Spoken as someone who well can truly cannot read a ratio.

There's a reason why companies that go by this definition don't exist any more. They got outcompeted by companies that can get people who can actually do things that matter, instead of being a school and a kindergarten for adults.

Competition is a bitch.

You're spewing the same tired bullshit...my phone is "good enough"...yeah...in the same way a microwave is "good enough" to make a burger. I have a top of the line iPhone 16. My brother in law has a new Samsung flagship as well...looks no different than the iPhone in any pic he's sent me. I have a 5yo Full Frame Camera...no comparison in any setting on a 27" monitor. I am not specifically a Fuji customer, but you're doing the same tired bullshit everyone does on one of these articles..."i don't get it, so it must be stupid."

I don't understand why people buy Lexuses, but I accept that maybe what's important to do me is not what's important to them as there's a fuckton of them on the road.

I don't honestly give a fuck about you. You're just a troll with issues beyond your ignorance of photography. I am posting because there are plenty reading this who haven't done what I have done and taken a cute kid pic with his camera the same time his wife or mother-in-law was taking a pic with her phone...and then actually looked at each of the pics later that day....who are tempted to believe your bullshit. Afterall, it would be really cool to think that phone in your pocket can successfully displace an entire large industry. No need to learn how to use a camera when you have a phone, right?...it's all the same?...all those pros are morons compared to you!!!!

For the people who are not internet trolls...photographers are not hipsters. We don't haul 30lb backpacks of gear that cost more than our car because it's a fun hobby, like brewing your own beer....we do so because the pictures are ACTUALLY better...enough that if you're getting paid, you'd get fired for showing up to a wedding with an iPhone. If your iPhone was good enough, every pro camera's internals would be that of an iPhone or Samsung, only with a hotshoe, lens mount, and nicer controls.

Every successful YouTuber starts on a phone and upgrades to a real camera and the quality difference is massive. Every pro uses a good full-frame and the difference is massive. Just because you're ignorant of the difference and really...never bothered to look....doesn't mean an entire MASSIVE industry is wrong.

They are probably factoring in the weakening USD too.

They aren't going to start making Fujifilm cameras in the US.

Tariffs are used to address systemic unfairness in trade, not because some idiot thinks that having a trade deficit is a bad thing. At best you might get a few new factories where robots do final assembly on some products, and high inflation. Best case.

Your eyesight is FUBAR if you can't tell the difference on a 70" 4k screen. If you're filming on a sunny summer day at the beach with clear skies...OK, you might fool someone if they're viewing on a small phone, but definitely not a 70" screen....film in anything but EXCESSIVE light and the differences are massive and visible, even on smaller screens. Film anything indoors? A skilled operator can make things look good...your iPhone will be blocky and noisy and look like shit.

Also, who is paying that?...that's the dumbest fucking question in all of history. It's a well-selling camera, so someone is. Just because it's not for you, doesn't mean others don't want it. I don't like gin...but I'm not stupid enough to go around asking "who the fuck is spending $50 on a bottle of gin?" They're excellent cameras for taking photos. Phones SUCK at taking pics. Their sensors are too small, the controls are clumsy and lead to shake...and it's just a lot less fun for someone who is doing because they enjoy taking pics....and that's not even considering the fact that you can use a good flash or change lenses on a real camera but not (really) on a phone

Finally, I have a cheap full frame DSLR and a top of the line iPhone. Anything indoors?....it's night and day, even on sunny afternoons. My camera takes perfect pictures with rich color and sharp images. The iPhone?...blurry, the colors are muted and wrong, lots of noise. At night, my camera can use a bounce flash and take PERFECT pictures in a pitch black room (if the ceiling is 10' and white)...really vivid color and sharp detail...in environments where a phone can't even fire. If you have someone holding a flash at a decent angle (on the camera, it looks like you're shining a flashlight in their eyes), you can even take perfect pics outside in pitch black...the same env a phone can't even take a pic in.

If you know what you're doing, a camera ALWAYS takes better pics. That's why even YouTubers all use them.

It's not a conspiracy from "big camera" or just people who have never used an iPhone....if you don't know why Fujifilm is relevant and popular, that's your ignorance...not Fuji's customers'.

I hope for America's sake that after Trump there is a big reset and things are put right. But I have little faith that the Democrats will actually do it. The damage may be permanent.

It certainly turned out that way with Brexit.

As long as the price rises are US only, it's fine. You guys pay your winning tariffs, but don't expect the rest of us to subsidize your choices.

Thanks for the detailed info and review. The hard bottoming out is an issue for me, I would need to fix that. I'll look into what the mod entails. Because of arthritis it's difficult to reliably release the key as soon as I feel it engage.

USB C is fine. I tend not use feet anyway.

Do you know if they are going to keep making them, or is this a case of grab it while you can because it might not be coming back any time soon?

Lots of things are pointers under the hood. But that's really irrelevant to the point.

Yeah, EVERYTHING is implemented at the base level in assembler, so pointers are in use everywhere. And I learned assembler first. But if that's your idea of where one should start, someone else can say we need to start with transistor theory, with just as valid an argument.

These job cuts were happening regardless of whether or not AI advanced. Low interest rates + market expansion (mobile apps + data mining + COVID increasing demand) led to a record expansion. IMHO, COVID delayed these and they would have started happening around 2020. Businesses naturally contract after expansions...a great example was the post y2k tech recession...MASSIVE, aggressive and unsustainable spending to get everything on the internet and y2k...once everyone had internet and every company had a web presence and y2k ended, companies had to downsize to sustainable levels. We created an entirely new category of consumer device...the mobile app ecosystem with the iPhone and EVERYBODY who was ANYBODY needed a mobile presence...and unlike most fads, apps are actually EXTREMELY useful for many businesses...like conventional retailers who want to do pickup or delivery models. Just like the WWW, this was a legit expansion of business function and a great benefit to the customer.

