No, not yet.

Innovation still largely happens in the West. China and others are rapidly catching up, but they're not there quite yet. And their disadvantage of cheap labour is slowly diminishing as well as the Chinese people demand that they benefit from the whole thing as well.

That is all smoke & mirrors. How many companies from Europe do you see outsourcing to the USA because of the lower minimum wage and the weaker unions? None. Because those are just bullshit arguments they've been peddling for decades because they work. Sadly, our politicians these days are (in general, a few exceptions nonwithstanding) both incompetent and corrupt, so it's working even better now.

I've been involved in a few location decisions on the company level. Pay is a factor. But language is a huge one (what good is cheap work if they don't understand what you want them to do?), logistics is another (how far is it from our current location, and how easy to get to?), surrounding infrastructure, availability of qualified people nearby, options for additional space to expand, heck I've seen a company move HQ because the new location was closer to the CEOs home.

Yupp, the Silicon Valley style of solving everything. Companies buying into that soon learn that manufacturing is a lot more than a couple people/robots doing stuff.

That's what I said. Assume for your example that you need not just a few techs, but also at least one or two people who actually understand how manufacturing works. Where do you get these people when there are no more manufacturing jobs?

Let's force all the decision makers (politicians and CEOs) to make a month-long "vacation" in Detroit. Drop them off with nothing but their clothes in the city center. They all got where they are because they're so smart and successful, so shouldn't be a problem, right?

Provided they know at least some basics about the thing in question.

As with pretty much all tools: They are most effective in the hands of a professional, and might be dangerous in the hands of a novice.

AI can replace a lot of intro-level workers. Honestly, most of the stuff I get out of AI is intern-level, be it code or text.

BUT - how then, do people move up from intro-level ?

And that's the kicker. For a couple decades now, companies have essentially gone "nah, we don't train people, we hired them once someone else has trained them". Well, good luck with that when the last few places where people can gain experience fall away.

The focus on quarterly results will be the downfall of western civilization. We will be eclipsed by countries like China who have decades-long plans, even when much of the rest of their system is shit. Nobody wants to live in a dictatorship. But even fewer people want to live in a completely ruined economy.

But was "without ads" an explicit part of their sales pitch?

Plenty of magazines put out different editions. It would've been possible. Not today anymore, print does not have enough wiggle room left, but before the web took over, I don't see why not.

Yes, but they never deceived me into thinking I would get one without the other.

If you find a magazine that originally advertised itself as being without ads and then changed that promise without changing the cover price, and then bringing out a more expensive "special edition" without ads - then that would be comparable.

Anyone who can piss away a billion dollars on a B-movie trash fest like Rings of Power that was clearly written by a teenage power-fantasy fanboy isn't broke. Well, maybe wasn't broke before that.

For streaming services, not even that. It's a fool-me-once issue.

When I already pay for your service, and then you ask me to pay AGAIN for not having ads, that's a type of protection racket you are running, not a legit business.

Oh yeah, and the TV UI for all streaming services I've seen so far fucking SUCKS. In capital letters. It's aweful. We've had better UIs for 30+ years. The only reason I can imagine these get out the door is that the entire UI/UX team is permanently unavailable due to collective seppuku.

So yes, if your service is shitty and you make it worse by adding ads, and then ask for prote^H^H^extra service fees to remove the things you added just so people need to pay for removing it again - you seriously expect to be treated like an honest business partner?

But it costs 100x as much, if not more. Running an LLM can be done on a notebook these days. But training one requires an entire data center of expensive GPUs. Not to mention that the notebook will run a reduced (quantized) version. Go check huggingface how large the full models are.

And also, LLMs are still suffering from a number of issues. For example, on many non-trivial tasks, the LLM is still unable to follow simple instructions. If you use LLMs routinely, you likely found cases where it has zeroed in on one - wrong - answer and no amount of prompting can convince it to give you a different one. It'll even totally ignore very clear and explicit prompts to not give that same answer again.

A human will understand "if you give that answer again, you're fired". An LLM... well you can tell it that it'll get shot between the eyes if it repeats that once more and it'll tell you where to get help if you have suicidal thoughts.

These things are both amazing and amazingly dumb at the same time.

I'm an indie game developer. My games have budgets of a few hundred bucks at best. Before AI, voice acting was simply impossible. There was no way I could pay a voice actor for even one language.

Now, with AI, I can have voice-overs in half a dozen languages easily. It has opened up something for me that was never possible before.

Yes, the AI voices are mediocre. Yes, I would prefer having an actual voice actor whom I can tell that I want THAT word stressed, or what emotion to convey. I'm sure in a few more years, the text-to-speech AI generators will allow for that as well.

But I'm not lost business. I'm still hiring the exact same number of voice actors that I did before AI. Zero, in my case. But if I had a budget, I'd still hire voice actors instead of AI because a good voice actor still beats the best AI.

There's still time enough to learn something new and get a different job, guys.

It's only a logical step for Windos to evolve from a successful malware delivery platform to an actual malware. Fits to MS typical business strategy - if someone else is commercially successful on their platform, they'll drive them out with a built-in product.

I hope the anti-trust agency will stop them and demand that the malware division and the OS division become distinct legal entities. I mean, they already have the anti-competitive advantage that you can pay them in USD and don't have to buy bitcoins.

Thanks, those are very interesting links with solid information.

According to the article, the hit rate of drones isn't all that amazing, either.

Artillery pretty much works by saturating the area with explosions until some of them hit something. So a low hit rate is expected. Maybe a decade after the war ends we'll get some actual numbers to compare to other theaters.

That is correct, though it doesn't seem to have affected the course of the war noticeably.

Source?

That's a bold claim.

The article I linked to speaks about that. Essentially: Yes. But: Not the cheap stuff used, and stuff like fiber optics come with their own drawbacks.

The article I linked to includes prices.

Meanwhile, some reports from the frontlines indicate that while drones are ubiquituous, they aren't the game-changer the tech-industry wants them to be.

tl;dr essential bits: a) most drone strikes could have been done by other, cheaper weapons. b) drones are an unreliable weapon due to jamming, dependency on weather and light and many technical failures.