This.

Culturally it would have been a big shift, even given the talent they have, but they just don't have the courage of leadership it would have taken to do this. It's been 60+ years since IBM had that, when they bet the company on the 360. The PC doesn't count; that was essentially a side project for IBM. They didn't create the hardware or software for it, and the companies future wasn't riding on it.

It's a part of their business, but not a majority of it, even before AI. They've added AI coprocessors to their Telum CPUs for their Z series platform, but it's not a significant player in the world of AI money. More of a checkbox me-too thing that probably will be of use for legacy customer applications, but no one is building data centers full of Telums to compete with OpenAIAnthropticGoogleEtc.

(What the heck does a PalmPilot organizer have to do with any of this?) Well ... I remember back when they first got popular, my buddy was a software developer at the company I worked for. At lunch one day, he mentioned how he absolutely loved the Palm OS platform, simply because it had so many limitations. He said when writing for the Windows PCs, by contrast? You had so many system resources and so many options, you could pretty much code anything you could come up with. Sloppy code was a non-issue too, on modern systems. Only the coders reviewing the source would know any better. He liked the mental challenges involved in maximizing what you could get from a Palm device with a small monochrome screen and the whole bit.

I feel the same way with movies. All these mega-mergers may give a few big-name film-makers massive financial resources to create new movies. But most of it is unnecessary to make an amazing film. What you need is a great story, and good acting (which really isn't some monopoly held by the big Hollywood stars!). Less is very often more. (Consider how well the first Star Wars trilogy held up over time, using simple backgrounds like a mostly empty desert for Tatooine. I prefer that to the crazy "busy" AI generated scenes in the newer movies.)

I keep hearing things like "my grandmother got so confused, I set her up on Zorin/Mint and she couldn't tell the difference."

The more people just use their PC's to get on websites the less they seem to notice if they use Windows or Linux.

Maybe. I doubt it: Intel seems to have figured out that x86 is not it's exclusive future, a change in corporate mentality that long overdue.

Also, this story must be fake news: Tariffs Don't Work! member?

This is the real answer. A lot of people are afraid of the speech Nazi's that ruin the lives of anyone committing wrongthink. They know the social media companies are moderated by privileged tech weirdos that are protected and immune, and readily bury the people they hate with no consequence. Sane people don't engage with stuff like that.

I cut back 90% on Facebook/Twitter after Jan. 6 because Twitter silently unsubscribed my account from following Abby Johnson because she happened to be in the audience on Jan. 6.

It doesn't matter if it's bad - if China and Russia agree it's bad you have to be for it.

You can never agree with China because they have a totalitarian AI Surveillance Police State there so you must support a totalitarian AI Surveillance Police State here.

If you are against techo-feudalism you must be one of them Putin Lovers.

- The New York Times / Langley, apparently.

I'm amazed to find your comment is an isolated example of reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Many others are 'accepting the premise' and 'entering the frame' of the LA Times weirdos.

Didn't expect that today.

Just be careful; a few old IBM sites had toxic waste problems. It sounds like they were just turning off the lights and water and walking away from these.

One woild hope everything was remediated but I wouldn't bet my own safety on it.

Yeah, that's why they mentioned the ancient Sony camera he lifted.

"Crime with a gun" is a separate crime according to NY.

SCOTUS will strike those down eventually. It's like saying "crime while praying" if it's a right.

Obviously he wasn't using the gun to jack a Betacam. He was probably worried about crackheads in there for the copper.

I believe it was well fitting, completely generated by AI.

If the argument can be proved that they ruined the minds of an entire generation using a massive AI/Big Data model running at n terraflops by deliberately addicting children during the crucial neuronal pruning period of their lives, that is at a minimum going to cost the society tens of trillions of dollars and restitution would be far more than the proposed fines.

Nobody gets a second chance at that pruning stage, at least in this lifetime.

Their profits may be far lower than the damage they caused, but that characteristic is always true of parasitic entities.

This is basically the whole point of the Island of Pleasure warning in Pinocchio.

It remains to be seen what can be proved in Courts but the DSM-6 won't be kind to their arguments as outlined in TFS.

The idea is probably from 1950's comic books but the tech seems brand new since they don't need any landing legs and use a net-on-frame architecture.

People should pay attention because they didn't have orbital technology thirty years ago and now they have a space station, reusable rockets, and are about to have a Moon base.

And possibly ultra-long flighttime 'drones' that can fly over Picatinny Arsenal unimpeded; that much is uncertain. We have no explanation for their energy budget (at least white-world).

Having a country run by engineers rather than professional thieves who hire engineers to justify pillage has certain advantages (and disadvantages).

Let's not get too overconfident.

