Pulling repeated hardware platform switches underneath without bothering customers too much is a thing that only a very competent company could do, and Apple is a very competent company.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

Apple nowadays is bound to avoid any huge missteps, because it has become a very conservative company.

Granted they blew some on the Vision Pro, but not much, for them. They folded on the electric car project, which now seems like a shame as Tesla is vulnerable.

What revolutionary product has Apple launched since Steve Jobs died? It has been 14 years, and I'm still waiting.

Somebody's going to get angry, make some threats, bluster, cave, go silent, then defend H1B while saying "America First".

Nobody in particular. Just the royal "Somebody".

As to VisiCalk being the real OG that started from nothing, there's an interesting comment on a VisiCalc youtube:

In 1969, we had to develop the world's true first electronic spreadsheet (LANPAR) within the limitation of 32k of memory - and we included forward referencing which didn't appear in Visicalc, TKSolver, Supercalc or even Multiplan I. Only in Lotus 13 years later. We even included the ability for sophisticated logic calculations, access to external data base data, and input of data in real time. Timesharing in those days was very similar to "cloud" computing now, except that you knew exactly which remote computer was doing the processing.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Also at that scale who knows how much they are paying for each seat, I'm sure it's a bespoke deal. No doubt MS is making money, but I wouldn't just take the retail price and multiply it by 2 million.

I made specific points and your reply did not.

As for my worldview, you interpret posts the same way you interpret the news, exaggerating everything and extrapolating it to absurdity to make yourself upset or say something unreasonable. If you have inferred I was ever an extremist, you were wrong.

thanks

No, Amazon specifically said their layoffs are not due to AI.

Amazon spokesperson said the job cuts werenâ(TM)t a result of using AI, and pointed toward a message in October from Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology, who said they were part of the companyâ(TM)s effort at âoereducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure weâ(TM)re investing in our biggest bets.â

But reporter would like to have a story about AI job loss, so they forge ahead and build the narrative:

Still, the push for agentic AI is arriving as Amazon is reshaping its own labor model, raising uncomfortable questions about whether the tools the company is selling will displace employees, both within its ranks and among the customers itâ(TM)s selling the new software to.

That part isn't news, it's commentary.

So, what is your prediction? It sounds like you think Amazon is going to fire thousands of people in hopes that AI will eventually replace their roles, and then say, "whoops, it doesn't work, we're screwed," and the packages will stop flowing. Is that your prediction?

Anybody have a way to read the blomberg article?

Solving the problem of paying wages is just another way of saying increasing efficiency, which has been the goal of almost every technology and management practice forever.

And people concerned with equality should be delighted if there are meager inheritances, or even if they were simply outlawed. Inheritances are very illiberal. Inheritance is the foundation of a class-based society. Inheritances are also fly in the face of conservative principles, since they in no way reflect merit nor market forces.

Let me tell you about this little detail called CO2...

No generalization ever applies universally. That doesn't make them useless. My father knew the difference between useful and problematic complexity. I get your point, and I also completely understand his.

"do you really think the grades are that important?"

If I'm asking somebody's opinion of John Stuart Mills, probably not. But if I need them to design a bridge, the yes, I want to know they were graded. And, to one point expressed in the article, I want to know the institution is concerned about maintaining a reputation for producing capable graduates.

If we think a bachelors degree has low utility now, imagine what value employers place on it if grading stops being a gatekeeper. It might be slightly more favorable than nothing... but barely.