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Comment Transparency (Score 5, Insightful) 109

One reason for quarterly reporting is that it gives greater transparency and insight into how a business actually works. Many businesses are seasonal. Most obviously, virtually all retail has its best quarter at the end of the calendar year. But many other types of businesses have key cycles each year that are tied to, for example, the buying habits of their largest customers. Suppliers matter, too; if farms have a bad quarter due to weather or other factors, for example, you're going to want to watch how that impacts food producers somewhere down the line.

Comment innovation is - sadly - dead at Apple (Score 1) 81

the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.

Quite so. It's been how many years since something really new came out of Cupertino? Granted, Apple is more profitable than ever, but the company clearly shows what the result of placing a supply-chain expert as the CEO does.

The really sad part is that there's nobody ELSE, either. Microsoft hasn't invented anything ever, Facebook and Google are busy selling our personal data to advertisers, and who else is there who can risk a billion on an innovation that may or may not work out?

Comment Re:Missing the obvious (Score 1) 15

Apple fans already have a heartrate sensor on their wrist, they don't need one from the ear.

That's wrong. I stopped using wrist watches 25 years ago and haven't looked back a single day. I don't want shit on my wrist. Try living without for a year and you'll realize why. It's hard to express in words. It's like having a chain removed.

Headphones, on the other hand, I use occasionally. For phone calls or for music on the train, plane, etc. - and especially for the plane if the noise cancellation comes close to my current over-the-ear Bose I'd take them on the two-day business trips where I travel with hand luggage only and space is a premium.

Do I want a heartbeat sensor? No idea. I don't care. But if there's any use for it than at least for me that's not a replication. I'm pretty sure many, many Apple users don't have a smart watch.

Comment "fake" - you don't say ! (Score 1) 83

So he claims that social media - the platform where everyone pretends to be more happy, more active, better looking, more interesting, more travelled, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, - feels "fake" ?

Man.

Next he's going to say that artificial sweeteners taste might not be natural.

Seriously, though, social media has been the domain of bots for at least a decade. Even people who actually write their posts themselves use bots to cross-post to all the different platforms and at "optimal" times. Nothing on social media is not fake. Well, maybe your grandmother's photo album because she doesn't know Photoshop exists.

Comment Re:You ARE the weakest link (Score 1) 47

Amateur-level procedures have really run their course and do not cut it anymore.

Do you want to bet on the percentage of Fortune 500 companies that use amateur-level procedures for their prod systems?

"Above 50%" seems like a guaranteed win to me.
"Above 75%" is where I start to think "maybe not that high". But I fear I'm giving them too much credit.

Comment malware delivery system (Score 1) 47

But the "m" in npm always stood for "malware", did it not?

The npm ecosystem is deeply flawed. Look at some of the affected repositories. Many of them are just a few lines of code, yet over a hundred other packages depend on them. At least half of them have no reason to even exist. A lot of them have last been updated years ago.

We have an ecosystem where seemingly every individual function has its own package. That is just ridiculous. It is modularization driven to its absurd extreme. It's why you add one package to your project and it pulls in a hundred dependencies.

And the more tiny packages there are, the larger the attack surface and the smaller the amount that can be monitored for malware injection and other problems. I wouldn't at all be surprised if one or more of these packages will never be updated and have the malware in them forever simply because the only dev with the password to the repo has since died or gone to do other things with his life.

Comment Re:scary (Score 1) 91

We have all but removed them already. In many kills these days, a human presses a button and that's about it.

But yes, removing them entirely removes that last bit of accountability. Next time a drone slaughters a market place full of civilians with no terrorist anywhere in sight, we won't even have someone to put on trial.

Well, we can try with the LLM making the decision. I'm sure it'll apologize a lot and invent a number of threats to justify its actions, if current AI is any indication.

Comment scary (Score 4, Insightful) 91

Why are we applauding this?

We've taught machines how to kill us. Doesn't matter which side did it first, there is no way this has a good ending. No, not because of machine overlords and AI uprising - because it removes accountability and the last remnants of warfare that's not utterly "kill anything that moves".

Comment "AI usage" is becoming meaningless (Score 2) 57

We need more differentiation.

Because, for example, gemini is better at translating whole sentences than google translate. So if I use gemini to translate one sentence in a foreign-language source, that's "AI usage" - but if I throw the same sentence into google translate, it's not?

Some stuff I write both for work and my hobbies, I through into a local LLM (for confidentiality) and ask it to flag grammar and spelling mistakes as well as confusing sentences. That's essentially a better spellchecker. Is that "AI usage"?

Heck, I figure that within the year your built-in spellchecker will be AI-based. Most IDEs already have AI doing code checking.

In some areas, we are trying. "AI assisted" is already a term I see often to contrast with "AI generated".

So in essence, the clickbait article needs to be more clear where it draws the line before its numbers have meaning.

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