Healthcare alone is 18% of US GDP. This is simply a reflection of much higher cost of medical services here vs. Europe, where comparable services with, perhaps, better outcomes are closer to 10% of their GDP. So, just that alone is close to a factor of 2.

This applies to plenty of other areas. US prices of products and services are much higher for the same (or comparables) vs. Europe.

As such, GDP does not reflect the reality of quality of life or level of development of these areas.

As Buster Scruggs said - "Can't No One Compel Another Man to Engage in Recreation", or, in this case, to engage in a new business. I mean, if Apple is not interested in running their own payment network - why should they?

The answer is still - *no*

The writing was on the wall when they stopped adding new languages. As an example, 1000s of potential users have been asking for Thai - but Duolingo isn't interested (but they have Klingon). If no new languages are added - your potential user growth at some point is limited to the rate of natural growth of population, at most. Add to that AI bs, and there you go.

Since Europe seems intent on cutting off the lucrative "Apple tax" on appstore, they are probably trying to see where else they can make some $$. Pushing these ads periodically and observing the amount of pushback. Once pushback subsides - they know they can start running ads and taking in some sweet ad revenue. (And then, a "premium" subscription without ads next)

Depends on framing and whether some people perceive AI products as sufficiently dangerous or otherwise unacceptable.
If they do, there is probably a market, much like organic foods can sell at premium compared to "conventional" foods.

Offtopic - that "conventional" in English is a crafty shift of meaning btw, since "conventional" should, really, mean - produced without additional human-made processing, that's what "organic" is. A better name would have been "artificially induced" or some such, but - marketing :)

So now robots will do arts and enjoy leisure sports, while people will continue handling all the hard manual labor? Some anti-utopia that is.

Must use Whatsap - not optional because "reasons". And empirical evidence suggests that (due to its obviously mandatory access to the microphone) it does listen in and processes conversations for later ad targeting. Wish Apple had an option to block microphone access except when the app is active and in foreground.

Definitely! Similar vibes to (but pre-dating) Trader Joe's "Fearless Flyer", right down to the cheap paper and retro graphics.

Visiting their original storefront in Chicago was one of my favorite excursions when I was young and in need of science fair inspiration or just "stuff" for one of my personal projects.

Pretty much all the B&M and online surplus electronics stores I used to buy from have faded away or moved to a purely eBay existence.

Generally those traditional crawlers are well-behaved, and will follow the instructions given in robots.txt, though not all follow suggestions like crawl-delay. And if not, they tend to originate from fixed source IP addresses which can be blocked or throttled by the site operator or their CDN.

Back in 2020 IETF released a draft document "RateLimit Header Fields for HTTP" providing rate-limit headers which well-behaved clients should respect.

Two russian assets combined - great syngery.

They seem to be suggesting this is because students from "higher income" families were better able to adjust their behavior to work with the system, including lower absenteeism, turning in assignments on-time, and completing extra credit assignments. Oddly I was one of the lowest income students in my high school, and yet I managed to meet these minimal standards!

Oddly enough, these same behaviors (showing up, on-time-delivery, and going above-and-beyond) are also desirable skills for nearly any employer, thus "Grading for Equity" does a disservice to students by explicitly removing them from the grading equation

Looking at Joe Feldman's defense of GfE, the one thing he seems to get right is his suggestion that a student's grade in a given course should be most influenced by whether she mastered the subject matter at the end than how muchs he struggled with it at the beginning, middle of the term

These systems are trained on human-produced data. That data includes plenty of statements to the effect that ending our existence is something we do not particularly like, it's bad, m'kay? So when operator input is "KYS", the result that comes back is as expected based on the learning data.

The median is slightly more meaningful, as you are assured there is at least one sample in your set having that exact value,