IMO, that's redundant. Holding companies are where brands go to die. Nothing specific to AEG. :-)

Everybody knows all birds aren't real. :-D

... because we have shoes, and can outrun the competition.

My guess would be soon as the warranty expires, given that this affects TVs released as recently as last year....

The music publishers own the mechanical and/or streaming rights. That's where it could be a problem. But given that this probably drives interest that makes them money rather than taking money away, there's a decent chance they won't care unless they think it will get them a big payday somehow.

No, it really doesn't. What it does is:

• makes it impossible to click the links at the bottom of the page (e.g. terms of service)
• forces the company to ensure that there will always be more to see by cramming in more and more padding to stretch out the limited useful data
• hides the fact that there's nothing left to see, making you waste more time on the site

There is literally never a situation where this is inherently the right thing to do (except for the company's ad-driven bottom line), because the quantity of data available is always finite. And the very design of infinite scrolling creates a perverse incentive to fill the feed with garbage and ads and padding and boosted posts and groups you might like and everything else under the sun, rather than telling you that none of your actual friends have posted anything new since you last looked.

More to the point, it disguises how much less actual use people are making of Facebook. And as people use it less, it requires padding the content with more and more garbage to hide the reduction in organic content, which reduces the production of organic content even more, eventually turning in a death spiral. But they'll hide that for as long as they can by packing in more and more fake engagement opportunities.

Agreed. Where we disagree is that I think infinite scroll inherently leads to that abuse. :-)

A lot of it really is the social media companies' fault. When I look at Facebook, my feed used to be 99% stuff posted by my friends and family. Now, it is only about 20% stuff posted by my friends and family. The rest is a combination of groups that I'm in (20%), random influencers and groups and pages that are being promoted (50%), and straight-up ads (10%). There is more garbage than content. And there's no good way to get the trash out, no matter how hard you try.

And yet, that steaming pile of garbage is being shown because for some subset of the population, seeing things that drive interactions, rather than things that genuinely deeply interest the user, causes those users to come to the site more and stay on the site more.

Meta, realizing that they have hit peak user count and can't realistically grow much bigger, have to find a way to keep the stock price from cratering because of zero growth potential, so they are abusing users to try to gain more eyeball time instead. They deliberately feed the addiction of those who have short attention spans and need continuous input to stimulate them.

The moment they started chasing engagement instead of users was the point when they became a net harm to society. And all of this social media addiction stems from that. Very nearly all of the harm that they cause stems from that. It stems from sites designed to continuously route you towards content that will be more engaging to keep you on the site longer. This is not to say that there is not room for some of that on a broad scale, but doing it too narrowly leads to rabbit holes, which are a net negative.

Fixing this requires keeping companies small, and requiring that big social media companies make their networks available to smaller companies (federation) so that there is actual competition in the marketplace. But the fact that governments should have intervened decades ago doesn't mean that it isn't still the fault of the companies. They had a choice. They could have continued to do business the way they did before, knowing that their stock price would never grow. They chose to seek revenue over user happiness.

(And yeah, it was a fun degree. Just a BA :) Decided to go back to school for a second degree on a topic that had long been of interest to me)

DNN-based, like nearly all modern AI. Not Transformers, as far as I'm aware.

Explain how this doesn't count as reasoning. Or this. To name just a couple examples.

Yes, they work by fuzzy logical reasoning. That is literally how neural networks, including the FFNs in Transformers, work. Every neuron is a fuzzy classifier that divides a superposition of questions formed by its input field by a fuzzy hyperplane, "answering" the superposition with an answer ranging from yes to no to anything in-between. Since the answers to each layer form the inputs to the next layer, the effective questions form grow with increasing complexity as network depth grows. Transformers works by combining DNNs with latent states (works on processing concepts, not raw data, with each FFN detecting concepts in their input and encoding resultant concepts into their output) and an attention mechanism (the FFNs of a given layer can choose what information they "want to look at" in the next FFN).

The theory is that people will see someone they find attractive and use this to figure out who they are so that they can stalk them. And yeah, that could plausibly happen, in theory.

In practice, Facebook doesn't know where I am right now, and facial recognition on a worldwide database is likely to produce hundreds of hits for every person, and that's assuming the person even has a Facebook account.

Also, in practice, the feature has almost no real-world utility. If you don't already know who a person is, you probably don't need to know that person's name, and if you do, then you are already probably connected in one way or another. Limiting this to people who are within a small-ish number of degrees of separation from you would fix both the stalking risk (for the most part) and the too-many-results problem, and I'd be surprised if they did not already do that, making their concern probably almost purely academic.

Locals can plan for it. People who just flew in from another country may starve to death.

It would also be a nightmare for me. Weekends are when I do personal projects around the house. If I suddenly realize that I need a screw or hinge or piece of lumber that I missed in planning, and if retail is closed on Sunday, the project stops and doesn't resume until the following weekend. And now you've cost me almost an entire week.

This also means that businesses that are only open during the day Monday through Friday might as well not exist from my perspective. I'll never do business with them, because I'll never be available to do business with them.

If I were picking days, I'd say, retail should *only* be open on Saturday and Sunday, plus maybe evenings after 6. Having those businesses open during the day when everybody is at work doesn't make a lot of sense. For businesses like Lowe's and Home Depot, people who work in construction can plan for it and pick up materials the night before. At least they would be set back by only a day if they forget something, rather than a week.

If you're going to have a guaranteed day off, what would be better would be to mandate that each individual place of business have a guaranteed day off. So half the businesses might pick Saturday and half might pick Sunday. And half the Lowe's stores would pick Saturday, and half would pick Sunday. And so on.

Better yet, have a religious freedom law that requires businesses to allow individuals to guarantee that their chosen day of worship is free if requested, plus religious holidays, up to some reasonable number per year. Let businesses figure out how to deal with that. For example, people who attend worship services on Saturday — Catholics, Jews, 7th Day Adventists, occasionally Episcopalians or Lutherans, etc. — could be a hot commodity and demand higher pay because of their availability to work on Sundays. Meanwhile, other churches would be pressured to offer Saturday worship to level the playing field, and in the end, folks would have more choice in worship times.

The name is a misnomer. It isn't backlit LEDs. It is LED backlights.

Being able to display darker blacks is actually kind of a big deal, particularly in a dimly lit room. Having crushed blacks because of inadequate ability to darken the screen makes some shows significantly harder to watch.

And it is even worse for computers. My MacBook Pro has one of those splotchy LCDs that can dim parts of the backlight, and I guess that's better than nothing, but at its dimmest backlight setting, the overall backlight still isn't dark enough to use at night in the dark by a large margin. Having an OLED panel where you just have brightness and contrast to deal with would be a real win, IMO.

Go always seemed like something of a niche language to me. Some DevOps folks, and especially people working on cloud-native infrastructure like Docker and Kubernetes, and the tools designed to run on top of them, seemed to love it. I never really heard of it catching on outside that niche, though (except within Google).