Linux MD raid had a spat of random issues were it appeared that multiple disks without a partition suddenly got partitioned (on a boot). And at least some of those people NEVER dual booted (so no windows). The leading theory was that a bios/EFI update decided that disks that it did not identify as having data needed to get "fixed" and have a GPT partition table on it. There were 3-4 different people that reported this in a 2-3 month window with none since then, with a wide variety of controllers, but a number of them started after firmware updates or motherboard replacements/upgrades. And I know enough "smart" developers that love to write code to "fix" things that they "know" are wrong and simply don't understand. I have also seen a software update "fix" (ie change) the partitioning because they decided the old way was wrong and did not consider there might be data on it.

In the recent past no one tracked most of these conditions that people get in old age. Alzheimers was first named in 1901. And a lot of people died young enough from various untreated common bacterial infections to reduce the size of the population old enough to even get Alzheimer's. Historical data is fairly limited, the data we have is at best poor to non-existent (not tracked, health so poor as to make what data that existed useless to compare), and for the most part we only even have useful data from that last 70 years ( before that general health of most of the population was generally so poor that a significant number of 18-25 year olds were not healthy enough to join the military in wwi, 11% had VD, 10% had TB, and there were other issues that disqualified).

Most of the "new" diseases we currently find are simply noticing some disease that was always there but our data was not good enough to identify it.

Ie like Zika. It was first identified in 1947, and at the time studies (in the area were it was found) identified that 6% of the population had anti-bodies for it, so no telling how long Zika had been around, and Yellow Fever and other similar tropical infections that were more lethal were bigger issues that would have made looking for Zika and other less lethal diseases not a priority.

So it is likely that Alzheimer's was always a problem but not really identified as anything other than one of the symptoms of "old age".

A bubble/hangover from all the money wasted on AI (basically a giant correlation engine) seems more likely than the Singularity.

I don't see any evidence that current AI is much more than the original Eliza program from the 60's on steroids.

And AI is making people stupid because they believe they can rely on it even though any answer it provides is just an answer provided by some other person someplace on the web. At best it is a better search engine except for the fact that it fails to provide a right answer often enough to make is useless.

They seem to be asking for a survey to make everyone "FEEL" better (after support calls and the like), but based on nothing changing and no responses I don't believe ANYONE/ANYTHING processes and/or reads any of those surveys. They surveys are just there to placate everyone.

It is similar to "your call is important to us, please stay on the line" and everytime I say to myself "if your call was important to me you would have more people to answer".

It boggles the mind how stupid companies are (both the employers and say BANKS). They want to train people to look for spam from 3rd parties, and then they send surveys and actual critical information that they want answered using 3rd party sites.

This is probably the #1 security violation (sending and expecting employees and others) to use/answer a 3rd party site that companies do without a single thought that they are increasing their security risk by their own actions poorly though out actions.

TimberSil/glasswood 10-15 years ago had lots of similar claims (wood pressure treated with sodium silicate--fireproof, rot/insect resistant). The company seems to have went away in a fury of lawsuits as most of the claims of how durable the product was were overblown.

Real non-ai tech support also does this, so AI is "improving" to be just has crappy as real 1st/2nd tier tech support. I have had non-ai tech support make random claims that make little or no sense to attempt to explain (and get me off the call so they could close it) the issue I was reporting. It is done all of the time, and seems to ignore what the software should do and/or what the code was designed to do. The goal seems to be to make something up to justify what is being experienced but they have no consideration of if it is even supposed to work that way or not, or if it is even reasonable to work that way.

Tech support often does random correlations/observations. They will declare that a Firmware upgrade fixes this (when if they had simply just rebooted and reset the hardware the device would not repeat the issue for years--ie it is "fixed").

No one with REAL intelligence would believe their AI/Neural net is actually Intelligent and know it was just a mostly well trained massive pattern matching program with no actual understanding of the underlying data. Hence the misfiring when the pattern matching does not quite match what it was trained on and giving random responses that make little or no sense but were the closest match.

Too many clueless people parroting AGI is just around the corner, when we really do not even have very good task specific AI, we just have a pattern matcher that can repeat what it has already been trained on and is in no way intelligent.

Checkers is a bit too complicated for T.

Tick-Tac-Toe maybe, but still tipping over the board because he loses even when going first...

The incompetence was using Lithium NMC batteries in the first place for a stationary application.

Companies in the US and Japan developed NMC batteries because they had higher power to weight. And power to weight makes sense in vehicles to boost range, but in stationary applications that power to weight really does not matter. Because they focused on the NMC batteries, they did not develop the safer (but lower density) LiFePO4 batteries (but Chinese companies did). Because the US/Japan only has good NMC batteries they use said NMC batteries for everything even when the density is not needed and ignoring the fact that once they catch on fire they are almost impossible to put out, unlike the LiFePO4 cells.

China uses LiFePO4 in vehicles, and even Tesla used to put them in one model but because the batteries were not domestic the vehicles did not qualify for as many tax credits.

One wrong step of we need high density and ignore the fire risk, and don't develop anything else. Given enough installations of NMC batteries a fire WILL happen simply because any manufacturing issue and/or accident will start a fire, and once started it will be very difficult to put out.

I am not sure how this is news.

To update the microcode you need to either update the bios or get firmware placed on the machine for the kernel to load. If I can do either of those I OWN the machine anyway and can pretty much do anything to the OS and you can trust nothing.

We all know they claim to be "critical thinkers" and their definition of "critical thinker" seems to be what the rest of us define as "mindless followers".

If someone says they are a "critical thinker" that is a big warning sign,

HPE is where bought companies go to die. I was a customer for a long time, they could not innovate with anything, and even writing simple software to do something useful was beyond their ability (StorageEssentials and other hyped products never worked and in some cases "the machine" could have absolutely never worked but HPE's management believe their own hype even though it was clear "the machine" already existed bit was physically large and all of the magic they claimed "the machine" could bring did not exist with the physically larger device because what they claimed would happen no one knew how to do and "the machine" was not magically going to change that).

Most big companies buy a successful company because they could not get into that market, and then typically they screw up the company they bought in very similar ways as to what caused them to fail in that market, or they buy the successful company(with good money) when it is already starting to go down and it keeps going down.

the money they use on the buybacks could be used to survive the blips. The buybacks make the stock look better, but reduce the companies cash on hand balance.

"staggering incompetent" is overestimating their competence.

I have heard it stated that corporations make money in spite of themselves. Typically because they are in a market where an idiot can make money so long as they can invest in stores/inventory and not do anything too stupid to ruin it.

Going out of business is typically doing something too stupid that costs too much money to survive.

One of the big ones is over optimizing everything so you don't have many capital costs and everything is a day-to-day expense and you are living paycheck-to-paycheck which works until there is a slight few months blip that cause a cash flow issue and you cannot make your loan/lease/payroll because you own nothing and have to pay for absolutely everything. Using blip survival cash to buy back stock is another way to over optimize.

But the stock market rewards all of these moves as they make the numbers look better (though often not actually be better).