If this is true, it will be a significant change in strategy. The company has always played upmarket. Average iPhone prices have risen since the first iPhone 18 years ago, as opposed to falling. Around that time, I heard Apple's CFO say at a Citigroup-hosted investor conference that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".

coughcough rsilvergun coughcough

... That's exactly what the Post article means by "echo chamber".

Couldn't have said it better myself. Productivity measured how? None of these statistics and 10-30% is pretty bad if it's just productivity in "generating code" - slamming out code is usually the wrong choice. A good senior developer makes strategic decisions that improve the maintainability of code and fix problems that nobody's even reported yet, AI won't do that.

This is the most useless idea I've ever heard and I work in tech so that's saying something.

This feels like a bait article honestly. And here I am falling for the bait.

Launch costs oh yeah lets just handwave away the climate impact of that. Never mind how expensive it is to launch things either, the cost of hardware and installation doesn't matter if the CO2 goes down (except that it does because that money could be used to save CO2 emissions somewhere else, obviously).

The obvious latency issues. The wildly unreasonable cost of what it takes to fix anything that fails in orbit. I could go on but my main point here is why is this even featured here? It's obviously a garbage idea with no future.

I was with you until this heh. In my experience no they do not, they get a jr analyst to do it then take credit for the resulting reporting.

Even if the bosses aren't doing the spreadsheet work today themselves, 10-30 years ago they were the junior analysts who did the spreadsheet work.

No. SVB failed because the price of T-bonds fell. T-bills are very short-term, so are easy to manage against interest rate risk, and are highly liquid so are essentially as good as cash.

While there are plenty of scientist in the DOE, none of them are going to have any specialty in anything to do with Covid.

Wrong. The US national labs do lots of things not directly related to nuclear weapons. Consider, for instance, Lawrence Livermore's biodefense research.

If you get enough people together that value quality then over time, that culture will take hold in new people working and in the end they can get much closer to the target they seek.

That's adorable..

Meanwhile:

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Those '80s sitcoms used "Very Special Episodes" to preach. They were explicitly advertised as such, and anyway usually dealt with nonpolitical things like dangers of child molesters (Diff'rent Strokes) or teenage prostitution (The Facts of Life). Popular culture made fun of the "VSPs" if the messaging was too heavy-handed (the above child molestation two-parter, for example).

Nowadays the preaching is a) implicitly political, b) what shows are fundamentally built around, and c) anyone who expresses dislike of such is denounced as racist/sexist/LGBTQXYZphobic/fascist/[insert expletive here].

Look up which US state is the closest to Africa.

But it is such a different time now. Trolling has expanded in some people's minds to include mere disagreement.

I get perfectly civil postings marked troll. They just disagreed.

Yes, those of us who have been online for a long time remember when trolling was intentionally saying something silly/ridiculous to see how many gullible people would fall for it.

In full disclosure, I do allow myself what I call "Saturday Night CurbStomping" posts when someone is being a particular asshole. This is kind of like a service to the community, and I try to keep it amusing. Weird thing is those don't often get modded as flamebait, because they are full on napalm operations.

I know what you mean. Again, those of us who have been online for a long time know how to unleash the full force of our argument in a thorough but civil manner. It's a skill that those newer can't/won't use, because they'll immediately jump to calling the other person a Nazi or equivalent epithet. (That's not to say that calling others a Nazi didn't occur back in the day; Godwin's Law was created for a reason. But in the '90s most viewed someone who invoked the Nazi/Hitler comparison as having lost the argument.)

And the weird folks with the psychosexual problems who took over many of the groups chased normal people away.

Yes. A description I heard a while ago of the long-time problem posters on Usenet seems very apt: "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". I wrote more about this on Hacker News.

Might be a good idea except that it only filters air on the way in. So this is a tool for selfish folks only. Dyson shouldn't have brought this to market.