I still can't get ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to write a decent story or do an engineering design beyond basic complexity. They're all improving, but they're best thought of as brain-storming aids rather than actual development tools.

You just won the thread, if not the Internet.

Growing up if I wanted to see a show I liked, it was planned into my week. We had three channels in English, one in French. I remember the day we got cable. The guy came in and hooked it up, and I switched the TV from 13 to 8 to finish watching Gilligan's Island.

Know what was great about this inflexibility? I was bound to a small amount of time. I couldn't lose a weekend binge watching seasons of stuff. I lost time to entertainment in 30 or 60 minute chunks a few times a week, plus some sports.

The introduction of the DVR was when things started to go south. I could schedule series recordings for stuff I didn't know if I wanted to watch. I could watch a show while recording others simultaneously. I was effectively filling large swaths of my future time. Now there's no end of immediately available material, and if I wanted to I could fill every waking moment with streaming. It isn't healthy.

If we suddenly had to go back to a handful of channels with scheduled broadcasts, I struggle to think how we would be anything but better for it.

My understanding is that despite the competition catching up in terms of the image creation/editing capabilities Abobe is still where you need to be to when you need to manage font licensing and pantone color matching and print workflows.

I'd be happy to be told I'm outdated/wrong on that though...

When I'm in charge, that's the font they'll be required to use.

It surprises me is that there is much real tension between basic research and application development two exists in Meta. For any normal company, sure. But this is a company that spent over $70 billion dollars on VR that nobody ever wanted. And they can't fund both AI research and, separately, application development?

Hah. Momentary lapse. Pardon me. :)

They erred in the other direction. The English descriptor of "forty-three trillion, eight hundred billion per year" is correct. The number shaved a trio of zeros by accident.

8,760 hours x 5B = 43,800,000,000,000

And I, too, am skeptical. Sounds like a meaningless calculation based on really silly choices of data points.

Now, I am neither a denier nor a skeptic. I am fully on board with anthropomorphic climate change. But this kind of rhetoric is worse than useless - it's counterproductive.

I once watched a news segment where they did bacteria checks of a home of a woman who kept an immaculate house. They found contamination all over the place. I looked around my home and thought, "Well, fuck me. If she can't keep it at bay, I certainly can't, so I won't worry about it."

Pulling repeated hardware platform switches underneath without bothering customers too much is a thing that only a very competent company could do, and Apple is a very competent company.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

Apple nowadays is bound to avoid any huge missteps, because it has become a very conservative company.

Granted they blew some on the Vision Pro, but not much, for them. They folded on the electric car project, which now seems like a shame as Tesla is vulnerable.

What revolutionary product has Apple launched since Steve Jobs died? It has been 14 years, and I'm still waiting.

Somebody's going to get angry, make some threats, bluster, cave, go silent, then defend H1B while saying "America First".

Nobody in particular. Just the royal "Somebody".

As to VisiCalk being the real OG that started from nothing, there's an interesting comment on a VisiCalc youtube:

In 1969, we had to develop the world's true first electronic spreadsheet (LANPAR) within the limitation of 32k of memory - and we included forward referencing which didn't appear in Visicalc, TKSolver, Supercalc or even Multiplan I. Only in Lotus 13 years later. We even included the ability for sophisticated logic calculations, access to external data base data, and input of data in real time. Timesharing in those days was very similar to "cloud" computing now, except that you knew exactly which remote computer was doing the processing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Also at that scale who knows how much they are paying for each seat, I'm sure it's a bespoke deal. No doubt MS is making money, but I wouldn't just take the retail price and multiply it by 2 million.

I made specific points and your reply did not.

As for my worldview, you interpret posts the same way you interpret the news, exaggerating everything and extrapolating it to absurdity to make yourself upset or say something unreasonable. If you have inferred I was ever an extremist, you were wrong.