Apple released the Neo at just the right time, at the right price, right when the market was stressed and looking for answers.

I've been ordering Chromebooks for my district for eleven years. Prices hit an all-time low of $227 per unit back in summer 2021. Since then, prices trended up for me year after year. Last year's units were $297. This year's were quoted to me in April at $430 each. I was able to find new-in-box 2025 models for $330 each and went with those instead. I was also warned that, if I ordered Chromebooks, it might take months before they would arrive. I have a neighboring school district that placed an order, then had it cancelled two months later because Dell couldn't fulfill the order. (There are supplies of Dell Chromebooks to be found, but at the moment, Dell is prioritizing supplying its biggest vendors like CDW. Meanwhile, many districts in my area typically order through smaller in-state vendors who aren't getting the same priority from Dell.)

The market is stressed this summer; supplies are low and difficult to find. Supplies that are available are 50% - 80% higher in price than last year. Apple comes along and says "You can buy an educational laptop right now for $500", and hell yea, the fish are gonna bite. It has nothing to do with people suddenly falling in love with Apple, and everything to do with constrains in the marketplace.

And I have no love for Apple either. Don't forget that schools have been begging Apple for a decade to release a $500 student laptop, and all Apple did was thumb their noses at us every single year. Why did they decide they now they need to release a $500 student laptop? It's only because they've been losing business to Chromebooks for a decade.

"Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal." --John Carmack

I had never thought about games in this way before. When I fell in love with Doom (and gaming) as a teenager, I didn't have any social media & smartphones competing for my time, because they didn't exist. Lots more time for gaming. The games back then were made to reward you for investing more time in the game itself. There was a joy in it, discovering all the hidden places that rewarded you with power-ups. Finish a level only to find out you found 87% of the secrets? That's when the OCD in your brain kicks in, you re-load the level, and hit spacebar on every inch of wall space you can can muster until you find that hidden BFG-9000.

Today's "games" don't try to reward you in that classic sense anymore. They've turned gameplay into a casino, where you grind away for six hours hoping for that rare-item drop. They can't beat the addictive components that make up social media, so instead they incorporated some of them into the gameplay...If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess. The only winning move is not to play.

I guarantee there isn't a single city official in Kansas City that rides the city bus. If they did, they would have never voted in favor for this.

Also makes you wonder how many officials are getting kickbacks from SafeSpace Global for this.

"And....it's gone!"

I'm hoping they can upgrade the OS all the way to Windows 2000. Peak UI, peak performance, and peak efficiency.

Lawyers are some of the most overworked people on the planet. Not only that, but the work they do requires a lot of high-level thinking and processing for long stretches of time. It's exhausting work.

So along comes AI, which can turn hours of work into minutes, saving them a lot of time and work (at least up front). Of course they'll take a chance at it, especially when it lets them get eight hours of sleep a few more times a week. Besides, with better odds than a coin flip, the case will probably settle anyways, and what they write will never see the light of day.

Besides, it's very easy to skim through what AI generates and feel convinced that it's good enough. Only if one were to really scrutinize the work would one discover how terrible it is, but why bother doing all that extra evaluation...wasn't AI supposed to save you time?

...When we called them programs? Or executables? I mean, they do end in .exe for a reason...

I think there's way too many people who imagine AI to be some sort of Stuxnet, and they're letting their imaginations run wild. It's all pareidolia at work. AI is just an amalgamation of training data. Think of it like hamburger...when you look at what comes out of the meat grinder, you can't say to yourself, "That morsel came from the shank, and that little bit must be the filet, and that tidbit there came from the rib." It all clearly came from somewhere, but when blended together, you can no longer distinguish its individual parts. There's nothing at all intelligent about AI, but we perceive it as such.

Can we perhaps stop trying to anthropomorphize an algorithm?

It's just absolutely sad to think about how many billions of dollars have been burned by Meta on such stupid things. Hey Zuck, how's that metaverse going for you?

Imagine...with that same amount of money, we could have created a program that would give everyone free access to a four year college education. But to hell with all the Socialists, because clearly this monstrosity will generate more economic growth than free college for all.

Fuck our corporate overlords.

Here's my reality:

1) AI is not 100% accurate.
2) AI supplanting human thinking is a process known as Cognitive Offloading, which significantly harms learning.
3) NAEP scores have been steadily decreasing since around 2010, which research has shown has been due to the integration of digital technology inside the classroom.

Fuck our corporate overlords. They want to destroy our public schools. Don't let them drive the proverbial nail into the coffin.

If one single blog post can create so much uncertainty in these businesses that it triggers an 800 point drop in the Dow, what does that say about the fragility of the businesses themselves?

I bought myself a hybrid a few months ago. Auto start/stop on it makes perfect sense, especially when the electric motor is there to do part of the work. I have to actually concentrate hard to even notice when the engine fires up or powers down.

On the other hand, when it's a pure ICE vehicle, I'm not a big fan. Most of the time it's tolerable, but three months ago, I was driving an Expedition that shut off the engine while I was idling at a frontage road waiting to make a turn onto the street. When I began my turn and hit the accelerator, the engine turned over, fired once, then stopped, and I got an error on the dash telling me to put the car in park and power-cycle the car to restart it. I was so glad I was on a frontage road with no cars behind me, because I swear I would have panicked if I was actually on a street with a car telling me it needed a "reboot".

The last time I drank two cups of coffee in a day, I had to wake up three times at night to pee. My bladder just can't handle that much caffeine anymore. Guess I better embrace my destined dementia demise.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to run online scams in Myanmar and elsewhere in South East Asia.

I was in the Philippines last November attending a wedding. The groom was a member of the Philippine Coast Guard. He said the #1 problem he dealt with was illegal fishing. The #2 problem he dealt with was trafficking of women and children. He said they seize at least one boat every month with hundreds of passengers. These women (and parents of the children) actually pay brokers to transport them over to Thailand, where they are promised employment. Then, when they get to Thailand, they're smuggled through the country into Laos, Cambodia, or Burma to work in these locations managed by crime families, often managed by the Chinese mafia.

Never forget: slavery still exists today. The western world just outsourced it to poorer countries.