I was never sure that they had the "best engineers", but they did have the best processes to make IC's.

They had (and still have) excellent engineers, but a terrible corporate reward structure. In my experience with them, engineers who worked on expensive high-margin products were rewarded and promoted. Everyone else was shoved aside.

Ever wonder why Intel made zero inroads into low-cost computing? They had the processes and the talent to do it, and even made an attempt with the (now cancelled) Galileo, Joule, and Edison product lines. But every time I contacted their Galileo group, a completely different group of engineers were running it. It was a dead-end career move at Intel, and every competent engineer tried to get out as quickly as possible.

Until and unless the internal corporate reward structure changes at Intel, the death spiral will continue.

Like most of the ills of academia, this one is largely self-inflicted.

For decades, promotion & tenure committees have held junior faculty to standards that they themselves could never have achieved. You'd have P&T committee members passing judgment on assistant professors who had published more journal papers than any three of them put together. It didn't matter - the bar was constantly raised.

So faculty increasingly turned to the MPU (minimum publishable unit) strategy - chopping up what should have been one really good paper into five or six mediocre ones. Even before AI exacerbated this problem, the crapflood of journal submissions was overwhelming reviewers and journal editors.

And now? It's become even more nightmarish. Many of my colleagues simply refuse to review papers any longer. They're done wasting their time going through ultra-dense text with perfect grammar and spelling that was clearly written by ChatGPT. There have even been Ph.D. students who attempted to pass their qualifying exams with immaculate presentations on material that they could not answer even the simplest questions about. So now we're moving into the second phase of the rot, where students who earned fraudulent Ph.D.'s become the next generation of faculty.

Academia will not be a pretty sight twenty years from now.

Tan said Intel will instead focus on "edge" AI that operates directly on devices rather than centralized computers.

And will those "edge" AI devices have to sell for $1000 each in order for the engineers who design them to be rewarded and promoted within the company?

That has been Intel's doom for the past three decades. The employees working on high-end products with high margin sales get all the attention and promotions. The ones working on high-volume, low margin products go nowhere. That's why Intel has made so little headway in anything beyond enterprise products in recent years.

This new "focus" will go nowhere unless Intel's corporate culture is vastly different than what is was when I last dealt with it.

I rountinely use LLMs for cleaning up prose in various reports. As a proofreader and editor, it's the best tool I've ever found.

For creating reports from scratch, you have to be careful. It's not perfect, but it will get you 85% to 95% of the way there on a first cut once you feed it the data. It's no replacement for a human, but it does save a lot of time.

I also use it for email. When I have an important email to send out that must be "perfect", I'll run my draft through ChatGPT and ask it for a review, and to show me what it changed, and why. More than once, it has caught a missing word or a clumsy phrase.

So yes, LLMs are not a gimmick, and they do increase productivity if used correctly.

This year, enrollment grew by only 0.2 percent nationally, and at many programs, it appears to already be in decline, according to interviews with professors and department chairs.

At my university, we've seen an 8% decline in CS enrollment since Fall 2022. It will probably be even worse when the Fall 2025 numbers are tallied. On the plus side, students are rapidly moving back into other engineering majors again, with several seeing 20% to 60% growth over that time.

Unfortunately, our adminstration decided back in 2021 to put all their eggs into the CS basket (i.e. faculty hires, budget allocations), just before the CS bubble began to burst. Other engineering programs are now desperate for money as their enrollments soar, but I expect that it make take a few more years before the message percolates up to the Chancellor.

Heaven help all colleges where non-STEM administrators decide to implement their visions about the future of STEM.

Yup. They are every bit as culpable for climate change as the fossil fuel companies. Now they complain it will take too long. Well it has taken a long time for us to get to where we have 400 reactors and 12,000 thermal coal plants in the world, so it is indeed going to take a long time to fix. Best start now rather than whining about how long it will take, that's the reason we are where we are in the first place.

Or to paraphrase a well-known saying: "The best time to build a nuclear power plant was twenty years ago. The second-best time is today."

The rise in the use of signal jammers is due in no small part to the popularity of WiFi-connected security cameras. For example, signal jammers are very popular tools among professional burglary rings. They've hit multiple homes in the pricier areas of the county I live in.

Companies like Ring have been very successful in convincing consumers that "Ring = home security", when in fact Ring cameras are a terrible choice due to the fact that they must have a WiFi connection in order to operate. The burglars scout out pricey homes in neighborhoods where no one ever talks to their neighbors, and houses are isolated by distance, foliage, and fences. And it just so happens that the owners installed Ring cameras.

