Refrigerators caused many ice factory workers to lose their jobs.
Self-service gas stations caused many workers to lose their jobs.
"Computers" was originally a term for a room full of women doing math. All of them lost their jobs.
Robots have replaced many workers in factories and farms.

Despite all these job losses, unemployment remained roughly the same. The reality is that yes, new technology replaces workers all the time. Society adjusts and those workers move to other sectors that need labor. "Jobs" is not a scarce resource, labor is. There are enough jobs for every single individual who wants one and then some. The reason unemployment exists at all is that we hold out for a better salary (understandable), we are able to get by with unemployment, or live off someone else.

So stop worrying about AI taking jobs; it will happen, but people will move on to something else. Just learn new skills, embrace the change and ride the wave.

Let's say we want to fly. Should we build a machine that flaps its wings like birds? Is flying defined as the act of flapping wings to generate lift?
The HOW is irrelevant. Helicopters, planes, gliders, none of them fly like birds do, but they get the job done. There is no point trying to do what nature does, we simply need to travel quickly from point A to point B, carry payload, entertain, explore, etc...

In the same sense, how AI achieves generating content is irrelevant. Whether there is intelligence, intuition, imagination, thinking, is just a philosophical circle jerk. What matters is that the machine achieves useful results, not how it got there.

Besides, asking: does AI think? is nonsense because there is no objective mathematical definition of what it means to "think". How can we objectively give a yes or no answer if we cannot precisely define what it means and test a model against that definition? All we have is a subjective notion of "think". Every person may have different opinions, all of them valid, hence, not useful. If you really want to answer the question, then start by drawing a clear line in the sand of what is and is not "thinking", something we can actually use to evaluate a machine.

The movie theaters keep about 50% of the money. If the movie makes $700 million, the studio only gets $350 million. In addition, they rarely disclose marketing costs, but are significant.

Hence, the break-even number is much higher than what the movie costs to make.

That said, they also make money on merch, streaming, amusement parks, or any other way they can milk it.

We end up with some wishy washy numbers that don't tell the complete story.

That is enough power for a pacemaker that never needs replacement (15 microjoules J)
That is enough power for a smart ring (a few milliwatts)
That is enough power for a tracking device (like an airtag)
That is enough power for a simple digital watch (2 milliwatts)

Heck, many consumer electronics have no battery at all, like credit card chips, toll tags, pet microchips.

So yeah, a termite that can fart consistently for 5K years would indeed be useful for many consumer electronics.

According to the WHO, everyone with a BMI of 30 or more is obese.
I propose we raise that definition to 40 or more, because I don't want to be obese.

Companies need to do layoffs all the time.

A "go back to the office" mandate is a cheap and effective way to reduce personal without the drama.
When the next recession hits, we will see a lot of companies adopting a go back to the office policy.

To be clear, ARM does not really want to kill Nuvia designs. I would even imagine they are happy their ISA has a foot in the door in the windows PC market.
The threat of killing Nuvia designs is the same as North Korea's threat to use nukes. It is simply a scare tactic to force Qualcomm to pay additional licensing fees.

Linus has been very vocal about his dislike for C++.

But it would be a lot easier for the kernel to adopt safe C++ than rust, and they added support for rust for its safety features.

So your argument is that making programming easier is bad because it increases competition?

By that logic, we should code everything in assembly and COBOL. That will raise salaries through the roof.

Pulling it off would be a technological feat, especially if it is robust.

However, I have to wonder: what problem does it solve?

When Apple launched the iPhone, it solved a problem: Using the web on your phone was difficult because the screen was tiny. The iPhone solved that problem by removing the keyboard to make the screen big enough and putting a legitimate browser in the phone.

But laptops don't have that problem. People don't have a need today that would be solved by an all-screen laptop. Like the vision pro, it would be a very cool solution looking for a problem.

If Apple does release this, I am tempted to short-sell their stock.

I have google home, it sucks. It also seems to be getting dumber over time. Things that used to work no longer work. For example:

* Recipes no longer work properly "Next step" does a Google search for "next step" instead of going to the next step in the recipe.
* It can't follow a conversation. Every command runs in isolation, so you can't add follow-up questions.
* when a timer ends you say "hey google set a timer for 5 minutes", It adds a second timer, and the first timer keeps beeping.
* I get in bed, all comfy and warm and say: "Hey Google", now and then it replies "Hang on while I connect to the internet", it never reconnects, I have to get out of bed to reboot the moron.

Saying "Hey Google" might as well be replaced with "Hey Moron"

Then I watched the GPT-4o demonstrations. That little phone is much smarter than Google Home, Alexa, and Siri combined. It feels like holding a Blackberry while watching Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone.

I would gladly pay MS a monthly subscription for an Alexa-looking device with GPT-4o. I would kick "Hey Moron" in the trash and never look back.

We are in a difficult position. There are billions of lines of code written in C++, with thousands of undiscovered vulnerabilities. So what do we do?

Option 1: rewrite all that code in a memory-safe language. This is completely unrealistic, there is no way to get it done. Even if we started right now, it would take decades, and we would introduce a lot of bugs in the process that have already been debugged out of existing code.

Option 2: tighten C++ through static analysis. Ideally, built right into the compiler. Many of those vulnerabilities will be exposed and corrected as new compilers are adopted.

Even if we try to do option 1 the prospect is so long-term that option 2 is still worth pursuing for the short term. That is Bjarne's approach, he wants to establish rules and libraries that compilers can check. If you deviate from those rules, the compiler will warn you, if you stay within the rules, the compiler will guarantee some safety (just like rust does).

This is not a pipe dream, watch Bjarne's presentation about C++ safety and what can be done to improve it. Many of those changes could be done in C++26. Improving C++ safety seems to be a top priority for the C++ committee.

This is a perfect example of correlation is not the same as causation. Consider:

Who does intermittent fasting? People who are trying to lose weight.
Who is trying to lose weight? People who are overweight.
It is pretty well established that overweight people have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.

So, it is perfectly reasonable that overweight people both do intermittent fasting and have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
They also acknowledge they do not control the quality of food they eat, and they rely on self-reported data.

Apple's success has been primarily due to coming up with innovative products that disrupt an existing market:

* In 2001 Apple released the iPod which redefined the mp3 players that were popular at the time.
* In 2007 Apple released the iPhone, the first phone with a full-fledged browser, touchscreen-based input instead of a keyboard, and a fluid user interface.
* In 2013 Apple released the A7, the first ARM 64-bit processor, even before ARM had a core design. They caught everyone by surprise. Their phones have since been consistently faster than competitors.
* In 2020 Apple released laptops with M1 chip, which blew away the competition from Intel and other ARM vendors.

Apple got caught by surprise by ChatGPT.
Microsoft already integrated LLM into most of its products.
Apple stuck stubbornly with Siri for years, despite their engineers wanting to dabble into AI.
Apple won't have anything until "later this year". They dropped the ball on this.

You are not wrong, it is a bit like looking at the plumbing, and for the most part, it does not matter. But there are some things that do affect the user directly:

* X is insecure by design, and there is no way to fix it without breaking a number of applications. Malware can easily look at and log everything on your screen including passwords and CC information.

* Besides the design flaws, Xorg has had a long and neverending history of security vulnerabilities.

* X has a problem with tearing. There is no real way to fix it. Maybe you don't notice it (lucky you), but many people do. It is apparently more prominent with video.

There are performance improvements. The Wayland protocol is much simpler and does not require as much back and forth between client and server.