Of course, with Apple dropping support for the Intel macs, I have to replace my mac too, but there’s no chance I can skip that, since I need it to develop iOS apps.

It’s been very problematic for my customers. I have an original threadripper in my CAD machine, and with Microsoft dropping windows 10 support, I’m going to have to replace it to upgrade to windows 11 in the near future. I’ve been seriously considering switching entirely to Mac instead.

You're probably right. The app makes no money if the owners can't sell the data because it's already leaked.

Yeah. There have been productive uses of AI, like that protein folding project, but those generally are limited to very specific datasets, very specific objectives, and professionals who already know what the end goal is, they're using it as a tool and have the capability to discern quickly if what they're getting back is plausible and accurate.

But that said, there are still cases where professionals within a limited field have tried and failed to use AI. The most visible of these is the practice of law, where lawyers who don't understand how AI works used it to draft filings that were 'hallucinated' garbage full of fake citations and other things that the lawyer should have researched. I suspect that the lawyer didn't use a law-oriented AI though, just a general purpose LLM, and thus the AI was full of crap that had nothing to do with actual law. Hell, it might not have even had an index of topics specific to law and was consulting youtube comments or internet forums full of opinions that weren't based on actual law at all.

For AI to work it would have to be tailored, even siloed to specific subjects. It would need researchers maintaining its dataset. It would even need the skilled professionals using it as a timesaver to go through what it spits back at them to confirm that it's right. Recalling that law example, there's a whole lot of caselaw out there, lawyers and firms have typically had to employ armies of paralegals to do all of the research for precedent and interpretation. A law AI could help do that job if it sticks to real, actual law as-passed by legislatures and as-interpreted by courts, but even if the use of AI could reduce the labor needed to do all that research, it would still be necessary to review what the AI provided and to confirm that those citations really exist and really say what the AI thought they said.

It was literally impossible to predict this, after how effective all these little warning labels have been.

That's about the only thing that such a centrally-managed setup gives, it forces a shift in the bureaucracy to make the oligarchy's mandate happen. The problem is that this may not account for things like environmental degradation, harm to the general population and other issues surrounding personal rights, etc.

Something of a compromise approach can be reached in democratic countries, but it requires all of the stakeholders from the federal officials down to the local building code inspectors during the construction process to be onboard.

What China does for 'the people' may well not be good for individual Chinese persons. Similarly to what the Soviet Union did for 'the people' was often quite harmful to individual persons.

The same goes for the size. It's pretty clear that scientists were ballparking its size in metric units, and converting the fractional units with that much precision was stupid. Calling it "about a hundred feet or thirty meters" would have been a lot better.

And this sort of thing happened long before AI was in the picture. People don't understand significant digits, and it's worse when it comes to estimates.

As for distance away, it would have been better to include something like its closest approach puts it around 3/4 of the distance to the Moon.

So there are two schools of thought on a premium product. One takes the mid-market product and cobbles-on a bunch of bells and whistles. The other designs the basic product itself to be of better quality even without bells and whistles.

I much prefer the latter. We bought a SubZero because the 40 year old SubZero that was installed when the house was built finally had enough rust developing in the housing itself that it was time to replace it when it had a cooling loop issue. If the new SubZero manages to go even twenty years I'll be quite happy with it. It's just a fridge. The only 'port' is an 8P8C tech/management port for troubleshooting, it doesn't do Ethernet, it doesn't do Wifi, it doesn't connect to anything in order to work, it just functions and lets a service tech get extended diagnostics while on site.

The trouble with the mid-market product that is turned into a premium product by cobbling on a bunch of crap is that it's ultimately still just a mid-market product underneath it all. When the stuff that was designed to the price-point for that middle-market position wears out due to those design decisions, it doesn't matter if all of the ancillary bolt-on crap is still working or not. It may well be due for the scrap heap because it's not worth the costs to repair it at that point.

So my advice would be to skip on the fridge with the screen and Internet connection. There's no point in buying durable goods loaded with commodity hardware and software.

So... Brazil ?

I guess that'd be more 1984 than Brave New World though.

The golden age of TV ended when the scripted age of TV gave way to low-effort 'reality' TV.

Yes, they could try to locate everyone that manages to use banned technology like this, but as commodity-level technology designed to be used by even unskilled individuals, they're not going to be able to stop people from using technology. All they'll be able to do is to punish them after finding them.

Don't misunderstand me, my wife has a bachelor's in mechanical engineering from MIT and has worked in the aerospace and defense industries for her whole career, and through her alumni club I've been friends with a bunch of other engineers and materials scientists. They have just about all done very well.

On the other hand I know two people with masters' degrees that are basically doing white-collar clerical work. I have no college degree, most of the people on my team don't have degrees, and I'm on the same team and at a roughly comparable role with those that do have college degrees. And I have a technical job too.

My point is that having a degree can be lucrative, but it can also provide nothing of additional value. If it provides nothing of additional value then it's an expense that isn't providing a return, so it's actually a detriment, not an advantage, and the degree of detriment is based on how much it's saddling the individual with debt.

I was rather impressed when someone got DOOM to run on a color printer.

And of course the frame-rate jokes were pretty damn funny even though it wasn't running by printing a frame at a time on paper, amusing as that would have been.

But can it play Crysis?

I didn't need more tchotchkes. Putting a CD in the microwave for a few seconds is amusing the first time, possibly even the second or third, but the novelty wears off very quickly.