"and if the Ai isn't storing and selling information about the user to the advertiser". I'm sure there's other conditions that should be levied on ad-based LLMs.

And, historically, someone here will post about how Apple products are overpriced and over-hyped. Still, people seem to be willing to pay that premium. I wonder why that is....

Apple records a massive increase in iPhone sales, particularly in China, and record results in high-margin Services. So what's the headline here? "Apple might have to raise prices or drop margins due to memory costs" (as if that's unique to Apple.) I believe the technical term for that is "bullshit."

Consider: (1) Apple is doing on-chip integrated memory. So they're not competing for separate DRAM chips. They would compete for flash components. (2) Apple negotiates long-term, 'preferred treatment' contracts with its suppliers. It's quite likely the contracts for this year's iPhone production run are set, and possibly next year's too. (I don't know and I don't think Apple says what their supply chain lead times are.) (3) Anyone competing in the market for memory chips would be in the same situation. But see point #2. (4) Apple explicitly addressed this a couple of times in last week's results call, and disclaimed the kind of significant impacts the "commentariat" (nod to Horace Dideu for the term, https://asymco.com/2026/02/01/...) is claiming.

So at best I'd conclude there's an explicit sense of "We don't believe what Apple said last week". But more significantly, this is consistent with the non-stop "Apple is Doomed!" pieces that pop up like clockwork each quarter. Why? Because bad news about Apple brings in the clicks. It's not journalism, it's click-bait.

Well, after using an iPhone, I tried an Android. I found it to be confusing and baroque. More significantly, I haven't seen any significant new feature that is sufficiently different from an iPhone to make me want to move to Android as my primary device. (I got the Android phone to run one app that is not available on iOS.)

I'm not saying people shouldn't buy Android phones, if that's what they want. But to castigate people who choose iPhones as 'sheep' or other pejorative judgements is disgusting to me. Each person makes a choice based on his/her preferences. If you don't like Apple the company or iOS the platform or iPhone the device, good for you. Don't insult those who don't share your preferences.

And Apple can collect 30%. Everyone wins!

Like PETA... This is about attention and clicks. Otherwise, there would be an actual scientific peer-reviewed and reproducible algorithm to set the clock.

You're replying to my post, so I can't mod you +1 funny!

What would that look like in practice though? Would all MAGA iconography be banned? Would Trump and his family collectively become persona non grata? How do you distinguish between MAGA and anything that is too similar to it?

If we look to Germany for parallels, we see there are nationalist right wing movements still there, they just don't call themselves Nazis. What criteria would be criminalized?

You'd think so, but the dominance of clickbait ads and clickbait stories (coverage of Apple is a good example, there's not a lot of really deep analysis of Apple compared to each week's "Apple is Doomed" narrative) shows the companies who pay for that ad space are happy with being associated with that shit. Now arguably that's because companies have so little actual control of where Google AdSense, et.al. places their ads, but someone has convinced CEOs that on-line advertising is essential and a good investment, now matter how obnoxious it is.

(And in evidence, I offer those "Mongo DB" ads that keep on popping up here. Now I'm not their target audience, but I can assure you that my impression of Mongo DB as a product and particularly as a company is very negative, based on their on-line advertising.)

Eliminating is a strong term. While the way they have entrenched themselves into all aspects of US political power can make it seem like there is no other way I'm not fully convinced. If the dear leader does cancel midterms then it will likely be time to eliminate the MAGA party. If we instead actually have something approaching free and fair elections then there may be hope for a less radical solution.

I'm not saying that mandatory audits are bad, but I have a couple questions on this proposal: (1) How many auditors would this require? Who hires, trains, pays for them? (2) how much would those auditors cost, both in absolute terms, and in the "per-project burden/tax'"to pay for the auditing of the contract? (3) who will take action on the results of any audit, since you're describing a 'forensic audit' that explains how much money has already been spent?

In government contracting, I've seen a lot of mandates (laws, policies, etc) that are intended for the best reasons, to prevent future failure, but that add substantially to the cost and time to deliver. (Kinda like "counting parachutes that opened on impact.") The "prevent a future mistake" costs often over-burden the project to the point where the cost of prevention exceeds the cost of the actual delivery.

The best audits gat to root causes. Sometimes that's malfeasance. More often it's incompetence (citing Hanlon's Razor in passing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) Sometimes it's systemic, e.g .costs caused by contracting rules levied on government projects that aren't levied on similar commercial projects. Often it's differences in requirements (such as 'expected lifetime of the project' - in military contracts it's often environmental conditions where the product must operate in desert, arctic, jungle, temperate, high altitude, etc, etc.)

So what I'm saying is "Make sure the cure is not worse than the disease this is intended to prevent."

Very true.

I actually suspect we may be approaching the end game of the two-party system. While our democracy was never designed to work this way, it has been locked into this for far too long. In 2000 the democrats became subservient to the GOP, now it has essentially be codified as such - hence we really have only a one-party system.
Br> If we could rebuild our government with at least 4 or 5 parties we could possibly prevent a situation like this - where one party takes over the entirety of government and locks out everyone else - from happening again, though I don't see that as being an easy reformation.

Right now, I get all kinds of irrelevant shit when I use Amazon search for "#2 x 1/2 slot head wood screws". Think about what the new-and-improved AI enabled Amazon search will return. "You asked for #2 x 1/2 slot head wood screws. We have populated your shopping cart with 3/8" lag bolts, #5 torx screwdriver, a sexy bra, and 5 books of chick-lit (where 'screw' is used as a verb)"

What was going on ~18 years ago in the United States? The Great Recession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... That's not the only cause, but it definitely helped create a hole in the population in the population of senior high school/college age kids.

The two Universities I'm associated with (Norwich, where I got my undergrad, and UNH, where I took courses as a non-degree student) both have been talking about this for the last 5 years or more. The local city school district also talked about this as part of their budgeting presentations. So this should not be a surprise to anyone who is actually in the eduction business (unless, of course, they can't do simple math...)