From an anarcho-capitalist and Austrian perspective, the attack of these subjects is severe. The core criticism is that welfare economics often dresses political value judgments in mathematics and presents the result as scientific optimization.
The Austrian objection starts earlier than the libertarian one.
There is no measurable quantity called âoesocial welfare.â
You value a steak dinner. I value the money more. We trade. Both reveal, through action, that each prefers the new situation.
Economics observes the voluntary exchange.
Now a welfare economist writes something like:
Social welfare = Aliceâ(TM)s utility + Bobâ(TM)s utility + Charlieâ(TM)s utility.
The Austrian response is: what units are you adding?
Utility is ordinal. You prefer A to B. This does not mean your satisfaction is 17.3 units and mine is 12.8 units.
You cannot scientifically establish that taking $1,000 from one person causes less lost utility than giving the money to another person creates.
You can support redistribution as a moral or political position. But calling the resulting calculation a social welfare function does not transform the moral judgment into an objective measurement.
âoeSociety choosesâ is dangerous language.
Individuals choose. Individuals act. Individuals own things. Individuals bear costs.
âoeSociety decided to spend $10 billionâ usually means a political process selected an expenditure and taxpayers were compelled to finance it.
From an anarcho-capitalist perspective, aggregating millions of people into a fictional decision-maker hides the essential question:
Who decided?
Who pays?
Who benefits?
Who refused?
What happens to the person who says no?
Social choice theory deserves some credit here. Its own results expose serious problems with turning individual preferences into a coherent âoewill of the people.â
The Condorcet paradox shows that majority preferences can cycle. Arrowâ(TM)s theorem shows that no general ranking system satisfies several attractive conditions simultaneously.
The anarcho-capitalist reaction is almost sarcastic: you spent decades proving mathematically that there is no coherent social preference ordering, then continued discussing how experts should optimize social welfare.
Pareto efficiency is much narrower than political rhetoric suggests.
Pareto efficiency has a legitimate analytical meaning. The trouble starts when economists move from voluntary exchange to hypothetical compensation.
Suppose a regulation gives Group A benefits economists estimate at $100 million and imposes costs of $60 million on Group B.
Some welfare analysis says the policy produces a $40 million net social gain.
The libertarian response is simple: Group B lost $60 million. Did anyone ask them?
If A gains $100 and B loses $60, saying âoesociety gained $40â treats separate people as entries in one accounting ledger.
An anarcho-capitalist rejects the premise. A benefit to one person does not cancel an imposed loss on another person merely because an economist performs subtraction.
The knowledge problem destroys the fantasy of optimization.
This is the Austrian argument associated especially with Friedrich Hayek.
Economic knowledge is dispersed. Prices contain information produced by millions of independent decisions. Preferences change. Local circumstances change. Resources have competing uses.
A central analyst does not possess the information needed to calculate the âoeoptimalâ allocation.
A market does not require one person to know everything. Prices coordinate plans without a central mind directing the entire system.
Welfare economics often asks, âoeWhat allocation maximizes welfare?â
The Austrian response is, âoeYou do not know the relevant preferences, opportunity costs, entrepreneurial discoveries, future alternatives, or counterfactual prices required to answer your own question.â
The calculation problem is worse without genuine market prices.
This is the argument strongly associated with Ludwig von Mises.
A bureaucrat deciding whether resources should produce railways, hospitals, housing, batteries, or server farms needs meaningful prices for capital goods.
Those prices emerge from exchange, private ownership, profit, and loss.
Without genuine market pricing, planners are not optimizing. They are allocating according to administrative rules, political pressure, historical budgets, lobbying, and guesswork.
A spreadsheet does not solve the economic calculation problem. More computing power does not solve a missing-price problem.
âoeMarket failureâ analysis often compares reality with an imaginary perfect market.
This is one of the strongest libertarian criticisms.
The usual pattern is:
Real markets have imperfect information, transaction costs, externalities, monopolistic tendencies, and unequal outcomes.
Therefore, government intervention might improve the result.
The missing step is institutional comparison.
Government officials also have imperfect information. Regulation has compliance costs. Voters are rationally ignorant. Agencies seek larger budgets. Politicians respond to concentrated interest groups. Regulations create unintended consequences.
The relevant comparison is not:
imperfect market versus perfect government.
The relevant comparison is:
imperfect market process versus imperfect political process.
Once you make that comparison, many clean textbook conclusions become much weaker.
Social choice theory accidentally supplies ammunition to libertarians.
This field is less inherently collectivist than welfare economics.
Social choice theory demonstrates that collective decision mechanisms have deep structural problems.
Majority rule can cycle.
Agenda setters can influence outcomes.
Strategic voting changes results.
Different voting systems produce different winners from the same underlying preferences.
There is no neutral mechanism for converting individual rankings into a single collective preference under all desirable conditions.
A libertarian conclusion follows naturally: if collective choice is structurally problematic, reduce the number of decisions imposed collectively. Leave more decisions with individuals, families, firms, voluntary associations, insurers, cooperatives, charities, and contractual communities.
Social choice theory often asks, âoeHow should everyone collectively choose one option?â
The anarcho-capitalist asks, âoeWhy must everyone choose the same option?â
That question cuts much deeper.
The deepest conflict concerns consent.
Mainstream welfare economics often focuses on outcomes.
Anarcho-capitalism focuses heavily on means.
Suppose forced redistribution produces a statistical improvement under some selected welfare function. The anarcho-capitalist still asks whether coercion became legitimate because an economist assigned weights to different people's utility.
From this perspective, the central problem with much welfare economics is not bad arithmetic. The problem is a category error.
Economics studies choices, scarcity, exchange, prices, production, and consequences.
The moment an economist says, âoeThis distribution is socially better,â a moral judgment has entered the analysis. The economist should identify the ethical assumptions instead of presenting them as a technical output.
The harsh Austrian verdict would be this:
Welfare economics starts with subjective individual preferences, admits they cannot be directly measured or meaningfully added across people, constructs a mathematical social welfare function anyway, inserts political judgments into its parameters, and then announces an âoeoptimalâ social outcome.
Social choice theory is more interesting because much of its best work demonstrates why the phrase âoesociety prefers Xâ is often logically unstable.
The anarcho-capitalist alternative is less ambitious and more disciplined: voluntary exchange, private property, freedom of association, decentralized decision-making, and liability for harms. Instead of trying to maximize an imaginary aggregate welfare number, allow people to pursue different goals and coordinate through consent.
The strongest criticism is not âoeall welfare economists are socialists.â Many are not. The stronger accusation is that the framework gives technocratic politics a scientific-looking vocabulary. Words such as optimization, social welfare, efficiency, and compensation criteria often conceal the real political questions: whose property is taken, who decides, who pays, and whether refusal is permitted.