As does using Windows.

With the ESA supplying the spacecraft, most of the software is likely to be competently written and/or open-source. This will prove to the Martians that there is indeed intelligent life on Earth.

It's a good question and one I'm working on trying to get an answer to. By giving AI hard, complex engineering problems, and then getting engineers to look at the output to determine if that output is meaningful or just expensive gibberish.

By doing this, I'm trying to feel around the edges of what AI could reasonably be used for. The trivial engineering problems usually given to it are problems that can usually be solved by people in a similar length of time. I believe the typical savings from AI use are in the order of 15% or less, which is great if you're a gecko involved in car insurance, but not so good if you're a business.

If the really hard problems aren't solvable by AI at all (it's all just gibberish) then you can never improve on that figure. It's as good as it is going to get.

I've open sourced what AIs have come up with so far, if you want to take a look. Because that is what is going to tell you if good can come out of AI or not.

I would think it goes further. If the company has already failed (ie: no longer exists) then the action is not taken by the company but a former employee of that company (even if said former employee was the CEO). Former employees are not granted special authority over PII or over company-owned information.

Irrelevant. PII protections are not subject to company discresion.

The conversations are not private, but PII laws nonetheless still apply. Anything in the messages that violates PII privacy laws is forbidden regardless of company policy. Policy cannot overrule the law.

Now, in the US, where privacy is a fiction and where double-dealing is not only perfectly acceptable but a part of workplace culture, that isn't too much of an issue. The laws exist on paper but have no real existence in practice.

However, business these days is international and American corps tend to forget that. Any conversation involving European computers (even if all employers and employees are in the US) falls under the GDPR and is under the aspices of the European courts and the ECHR, not the US legal system. And cloud servers are often in Ireland. Guess what. That means any conversation that takes place physically on those computers in Ireland plays by European rules, even if the virtual conversation was in the US.

This was settled by the courts a LONG time ago. If you carry out unlawful activities on a computer in a foreign country, you are subject to the laws of that country.

Unfortunately, it was all of our responsibility to make sure our neighbors didn't turn out to be uneducated assholes, and we collectively failed. As it turns out, abdicating that responsibility to a department of education in a far-away land didn't actually satisfy the need.

The changes we have set off in the world today are not unlike those that precipitated the Great Dying 252 million years ago. We're at 420 ppm CO2 now but the permafrost is done for and after that the clathrates in the shallow seas are liable to let go, too. The current ice age is only 2.5 million years old and we've ended it. We may have triggered something akin to the Permian/Eocene Thermal Maximum.

There was some chance we could have headed this off, had we turned immediately and aggressively on the problem around the turn of the century. We have proven politically incapable of addressing this existential threat, and now that we might be mustering the will, the window may have closed.

We've had a good run, we anatomically modern humans, but this ending due to a lack of foresight is ... embarrassing .

Really? I don't think I've ever used NTFS on any machine I've owned.

Lots of shortsighted hot takes on this.

Anthropic is involved in litigation against our inebriated SecDef because Dario won't cosign for algorithmic warcrimes. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, Asia is going to hit a wall on liquid fuel and natgas. The U.S. AI datacenter build frenzy has hit a wall in the form of public disapproval, and under that an electrical components availability problem that the trouble in Asia will NOT improve.

If your hot take doesn't factor the geopolitical things into the mix, your are wasting poor defenseless electrons that accomplished nothing with their potential.

I would love to be a fly on the wall in the Anthropic C suite conference room why they work through this. They are mobbed with customers, running a subsidized customer acquisition strategy they can't just quit, and several legs of the table supporting this are wobbling.

I'm glad the heat has passed me by, I saw a little friction during the conversion, but Opus 4.7, unimpressive as it may be, is steadily trundling along doing work for me the last twelve hours.

It's a good thing for you that most people do. Those ads your'e avoiding fund most of the content you consume. You can only freeride as long as enough others are paying the toll to subsidize you. I do the same, but I won't be surprised or angry if it becomes impossible.

So say we all.

Apple is its own thing. It is not fully inconceivable that the feds (and therefore everyone else) would switch to MacOS if Windows became [even more] unsupportable, but I doubt Microsoft can provide Office at even the sad level it achieves on Windows and it would take Apple time to ramp up supply.

Linux is an easy sell unless people are hooked on some application or game that doesn't run on it, then it's hard. The interface is familiar enough now (especially with KDE, but there are some other basically credible options) that they won't have a lot of room to complain so long as they don't have problems. That part is going to depend on the hardware, and IME they will have the fewest problems with AMD CPU and GPU now. If they have Intel it might or might not be OK; if they've got Nvidia they're likely to have a bad time at least sometimes.

Business is increasingly using web-based tools for everything, which is not itselft a bad thing- if only more of them were self-hosted. But either way, this decreases the dependence on Windows. I've worked where there's a few Windows machines for clerical staff, or where there's a Mac for the graphics department. That can be Windows' fate again.

You are correct with respect to their internal storage.

However, say you want to interchange files among several computers using removable media, such as an SD card, USB flash drive, or USB hard drive. One is a Windows PC that prefers NTFS, another a Mac that prefers Apple's FS, and another a Linux PC that prefers ext4. What file system would you use on the drive?

Obviously many others had thought of it. Hastings' brilliant idea was to pivot from what was working (DVD rental by mail -- which itself was pretty innovative) to streaming while the DVD business was still good. That seems like a blindingly obvious move in hindsight but it's actually really hard when you're in the thick of running a successful business to step back and think "We need to completely change our business strategy, even though it's working well".

As geekmux mentioned, Blockbuster was incredibly well-positioned to do both of the things that Netflix did, first to pivot from brick-and-mortar DVD rental to rental by mail (possibly exploiting their broad physical store base) and then to streaming. They had deep relationships with every player in the content industry, large and small, they had near-universal name recognition and positive perceptions in retail video distribution. But they did neither, they just kept running their business until their market disappeared. That's what usually happens, and it's not because the CEOs are stupid, it's because it actually takes someone with both vision and guts to see and act on broad market changes before they happen.