Yeah, you're not understanding what I'm saying: Azure doesn't just host Linux VMs, significant parts of the infrastructure are built on Linux. Microsoft has just as much (if not more) to lose from a resurgent SCO lawsuit than anyone, they aren't going to be the ones rocking this boat.

Is that a rubber duck and a doughnut?

Exactly. Especially as it seems that the AI companies are selling their tokens at below cost. Small-scale installations for local models may make sense for individuals who want to keep their data isolated, but they do not make economic sense for companies.

I was in the market for a tablet a couple of months ago because I needed something for reading sheet music.

Cheapest 13" Apple Tablet: $949

The generic Android tablet I bought instead: $179.99

I'm not saying they aren't being impact by memory prices, but they're either incompetent at supply chain management or they're milking this for much higher profits. Either way, there's a reason why this Mac and iPhone user uses 4 Android tablets and zero Apple tablets.

At this point, if I weren't locked into the Apple platform by the software I use, I'd probably be looking for alternatives on the Mac side as well. The prices have simply become absurd when compared with the rest of the industry. It actually seems worse now than in the beleaguered period when everything was custom hardware assembled by hand.

Case in point, I was seriously considering upgrading my M1 Max MacBook Pro, which cost me about $6k when I bought it. The base model of MBP ostensibly starts at $2999, but to get 8 TB of storage (which I could add externally for just $900), between all the forced upgrades that I don't care about and the whopping $3,000 for the SSD upgrade, the price leaps to a jaw-dropping $7,549, or $4,550 total just to get $900 worth of extra storage. And really, less than that, because an 8 TB SSD would give you 9 TB of storage, and that's only 8.

Apple pricing is just plain nuts now. I mean, it was painfully high before, but even as a software engineer, I'm having trouble justifying the cost of staying on the Mac platform now, with a 25% increase in prices since 2020, and I think even higher increases for some configurations.

Except time and willpower. However, the McDonald's analogy does hold up -- nobody is ever going to get rich flipping burgers at McDonald's, precisely because it requires so little skill to do that job, making McDonald's workers completely fungible. Since anyone can man a grill, no one is going to command a salary much more than what a high schooler will agree to do it for.

The economic problem with having an AI produce music for you is, you never get the opportunity to learn how to produce it for yourself. At the end of the day, you're paying them $200/month for the privilege of remaining unskilled, and you're competing against everyone else who knows how to enter "write a catchy song for me" into a prompt box. You can't make money that way, because the moment you do, the AI companies (who own all of the talent and all of the production machinery) can simply appropriate your income stream for themselves.

It's the difference playing Guitar Hero and taking guitar lessons -- both let you feel like you're a competent musician, but only the latter will ever get you a career as a musician.

First, searches of their persons and effects does not mean reading and making a copy of their letters and books. It means looking in the trunk and verifying that it is just letters and books.

Second, there were no border agents in 1789. You could walk or swim into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico freely for (statistically) most our nation's history. The first border patrols began in the 1920s to restrict immigration from certain countries. There were laws in the late 1700s regarding import of *cargo*, and that was handled by the folks who ran each individual port, but again, that's not the same thing as searching a passenger's person and making copies of their letters. Those laws applied only to identifying goods that were likely intended for sale, for tax policy/import duty reasons.

This bastardization of border policy to include searching the contents of people's papers and devices is a late 1900s perversion of the Constitution.

So no, pretty much everything you said is wrong.

It still is if you do it yourself and don't have ChatGPT do it for you. But it isn't a useful indication for parents or teachers, because the kids can just have ChatGPT do it for them, and moreover are encouraged to do so by the pressure to get good grades. By making the homework be graded only on adequate participation (which may be per-student) rather than on correctness, you shift the focus back to the homework being a way for students to get ready for the test and make it clear that having an AI do the work will prevent the teacher from knowing how well the student is doing, and will likely result in a lower grade on the test. Once the motivating factor of grades is eliminated and, in fact, reversed, they'll stop doing it, or will use it only to help them understand or to check their work, rather than using it as a crutch to actually do the work.

Any child gifted with high motivation and broad interests wants to practice stuff they already understand less so that they can do other things and learn other things. A child's time is a zero-sum game. The more time they spend doing things that are less useful, the less time they have for doing things that are more useful.

The ones who mindlessly work more problems because they are motivated to get good grades are the ones who aren't doing band, orchestra, chorus, or theater, who aren't going on field trips to learn about the world, who aren't getting the breadth of education that will prepare them for the real world, and will mostly end up in boring (but probably reasonably well-paying) jobs for the rest of their lives. They won't ever be the rockstar in their field, but they probably won't fail horribly. And I guess that's okay, but IMO it's not what we should try to inspire kids to become. The motivation should be to learn for learning's sake, and excess repetition is the opposite of that.

Meh. If that's your experience, then there's no hope for improving anything, because the kids who don't do well are going to pass anyway. This is how we end up with a bunch of graduates who can't actually do anything. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if you're right, then it's critical to fix that at the same time.

They're overlapping, but not the same group. Some smart kids are hard-working and eager to learn. Some are rule-following. Some are both. Some are neither. What I think you meant is that they are not dependent variables.

The effect of this would be that the teacher would quickly intervene and tell the kid that they need to do more of the work, because they don't seem to have fully grasped the concepts. If the kids ignore this, then at the parent-teacher conference after the first six-weeks period, the teacher would encourage the parents to either make their kids do more work or put their kids in an after-school program that would do so.

And if that doesn't work, you can also make the participation points be contingent on whether they are grasping the concepts, where if it is clear that they're not getting it and aren't doing enough work to learn it, you tell them that they won't get participation points unless they do more of the problems.

One could argue that no one is doing it in six days without a shit ton of automation support. Some cherubim in ops saved eons when he wrote createstar.pl and it's still running in production today (though it looks like creategalaxy.pl stopped executing some time ago and hasn't been restarted and/or patched yet).

This was a reasonable screed two decades ago (and probably at least somewhat factual) but today Microsoft is one of the world's largest users of Linux. It has no current motivation to harm Linux and every reason to defend it.

Nods. Sadly, it's probably not enough to bankrupt them even if this company wins, but it's a good start.

Correction, the dystopian interpretation of the constitution purveyed by our current lunatic fringe Supreme Court is that they have the authority to do so. The constitution says otherwise, but at some point, our government stopped actually reading it.

Eh? This is incorrect. Perhaps most fictional murders are premeditated, because that makes for a more interesting mystery to solve, but in real life, the vast majority murders are impulsive, spontaneous acts that happen during arguments, fights, or emotional outbursts (often with the help of alcohol and/or readily available weapons).