So the burglars drive up, activate their jammers to knock out both the Ring cameras and the cell connection for any burglar alarm, then clean the place out. Even if an alarm goes off, chances are that no one will hear it, or call the police if they do.

If you're truly serious about video security, you need hardwired cameras with onsite storage and battery backup. You might still get robbed, but at least you'll have something to show the police.

The interesting part is the human psychology behind it, i.e. what causes (allegedly) intelligent people to perform a necessary test, and then simply ignore the results of that test when the results aren't what they had hoped for?

That type of behavior (ignoring inconvenient facts that fail to fit your desires or opinions) is so common that it's practically the norm for humanity. Someone who can look at the facts and accept a conclusion that will cost them money or social standing is a very rare bird indeed.

Rush only killed four people besides himself. Politicians with similar mindsets have been responsible for the deaths of millions. In that sense the world is lucky that Rush's influence only extended to OceanGate.

You could replace "mosquitoes" in that headline with polio, smallpox, measles, AIDS, malaria, or any one of a thousand different pathogens. No one is agonizing over eradicating them.

If a particular species of mosquito is a vector for a deadly disease, eliminating that one species provides a net benefit. You don't have to kill all mosquitoes, just the species that are truly dangerous. So yes, do it.

So are you advocating for the repeal of all the bill off rights, or just this one?

No, I'm pointing out that aerial photography of private property is absolutely permitted (and legal) under specific circumstances. I can go to Google Maps right now and see which of my neighbors have swimming pools and decks. So where was the ACLU back when Google started doing this? Clearly the 4th Amendment is not preventing Google, Apple, or anyone else from taking aerial photos.

The gist of these complaints is "I spotted a drone near my property, so the government must be spying on me!" There is zero proof from the news article, or from the ACLU brief, that the county has captured any information that could not have been captured from a helicopter or aircraft. The drone is just a lot less expensive.

On top of that, the people who are complaining are doing so because their own local govenment cited them for codes or zoning violations. It is the job of your local government to enforce those regulations. Just because you built that unpermitted hot tub behind that 8 foot fence and got caught doesn't make you a victim of illegal surveillance.

You can take pictures from the street in front of your house but not from the air? Hard time understanding this.

For that matter you can also take photos from an airplane, helicopter, or satellite. So where's the outrage there?

There is no indication that anyone's "privacy" was violated beyond their desire to keep their code violations hidden from regulators. You can see the image in the SFGate article that the woman is suing over. You'd be hard pressed to spot a human figure in that photo, but you can definitely see the hot tub she built.

That just means that most of the writing you do is useless or of negative worth.

No kidding! You are absolutely correct. These reports that I must generate as part of my job are the type of meaningless verbiage that middle-manager types with too much time on their hands demand on a regular basis. They're a waste of electrons.

Does anyone actually read them in detail? Of course not, but that doesn't change the fact that someone wants to see them.

The modern world is full of pointless documentation and record-keeping. An LLM can save you countless hours creating it, if you use it intelligently and double-check what it produces.

Exactly what do LLMs "produce"?

If you expect them to act as finders of fact, or to think creatively, you'll be disappointed. But if used properly, they dramatically increase productivity. LLMs are the best writing assistants you could ever hope to find.

Yesterday I uploaded 22 separate status reports into ChatGPT, then asked it to summarize the findings and plot the statistics. It did those things flawlessly, and in a matter of seconds. It would have taken me hours to copy & paste while compiling the numbers. ChapGPT provided a report in Word format along with tabulated results in less than a minute.

So yeah, a lot more useful than Bitcoin.

Are they getting trolled here; or do the fundamentally misunderstand why people find them creepy? This is basically "Zuckerberg thinks that AI friends are the solution to loneliness" the movie"

As much as I hate to give credit to one of the world's leading techno-sociopaths, Zuckerberg isn't entirely wrong. My wife is a social worker who works with lots of shut-in patients, and in many cases even an AI companion would be better than the complete lack of human companionship and interfaction that many of them have. There are a great many depressed and lonely people out there, particularly since the pandemic.

Always having someone to talk to who cares about them and never gets bored or frustrated talking to them would be a boon to some patients, if it was done properly. On the other hand, I would never trust any AI companion that Zuckerberg or Meta came up with.

I've long wanted a bright array of IR lamps to put around my license plate holder to blow out traffic cameras....

Too late for that. Camera manufacturers are transitioning to white light illumination with IR filters due to the prevalence of 3M printed plates which have terrible IR reflectivity. They'll even read paper plates at night.