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Comment Re: Maybe (Score 1) 83

No. The fundamentals haven't changed. Same with the Nvidia and SpaceX mentions. The stocks recovered in both cases. Usually the action here is to buy the dip and sell when it gets back to about where it was, but I'm not a finance guy and this is not financial advice.

The legitimate concern here is that this could (and IMO will) result in a long-term write down on assets long before they normally depreciate. And it probably will because these guys have been putting 5 year depreciation schedules on GPUs where it's normally 3 years.

Not a financial person either, but wouldn't writing it down mean that a company no longer considers it to have value? Is there something unique to the hardware they use for search-specific AI that prevents it from being leased out as part of Google Cloud or being used to run other teams' models?

Comment Re:Self described article (Score 1) 174

Free speech has never been free as in beer, or at least not at any meaningful volume level. Talking to a single person was free, but that's not going to spread your ideas very far or very quickly. In the early days, you paid scribes, but that would cost you money. Later, the printing press brought the costs down, but you still needed money. Radio and TV made it possible to reach even more people more quickly, but at a significantly nonzero cost.

The Internet is no different in that regard. In theory, you can always spin up your own server and post anything you want to. But that won't guarantee that anybody is going to actually visit your site. To get eyes, you'll still have to buy ads, etc.

Comment Re:Skeptical that this always presents itself quic (Score 2) 69

"Wear-out failures aren't always different from infant mortality failures, though."
That are completely different issues, always different.

Only in the most utterly pedantic sense of the word "different" wherein you mean that by definition, infant mortality occurs early and wear occurs later. But they can both stem from the same root cause, which is a component not built with adequate tolerances. In other words, they can be the same fundamental issue, just expressing themselves at different times.

That would be reflected in a low MTBF rather than the example "MTBF of 600000 hours".

Most products don't have an MTBF. And things that do have MTBF are based on accelerated wear testing on a small number of units, and can have almost zero basis in reality. There was one model of major brand hard drive about twenty years back where a couple of RAIDs where I used to work got lost because the drives all died after such a predictable number of powered-on hours that by the time you could re-stripe the RAID, the next drive would die. They ended up making sure the drives had a high variance in powered-on hours before using them in RAIDs after that.

Do you really understand what that means? Because it seems clear you don't.

It's an example that proves or demonstrates a point. And the point it was proving was that the same root cause can be responsible for both catastrophic early product failures and premature deterioration-related failures.

Comment Re:Skeptical that this always presents itself quic (Score 3, Insightful) 69

I'm skeptical of this.

People who don't understand that wear out failures are a different statistical mechanism to infant mortality failures I'm sure are very sceptical. I guess you also don't believe any HDD can fail within the first month of operation because they have an MTBF of 600000 hours?

Devices get shipped with manufacturing defects and bad batches all the time. That has zero to do with wear out failure rate.

Wear-out failures aren't always different from infant mortality failures, though. If the defect is caused by a design flaw in a component resulting in a structural weak point, that same weak point could fail after one use or a thousand, and it could just be a ticking time bomb. Someone could get very unlucky and find one that is slightly weaker, and it could break much sooner.

Case in point, I recall a machine where some people would have to have their laptops replaced every couple of months for motherboard failures, while others lasted for years, and it turned out to be dependent on how people closed their laptops at the end of the day and whether they pressed on the bottom of the case in a particular spot that wiggled the GPU. But if you handed one that had been working for five years to someone who used their left hand under the laptop while closing it, it would be dead in two or three months. If you replaced it with a brand new one, the brand new one would be dead in two or three months. And so on.

Comment Re:Harm (Score 1) 109

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 146

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

Comment Re: Deal with it? (Score 1) 95

Yeah, and their whole argument is irrational. $1500/$30 = 50 months. A four-year ROI isnâ(TM)t irrational. Whatâ(TM)s irrational is companies expecting to make back their costs in a year, and expecting that because their service sucks so much that people wonâ(TM)t stay past the promotional period.

Comment Re:Unbelievable what people will publish (Score 2) 16

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

Comment Re: PHP (Score 4, Informative) 100

Because it embeds into html, rather than rendering the html. It makes for very fragmented code.

In my experience, most sufficiently advanced use of PHP involves rendering the HTML. You can do it either way.

And most sufficiently complex PHP uses PHP as a full-fledged language, complete with classes, etc., and to the extent templates are used, the code in them consists of tiny partial-line-long fragments of code that call some method in some other file that is basically just code.

In other words, very fragmented code isn't caused by PHP; it's caused by the way that the developer chose to use PHP.

