I'm less productive. Not only do I have to deal with a noisy and distracting environment, I also have to deal with the commute taking up time that I could otherwise spend more productively. Even if it is staying 15 or 20 minutes late or starting a half hour earlier, well, that's now part of my commuting time. But if leadership wants to play stupid games, they can win stupid prizes.

Macbooks are affordable? Not compared to Windows laptops.

Right now,, I can find a Lenovo with an i5 for $650. If I wanted to go cheaper, they have an AMD Ryzen 5 for under $400.

It looks like the cheapest Mac laptop is $1000.

That's a $350-$600 difference.

That's not pocket change for many people. You are seriously underestimating how much free cash some people have.

And why should they spend more? 90% of people are just browsing the web, reading emails, and doing some light document editing. Most laptops work fine for that.

Nice, the Zenmuse L3 is $18k, the DJI Matrice 400 drone to carry it $11k. So it won't be long before surveyors and the like will be selling its services.

Rats, as an architect I was hoping it might be useful to the general construction industry, but not at 3m accuracy.

In the last tech bubble, companies were spending more on gaining and keeping employees. Employees earning more money spend more money, generally speaking. That consumption drives the economy. (It turns out, the real job creators were the average person.)

In the AI bubble, companies are holding off hiring and are not interested in retaining employees. That hurts consumption, and thus the economy isn't booming.

The rich are getting richer, but that doesn't help as much to drive the economy - they don't need the extra money, thus they are less likely to spend it. Give a person making $30k a year a $1k raise, and they'll likely find something to quickly spend it on. Maybe they'll finally fix their car. Maybe they'll buy something they need but couldn't afford before. Maybe they'll actually go out to eat for a change. That all drives the economy. But give a person making $3 million a year a $1k raise, and they don't have the same need to spend it.

Which is likely why we see the stock market booming even though the economy is mediocre. Money that's not needed is often invested.

So, you're saying it is the same successful approach as hiring a code monkey to vibe-code your first website and then when you hit a 100 users and it goes down, paying to a real developer to "fix" it?

I've seen this approach, it is very common, but that's the only thing it has going for it.

In some organizations, quickly half-assing a project pushed by management with no real world benefit is not a bad idea.

Perhaps that's why management loves AI - it gives their bad ideas good metrics. And it even BSes for them!

and the boys were already ten and eleven years old when I entered their life

I hope you got a good relationship with them! My son can't even talk yet. So, right now, he's just this cute thing that runs around and causes trou^H^H^H^Hgood things to happen.

 

Well, some of that is for classes for people who can't see that default 3-pixel wide scrollbar on Windows 11 in high contrast dark mode. :-)

Fair. Just making fun of Windows 11.

Yeah, you're blessed to have one of each. Until they start conspiring against you, which you KNOW is going to happen.
ha!

Hopefully we'll raise them better than that. And let them see us honoring our parents.

You charge to "upgrade" to Windows 11? How evil are you? :P

For all my pro-life ramblings, we were granted only one child.

Precious. I feel bad you couldn't have more though. G-d has been very generous to us.

Keeping up with two toddlers after age 50 can't be easy.

And yet i wouldn't trade it for anything! Thank G-d, we have a lot of help. Especially, when some neighboring girls come by to take our son for a walk. G-d bless them all.

IPx5 is not rated for submersion.

That would be IPx8.

I'm seriously confused at how AI can do the jobs of historians.

AI clearly lacks the comprehensive of a prompt I'm giving it today. I don't trust it to be able to interpret and put in context events that occurred well in the past.

I overall agree with you - price disruption in tunneling would have so many benefits.

But at this point, I'm thinking Elon's businesses such as SpaceX is a mix of two factors: Elon not being full crazy yet, and other people successfully managing Elon's excesses.

Also, overall, techbros are like moths to the flame when it comes to reinventing mass transit poorly.

Google says about 1/6th of European buildings use heat pumps for heating. A heat pump is just an A/C unit operating backwards. A reversible heat pump does both With Europe's warmer climate, as well as advances in heat pump technology, it seems like heat pumps would be viable in most of Europe. Heat pumps are more efficient and can use greener sources of energy. As well as reduce dependence on non-EU fossil fuel sources. All of that is a win. It seems like the added desire, if not need, for A/C could be used to encourage more people to switch to reversible heat pumps that can be used for both heating and cooling.

Given that China doesn't allow everyday citizens unlimited access to the internet, we can assume the only ones allowed out are bad actors like badbot, so blocking China entirely would be a net benefit for the entire world. We'd have to get the VPN operators to cooperate, which is near impossible since they'd sell their own mothers for a quick buck.