... is going. I read that as Phoebe Cates.

My guess: It's a scam, built on pre-existing 'bot technology.

When it's all done with, the "investors" will have a huge tax write off for their losses plus some neat new data centers, high end servers and utility resources to go into Bitcoin mining big time.

In related news, Netflix turns a failed $11 million investment into a $55 million tax loss.

Bialystock and Bloom have nothing on Netflix.

You bought The Bible?

Then who remains to buy iCrap?

Yes. And no.

Free apps will continue. As long as they are actually free. Anything that owes (owed?) Apple that 27% of in-app sales or other revenue sources is either not free. Or written by a very generous developer. Apple gots ta' get paid.

What do you think the current 27% fee is? Maybe replaced with a fee for Apple Store server space and installation bandwidth. That's what the now defunct Apple Tax supposedly covered. But the in-app sales revenue stream doesn't necessarily run through Apple systems. And presents no cost to them.

Time to stop coddling US industries with tax write-offs for phony R&D investments and generous depreciation allowances for capital investments. Either get to work actually innovating and building stuff. Or go out of business.

Probably true.

I'm using my converter to "rescue" older displays. Which don't do the full spec performance. So down conversion isn't an evil I must put up with. It's a necesity. I suspect many converters are on the market for exactly this reason.

The whole bugaboo over display performance and human visual accuity is best left for a flame war in another thread. But suffice it to say, the HDMI Forum and Blue Ray Disc Association are wasting a lot of energy over the insoluble issue of content piracy. The market for illicit movie copies, which is well satisfied with garbage filmed in movie theaters by people with cell phones, intersected with the set of people who insist on pristine 4K HD copies is pretty much the null set.

It's like Prohibition. Many people will be satisfied with the booze distilled in automobile radiators. Even if they do go blind. Crap movie copies will always be with us.

You had to go anonymous to post this? Pathetique...

Check the 3 year PMI at Trading Economics. Not obvious that manufacturing activity in the US has done anything but increase over the last 12+ months.

You have different statistics? Of course, we know what statistics are, don't we? Even that site has conflicting data, because there is no single measure that tells us much. Bitterness is not an acceptable economic policy.

That's so 80s. Browsers got a lot more functionality in the 90s. You were there, right?

The complaint is, at its right, AI replacing people. That's not a new fear. And I expect it to play out much like past technological changes. Not without pain. SMH not without advantages.

Here's the trick...

RISC-V is ostensibly an open source ISA. So as designers build new implementations, they may be advancing the capabilities of the ISA and contributing to the RISC-V universe.

But history teaches us that despise licensing and such, open source advances often get locked behind commercial license forks, and it is a fight to get these outfits to obey the true license. ARM suffered from this occasionally, but not like I expect RISC-V to. This chip ISA has the potential to upend the whole business.

Unless the big stuff gets locked away.

Combine Qualcomm's IP and expertise with the RISC-V platform, a nearly blank slate, and we could see cool stuff. Giving back to the RISC-V community? Not Qualcomm's strength from experience.

But RISC-V could win, if the innovators aren't locked out or patent-trolled into oblivion.

... give a little ground on the opensource drivers.

In my experience, some Linux systems still need binary drivers for stuff like WiFi or cellular. Just hold your nose while you download the Windows driver and load it with NDISWrapper.

The one guy concept has been around for a while. Sometimes they use consultants, sometimes it's the gig economy that gets them work that can be done on demand. The AI is going to be another one of those tools. But you don't need two people to have a corporation. I think that describing AI as" replacing the corporation" is really just scare talk. The AI is going to replace jobs, it's also going to make new jobs possible or attractive. As with most all technology that we've seen over the past century, we can't predict all of the effects. I don't think it's the end of anything, though. Monolithic tools that operate in virtually every facet of life bring with them the risk of singular failures. That'll be interesting to watch