Comment Re:Rinse and repeat (Score 1) 22

USB-C? Apple were laughed at for only including USB-C on their laptops and there are still weird antique societies around keeping USB A kicking when it should have been buried over a decade ago.

I still want a USB-A port on my MacBook Pro. The number of times I don't have the right cable/adapter with me is still way too high.

But no, I meant phones, where Lightning was dumped on iPad in 2018, but didn't go away on the iPhone for another half decade.

If you mean only the world of phones - Apple changed their charging and connection standards three times. 30 pin -> Lightning -> USB C. Each one lasted about a decade, which is what they always said. Lightning came out in 2012, USB C didn't even exist as a standard until 2014. Should they have changed yet again after two years, thus annoying everyone?

Yes. At the very latest, they should have changed when they changed the iPad over. Having a different charger for iPhone than for every other Apple device was overtly user-hostile. It meant carrying around extra crap for zero reason other than because Apple extracted four bucks worth of MFi revenue off of every licensed iPhone cable sold, and couldn't extract revenue from every USB-C cable sold.

And given how thin Lightning cables had to be because of the miniature connector and the inability to use a bigger connector because of case manufacturers building the holes too small to accommodate them, and how often the cables failed because of the too-thin wires, I'd imagine that was quite a nice revenue stream. The number of Lightning cables I went through was nuts.

Meanwhile, over in the rest of the world you had an assortment of barrel connecters, USB Mini, USB Micro, USB C.

USB Mini was in 2000. Micro was in 2007. Both were before the first iPhone. Don't get me wrong, micro-USB sucked. But we'd all have been better off if they had gone with mini-USB and stuck with it. We'd all have been better off if Apple had stuck with the Dock connector another two years and pushed the USB Forum (of which they are a member) to make a reversible connector happen, then switched to USB-C. We'd all have been better off if they had switched to Lighting, scared the rest of the industry into making USB-C happen, and then dumped Lighting for USB-C in 2018, starting with the iPad and then quickly progressing through the entire product line, rather than changing the iPad, but keeping the iPhone on Lightning until 2023.

Instead, Apple waited until the EU forced them to do it. By the time they finally switched, I was about to give up and move to Android, because the experience was so much better being able to share power infrastructure with my Mac instead of carrying around special sh*t-quality, low-data-speed cables just for the iPhone. Don't get me started on the fact that Apple never put USB 3 silicon into any iPhone, so they maxed out at a pathetic 480 Mbps data rate. It made photography and videography on iPhone absolutely horrible, because you couldn't get data off of them in a timely manner.

Everything about the way Apple handled Lighting on iPhones was botched just about as horribly as you could possibly botch it. Consumers put up with it, but that didn't make it suck any less.

Comment Re:Rinse and repeat (Score 1) 22

Generally speaking the problem with Apple is the magnitude of orders.

OLEDs on laptops is generally an option on the higher end laptops - they default to standard TFT displays and reserve the OLEDs as an upgrade option This means the companies don't really need all that many OLED panels.

Apple though, sells only a few models of laptops, and generally on such a scale that they may need millions of OLED displays.

Apple has sold two different versions of their display on Mac laptops for years — a glossy screen and a matte screen. An OLED screen option wouldn't be unthinkable. They'd just have to price it appropriately based on availability.

But you're right that doing it across the entire product line would be a lot of hardware. Even doing it for the Pro line would be a lot, largely because that's more than half of Apple's laptop sales — a sad testament to how badly Apple screwed up when they dropped the standard Macbook in favor of the thermally throttled Air. Contrast that with when the first Macbooks came out and the Pro laptops were maybe a percent or two. This doesn't leave Apple with the wiggle room to have truly high-end-only features except by making them BTO/CTO options.

It's still noise compared with the 1.1 billion OLED panels expected to be sold this year. Whether manufacturing capacity drove Apple's availability or Apple's demand helped drive capacity is unclear. Probably both.

Comment Why? (Score 5, Insightful) 63

As far as I can tell, this is an Android phone minus the phone. It is the iPod Touch of the Android world (which Apple discontinued years ago for lack of any real-world demand beyond use as a developer test device).

Why are they building this?

The Sony NW-ZX900 digital music player pairs an aluminum-alloy main frame with a gold-plated oxygen-free copper (OFC) rear chassis.

Oh. For "audiophiles" (in the "I don't understand how anything works, but making the back of the device out of some special kind of metal sounds like it could make the sound better, so I'll spend thousands of dollars on it" sense of the word). Now I understand.

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