. That's not a statement of a climate change denier. Things do seem to be warming up. But it is the statement of a skeptic who recognizes there are always unintended consequences. And seeding our atmosphere in such a way that can create a significant change in our climate comes with huge, extinction-level risks. What if the swing is too great? What if the swing has some runaway affect? How will it affect plant life, insects, water/nitrogen/carbon cycles?

Ultimately, the right answer is to stop doing the things that might be causing negative climate effects. Geoengineering is treating the symptom, not the cause.

Your argument misses the actual letter of the law. This doesn't ban children under 14 from social media entirely. It just requires a social media company to get parental consent for their child to be on their platform.

How that parental consent is verified is another question, obviously. But this doesn't give the government any right to raise your child.

This still required someone to create the RNA molecule in the lab. So, wouldn't this actually be proof of intelligent design?

I don't disagree with this part of Gerald Joyce's statement because there's an intelligence behind the creation of that life:

"this is the road to how life can arise in a laboratory"

But this is where the giant leap happens...

"or, in principle, anywhere in the universe...."

I wouldn't call this very stealth. Dell has basically said, "come into the office or don't expect career advancement for remote work". I'm sure there are some exceptions to that (such as outside sales). Regardless, it's clear that the pendulum has swung in favor of the employer. As much as that annoys me, it's been a good run for tech sector employees. A solid decade of employers wooing talent with perks, flexible schedules and high pay. But that was never sustainable long-term. There has to be an equalizing.