You're spewing the same tired bullshit...my phone is "good enough"...yeah...in the same way a microwave is "good enough" to make a burger. I have a top of the line iPhone 16. My brother in law has a new Samsung flagship as well...looks no different than the iPhone in any pic he's sent me. I have a 5yo Full Frame Camera...no comparison in any setting on a 27" monitor. I am not specifically a Fuji customer, but you're doing the same tired bullshit everyone does on one of these articles..."i don't get it, so it must be stupid."

I don't understand why people buy Lexuses, but I accept that maybe what's important to do me is not what's important to them as there's a fuckton of them on the road.

I don't honestly give a fuck about you. You're just a troll with issues beyond your ignorance of photography. I am posting because there are plenty reading this who haven't done what I have done and taken a cute kid pic with his camera the same time his wife or mother-in-law was taking a pic with her phone...and then actually looked at each of the pics later that day....who are tempted to believe your bullshit. Afterall, it would be really cool to think that phone in your pocket can successfully displace an entire large industry. No need to learn how to use a camera when you have a phone, right?...it's all the same?...all those pros are morons compared to you!!!!

For the people who are not internet trolls...photographers are not hipsters. We don't haul 30lb backpacks of gear that cost more than our car because it's a fun hobby, like brewing your own beer....we do so because the pictures are ACTUALLY better...enough that if you're getting paid, you'd get fired for showing up to a wedding with an iPhone. If your iPhone was good enough, every pro camera's internals would be that of an iPhone or Samsung, only with a hotshoe, lens mount, and nicer controls.

Every successful YouTuber starts on a phone and upgrades to a real camera and the quality difference is massive. Every pro uses a good full-frame and the difference is massive. Just because you're ignorant of the difference and really...never bothered to look....doesn't mean an entire MASSIVE industry is wrong.

Your eyesight is FUBAR if you can't tell the difference on a 70" 4k screen. If you're filming on a sunny summer day at the beach with clear skies...OK, you might fool someone if they're viewing on a small phone, but definitely not a 70" screen....film in anything but EXCESSIVE light and the differences are massive and visible, even on smaller screens. Film anything indoors? A skilled operator can make things look good...your iPhone will be blocky and noisy and look like shit.

Also, who is paying that?...that's the dumbest fucking question in all of history. It's a well-selling camera, so someone is. Just because it's not for you, doesn't mean others don't want it. I don't like gin...but I'm not stupid enough to go around asking "who the fuck is spending $50 on a bottle of gin?" They're excellent cameras for taking photos. Phones SUCK at taking pics. Their sensors are too small, the controls are clumsy and lead to shake...and it's just a lot less fun for someone who is doing because they enjoy taking pics....and that's not even considering the fact that you can use a good flash or change lenses on a real camera but not (really) on a phone

Finally, I have a cheap full frame DSLR and a top of the line iPhone. Anything indoors?....it's night and day, even on sunny afternoons. My camera takes perfect pictures with rich color and sharp images. The iPhone?...blurry, the colors are muted and wrong, lots of noise. At night, my camera can use a bounce flash and take PERFECT pictures in a pitch black room (if the ceiling is 10' and white)...really vivid color and sharp detail...in environments where a phone can't even fire. If you have someone holding a flash at a decent angle (on the camera, it looks like you're shining a flashlight in their eyes), you can even take perfect pics outside in pitch black...the same env a phone can't even take a pic in.

If you know what you're doing, a camera ALWAYS takes better pics. That's why even YouTubers all use them.

It's not a conspiracy from "big camera" or just people who have never used an iPhone....if you don't know why Fujifilm is relevant and popular, that's your ignorance...not Fuji's customers'.

I've never heard of anybody being mugged at a charging station, and a quick google search doesn't give me any examples in the news.

There is such a large campaign to disparage electric vehicles that I expect that this has ever happened it would have been trumpeted all over.

On the other hand, a quick google gives me a plethora of news stories about people mugged at gas stations (although there are a lot more stories about the gas stations themselves getting robbed) https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3F...

So, no, you seem to have it opposite.

It sure simplifies thinking when you take complicated things and summarize them with a quip.

My conclusion here is that you don't really know very much about socialism.

(and, for the record: no, I am not a socialist. But I do pay attention and try to understand things at more than a superficial level.)

These job cuts were happening regardless of whether or not AI advanced. Low interest rates + market expansion (mobile apps + data mining + COVID increasing demand) led to a record expansion. IMHO, COVID delayed these and they would have started happening around 2020. Businesses naturally contract after expansions...a great example was the post y2k tech recession...MASSIVE, aggressive and unsustainable spending to get everything on the internet and y2k...once everyone had internet and every company had a web presence and y2k ended, companies had to downsize to sustainable levels. We created an entirely new category of consumer device...the mobile app ecosystem with the iPhone and EVERYBODY who was ANYBODY needed a mobile presence...and unlike most fads, apps are actually EXTREMELY useful for many businesses...like conventional retailers who want to do pickup or delivery models. Just like the WWW, this was a legit expansion of business function and a great benefit to the customer.

