Laying off people typically means higher profits, plus you can claim that AI will replace them anyhow, signaling that you believe in AI. For Investors, that's important.

Of course we have seen largely overinflated engineering teams at big-"tech". Compare, for example, the size of the Android team to the one of a comparable project like Windows. While there were, at peak times, around 100 people working on Windows, the Android team recently had hundreds of people laid off, so there must have been many more people working there. This is why Android is so much more complex than, say, a typical version of Windows.

Having such immense resources will lead to unnecessarily complex solutions. Why think hard to solve a problem, when you can just throw 50 people at even the most trivial problem. If you set the standard, this will in fact give you an advantage. Any competitor will have to spend almost the same amount of resources to clone your product. This is why "Linux on Windows" is so much simpler than "Wine". Linux follows many of the UNIX principles, making it a much simpler system.

In a way most innovations in IT were ways to reduce complexity. This is something we are dearly missing today.

However there is something else we might see now. Complex solutions require a lot of resources to maintain them. If you have an organization with complex solutions built by many people, and then fire people... those people might not be enough to maintain the solution. We have seen that with Twitter some years ago.
This may happen in other areas, too.

However there is some beauty in it. It'll mean change. Those laid off developers will perhaps start their own projects or companies, replacing big-"tech". We might get a new era of innovation, perhaps a bit like we did in the early 2000s.

But where is the use case. You can store all the data from a case-insensitive file system on a case sensitive file system. Users typically click on filenames or use autocomplete so they don't care about case-insensitiveness. There is probably no software around that fails if it could create "FILE" and "file" in the same directory.

It's like saying, Linux should strip long filenames as Windows can just do 8.3. Yes you can use Samba to provide short file names to Windows systems, but that's an issue that must be handled in the server software (samba) and not in the file system. The file system is the wrong place for such functionality.

So essentially you are suggesting an explosion in complexity with everyone having to change their computers in major ways... just to replicate some functionality in some file systems? A functionality most users wouldn't even know is there?

Sorry, but that's nonsense. There is no universal concept of "upper and lower case" in languages, not even in the ones with "latin" script.

Asking for a file-system to do case folding for you is like demanding a spell checker inside your CPU core. If you need it (and again, nobody brought any actual use-cases for that) it's better to implement it somewhere else, somewhere where you know what language the directory should have.

I mean even if there were no security implications with it, you'll still end up with quadratic costs for file creation as you need to implement some form of "fuzzy matching".

Yes but we are talking about filesystems and natural language support. Which means that you'll somehow have to tell the file system which language the directory is in. We'd need to change all of the APIs for that. Particularly for multi-user systems where different users may speak different languages... or multilingual single-user systems, that's a nightmare.

You can't abstract that away from the programmer since it needs to know what rules it needs to apply. Having the same script doesn't mean the rules for case-folding are the same.

And then again, why do it at all? What is the use-case?

Well but even then that functionality would be far better served in the file server daemon as it already needs to do things like character set conversion and file name conversion.

Suddenly you are dealing with natural language processing on a file system level. It may seem trivial to do case insensitive matching for US-ASCII, but on a grander scale it's not.

For example in German if you have a ß-character and you want to compare that word to an upper-case version, it can be either SS SZ or . There are characters for which no upper- or lower-case variant exists. Upper-case is language dependent. For example in German-German the upper-case variants of äöü are ÄÖÜ, while in Swiss-German it's not uncommon to write Ae, Oe and Ue.

It's just incredibly hard to do that correctly. Of course it might still be worth if there was some strong argument for doing it, however nobody has brought that forward.

Generative "AI" as we currently try it probably won't ever reach "AGI". There is however a mildly interesting trend of re-defining "AGI" to mean "can produce any sort of text". By that new, much weaker, definition, we kinda are already there. You can use text generators to produce any kind of text. It's just not good text and it lack things like complex logic structure. It seems like we are trying to solve a problem in a way that makes the effort exponential. It's like trying to use a finite state machine as a computer. Sure you can, in theory, do anything a real-life "von Neumann" Computer can do with a state machine, but the effort becomes exponential. We probably have models right now that are larger than a human brain and we feed them more information than any human would ever process... yet they still can't do basic things.

So what we have at the moment is kind of a bubble. Companies invest in AI mostly to promise growth. Leadership at those companies fell victim to the religion/mental illness that's called "Longtermism" in which they believe in a future computer god that will either send them to "computer heaven" or "computer hell" depending on what they do to please that future computer.

Considering that big companies are slow moving by design, the idea that might actually lead to something like AGI might get dropped in some meaningless meeting.

I mean yes, many Big-"Tech" companies will collect massive amounts of data, but that's just a side effect for them. They know, for example, about trans-persons, but they don't do it to harm them.

On the other hand Palantir explicitly collects that data to give it to their customers. So they deliberately make lists of trans-persons... in order to give that information to the local dictatorship.

So while you might justify working for companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft or Amazon, as they do make useful products, there is no such justification for Palantir.

I mean just block those IP-Addresses temporarily and serve them plausible garbage. It should be feasible to detect them.

I've just looked at my usual supplier of TV tuner cards... and those don't seem to support ATSC 3.0 only 1.0.
I mean from a technical standpoint I can understand getting rid of ATSC 1.0, it's not well suited for broadcast applications, but the sensible solution would be to go to something normal like DVB-T2 or something.

Yes, but you can't expect people in IT to already have read that paper. After all it only came out on January 1966. In IT that's a tiny fraction of a moment ago. There are whole industries claiming they can solve the halting problem.

So what? People felt emotionally attached to Tamagotchis, too. You don't need anything complex for that.

I'm sorry, but having a laptop on an airplane is such an exotic use-case, why bother optimizing it for that?

Please Lenovo, bring out some new Thinkpads, with decent keyboards, decent, hot-swapable batteries, and so on. Devices that are designed to work and be easy to repair if they stop doing that. Machines that are optimized for function, not looks.