Then we had the data mining boom...I know /. hates it, but in fairness, being able to serve you targeted ads allows businesses to give away products for free. This also led to a massive expansion in providing useful apps (think Google Docs) or games for free. Yeah...there are a million things wrong with this model, but lots of companies invested a lot of money into hiring data scientists and DB professionals and big data professionals.

But now what?...we have no massive market expansion...the poor have devices & are fully connected...the mobile device market is saturated...the data broker market is saturated. Any gains in one business typically come at the expense of another. We're running out of reasons to motivate businesses and consumers to spend new amounts of money.

So now, companies have been staffing up for years...and some of their hires are total duds....some products are not really needed...but in tech, everyone had a growth mindset and wanted to hire the best talent to prepare for the next expansion and to take marketshare away from their competitors. If Amazon is laying off developers and Google isn't, then this makes new grads greatly prefer Google. So no one wanted mass public layoffs.

After expansion, you typically do need to cull a few people. Some hires just suck. Some are AMAZING in the interview and lazy or entitled when you hire them...especially when you seek geniuses. We've had HUGE issues with MIT hires...you hire some elite kid who wants to change the world and he doesn't want to design customer-facing applications. He spend all those years working his ass off to get into a top school and no amount of pay will make a real-world job with actual customers in a profitable business anything but boring AF to him...so he needs to go. I sympathize, he's an amazing genius, but he needs to start his own pioneering company, not service the needs of a mutil-billion dollar stable business. All the people who frauded their way into the interview and it shows a few years later need to go...all the people who just had a life change and no longer want to work need to go. All the people who argue with their boss on every assignment for no good reason need to go. Most MBAs need to go. :)

This should have happened around 2020 gradually, but COVID caused an increase in demand so companies held off. Then the triple threat of Elon Musk bumbling his way through managing Twitter + interest rate increases + BS AI hype gave them the cover to cut jobs. Once everyone was doing it, you had no disincentive to clean up your own organization.

AI is not causing the job decline. AI isn't useless....but it's FAAAAR from useful enough to replace an employee. It might cause hesitation to expand from people who have never used AI and believe the bullshit from Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang, but....anyone who actually uses it knows it can't even write code that compiles. At best, it can make existing developers a little more productive, but not 2x or 10x or whatever the hypemongers are promising. If someone can be replaced by AI today, they weren't a valuable employee....they were DEFINITELY underutilized before and this just hastened the inevitable.

What's our new expansions? AI? VR? Both have amazing theoretical possibilities, but have not really delivered any huge hits. My kids love their VR headset...for about 2 weeks and got bored. I don't know of any killer app fueling people to spend lots of time in VR...beyond early adopters and enthusiasts. The same with AI...it's fun to play with and businesses are investing with hope of it fulfilling the promises made...but no tangle results. No business is making money from AI with the exception of those selling AI solutions or hosting them. Once a killer AI app emerges, that will change...something that services an existing business need using an LLM (like how Uber/AirBnB/Tinder serviced business needs on mobile).

Additionally, if we get a new category of business for tech to expand to, we'll see a similar cycle of expansion, saturation, and contraction.

Paid "research" by a company that would benefit from the result? Check.

Questionable self selection of data sources ("We focus only on conversations in the United States to align with occupation and work activity information from O*NET.", "Note that Copilot-Thumbs may not be representative of overall task success, as some types of users may be more likely to provide feedback, or some types of tasks may be more likely to elicit feedback from users.")? Check.

Oversimplification? Whoo boy, they are killing it on this one. An economist is described as "Compile, analyze, and report data to explain economic phenomena and forecast market trends, applying mathematical models and statistical techniques.", which is simplified to "Forecast economic, political, or social trends.", which is simplified to "Analyze market or industry conditions.", which is simplified to "Analyze market or industry conditions." Check.

Using the thing being studied in the study ("we use a GPT-4o-based LLM classification pipeline to identify all intermediate work activities (IWAs)"? Where's Kramer? Why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you would like to see? Check.

Conclusions that defy basic logic. "Passenger Attendants" scores high on can be done by AI. Flight Attendants who bring you drinks and evacuate you in an emergency are going to be replaced by AI? Or maybe redcaps, the AI is going to carry your bag to the plane or train? Or maybe the sleeper car attendant on the train who makes your bed. Check.

Is AI taking some jobs? Probably. Is it taking most of them? No way. The tech economic bubble burst. Too many tech things have reached saturation, there's no more up and to the right for them. Companies predictably have gone into cost cutting mode as a result, and the stock isn't being juiced by 10x growth. So they are selling an AI snow job to cover up that the core businesses have reached saturation and aren't going to generate 10x results anymore. Tech is in for a hard time in the near future, not because of AI, but because people have as much social media, streaming, etc as they want, and everyone now has it. In fact many are fed up and giving up parts of it, because they have learned it's garbage. There's no new people to feed into most of the systems anymore.

Are they any good? Certainly not cheap. I would have got a Unicomp one if they still did Japanese layout. These new Model F ones do have JIS layout, but I've never actually used a Model F keyboard or these, so it's a fair chunk of change for an unknown quantity.

Support for notorious liars like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson seems to skew older. Boomers and early Gen X. A lot of them seem to be getting their information from Facebook, and shitting on information that is credible.

It's not the wasps, it's whatever irradiated them. Clearly it is accumulating.

Huh. Ford is indeed second from the top of the EV market at 5.4% as of 2023 but Hyundai is close behind at 4.7%. Methinks thou protest too much.