I used duckduckgo for a while. I switched to Kagi last year. Not everyone is willing to pay, up front, for search. But if you do, the experience is even better, because there are no ads to watch out for at all. Everything is search results.

Except that non-ai search engines still work, whereas Google does not, unless you manually step in to tell it what to do. Still a reversion. And not an unavoidable one

The reason Google rose to dominance is that their algorithm accounted for trustworthiness. You didnâ(TM)t need to know the site that had your answer, Google knew it, and ranked it at the top of your results. This is basically asking you to manually do what Google historically did automatically, which is to vet websites that might contain answers to your queries. All so that they can inject LLMs into a process that does not need them. Yet one more reason Iâ(TM)m glad I ditched Google.

It's not a remotely level playing field. One soldier who took part in the Venezuela raid basically had orders in hand when he placed multiple bets on the timing of the raid, netting a ton of money. There have been many other examples of inside information being used to stack the odds.

This is absolutely not true. There are plenty of people in the financial side of a business that have information that is material but non-public, and trading based on that knowledge is illegal, including sudden cuts in spending, audit results prior to publication, and more. HR will be aware of major layoffs. Facilities might be aware of impending site closures before they're announced. All these things can be used for insider trading.

Lower-level people aren't usually pursued because they're small enough to fly under the radar. But that doesn't mean it's not illegal, and it doesn't mean it never happens.

Shareholders have this odd habit of wanting their CEO to do things that increase the profitability of the company. Given how many businesses are fleeing the anti-business climate of California for Florida, Texas, and other business-friendly states -- and thriving in those new states -- they might just give him a raise.

And yet, with all that economy, they still can't make budget

One could be forgiven for saying they can't afford to lose a single dollar of potential tax revenue.

They already have a planned rotation. There will be two crews, rotating every four hours. This isn't unlike existing long-haul flights, except that instead of the crews rotating at the same time, they will be on two-hour offsets. One pilot will stay for the first four hours, the other for the first two hours. A replacement will swap in at two hours and stay through the sixth hour, and then the other will swap at four hours and stay through the eighth hour, and so on. Qantas said that this will apply to all flights of 20 hours or more.

I will not write it, Sam-I-Am,
I will not offer colored ham!

Most comms software is better handled by a service. Email, chat, phone, etc. Let someone else deal with the problems of maintaining it. Almost everything else is worth discussing.

Potentially, but not necessarily more than they're going to spend on the work.

Maybe Apple sees it as just the right thing to do. Apple has access to enormous volumes of data that they could monetize if they wanted, but they don't. They jumped through a bunch of hoops to make Lockdown Mode that, if the user screws it up, means that everything is lost. They are unlikely to be making money on that, especially since it limits some app installations and functionality, and they're not going to get fined by anyone for not having it. There is, in fact, a real risk that someone is going to fine them for being unable to recover the data.

It holds a legal and fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of its shareholders. Tim Cook rather famously told off an Apple shareholder who asked him to commit to pursuing only programs that would be profitable, saying, "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI."

That's just one small example by a powerful CEO after a shareholder initiative was shot down 98-2, but most companies spend money on things that reduce profits or are not profitable. Look at the sprawling HQs with fancy buildings that are set up by so many companies when they could have gone with simple brutalist architecture. There are companies that pay well because it promotes long-term stability even at the expense of short-term profits.

I get that these big companies don't deserve blind trust, but understanding what their obligations are is much more helpful than oversimplifications.

Some industries do it. Most run on standard schedules year-round, at least in the US.

Business drive personal schedules. Bigger businesses won't shift because it complicates internal work. That means smaller, local businesses largely won't shift because they often need to match their customers' hours. The end result is that people who are expected to show up at 8:00 for work now will still have to show up for 8:00 then, even if it's two hours before sunrise.

I credit most of SpaceX's success to CEO Gwen Shotwell. She keeps things going even when Musk is off on an irrelevant tear somewhere else.

Unfortunately, Musk seems to be on a path to sabotaging her efforts. The SpaceX prospectus showed that xAI (which bought Twitter, because why not?) was the reason they posted a loss in the last fiscal year. Even with all the expenditures on Starship, SpaceX would have been profitable. Like every other major AI company, it is not at all clear that xAI can reach profitability anytime in the near future, especially since xAI is blocked from so many enterprises and doesn't seem to be able to keep up with the big three at all. As Starship production scales up, the costs are going to increase, and they need payload revenue to offset those costs. There's so much focus now on the Pez dispenser and the lunar mission that I haven't seen any hints of the conventional payload delivery version (aka, "Chomper") in a couple of years. Maybe it's being quietly worked on. I hope so, because the big space station payloads that were talked about a few years ago will need it.