Then we had the data mining boom...I know /. hates it, but in fairness, being able to serve you targeted ads allows businesses to give away products for free. This also led to a massive expansion in providing useful apps (think Google Docs) or games for free. Yeah...there are a million things wrong with this model, but lots of companies invested a lot of money into hiring data scientists and DB professionals and big data professionals.

But now what?...we have no massive market expansion...the poor have devices & are fully connected...the mobile device market is saturated...the data broker market is saturated. Any gains in one business typically come at the expense of another. We're running out of reasons to motivate businesses and consumers to spend new amounts of money.

So now, companies have been staffing up for years...and some of their hires are total duds....some products are not really needed...but in tech, everyone had a growth mindset and wanted to hire the best talent to prepare for the next expansion and to take marketshare away from their competitors. If Amazon is laying off developers and Google isn't, then this makes new grads greatly prefer Google. So no one wanted mass public layoffs.

After expansion, you typically do need to cull a few people. Some hires just suck. Some are AMAZING in the interview and lazy or entitled when you hire them...especially when you seek geniuses. We've had HUGE issues with MIT hires...you hire some elite kid who wants to change the world and he doesn't want to design customer-facing applications. He spend all those years working his ass off to get into a top school and no amount of pay will make a real-world job with actual customers in a profitable business anything but boring AF to him...so he needs to go. I sympathize, he's an amazing genius, but he needs to start his own pioneering company, not service the needs of a mutil-billion dollar stable business. All the people who frauded their way into the interview and it shows a few years later need to go...all the people who just had a life change and no longer want to work need to go. All the people who argue with their boss on every assignment for no good reason need to go. Most MBAs need to go. :)

This should have happened around 2020 gradually, but COVID caused an increase in demand so companies held off. Then the triple threat of Elon Musk bumbling his way through managing Twitter + interest rate increases + BS AI hype gave them the cover to cut jobs. Once everyone was doing it, you had no disincentive to clean up your own organization.

AI is not causing the job decline. AI isn't useless....but it's FAAAAR from useful enough to replace an employee. It might cause hesitation to expand from people who have never used AI and believe the bullshit from Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang, but....anyone who actually uses it knows it can't even write code that compiles. At best, it can make existing developers a little more productive, but not 2x or 10x or whatever the hypemongers are promising. If someone can be replaced by AI today, they weren't a valuable employee....they were DEFINITELY underutilized before and this just hastened the inevitable.

What's our new expansions? AI? VR? Both have amazing theoretical possibilities, but have not really delivered any huge hits. My kids love their VR headset...for about 2 weeks and got bored. I don't know of any killer app fueling people to spend lots of time in VR...beyond early adopters and enthusiasts. The same with AI...it's fun to play with and businesses are investing with hope of it fulfilling the promises made...but no tangle results. No business is making money from AI with the exception of those selling AI solutions or hosting them. Once a killer AI app emerges, that will change...something that services an existing business need using an LLM (like how Uber/AirBnB/Tinder serviced business needs on mobile).

Additionally, if we get a new category of business for tech to expand to, we'll see a similar cycle of expansion, saturation, and contraction.

I have a good friend that told me about the app because she used it to determine why she was ghosted by her BF. She learned he does that often. I was horrified because she was sharing info about a guy without his knowledge or consent and not giving him chance to explain...and even mentioned how horrified she'd be if it were reversed.

Her response was that men go on dates fearing being doxxed on Tea from gilted exes. Women go on dates fearing being raped or mudered...not defending her logic, just repeating it...giving a user's perspective, second-hand.

Alphabet can absorb way more fines than prison sentences.

Hopefully they won't be Evil.

This is a good start: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nrel.gov%2Fgis%2Fsolar... . For CO2 emissions you have to multiply by the carbon emission of the power you're replacing.

Yes, they do similar maps for wind, although it's trickier, since wind can vary widely with local topography.

Can't study everything at the same time, the report would be ten thousand pages long and somebody would still say "but why didn't they study X?"

CO2 emissions decrease equals the solar energy output times the carbon intensity of the power grid at that location (ie, how much CO2 is emitted per kilowatt-hour generated by the utility. Highest for coal, lowest for hydro.)

You could do price, but that can be changed by the regulators. (in particular, changing to time-dependent power cost changes the economics of solar radically. Also changes the economics for coal, gas, and nuclear.)

Anybody who looked at NREL maps, which are easily available on the web. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nrel.gov%2Fgis%2Fsolar...

Minutes is a little pessimistic. When I switch on my flashlight, it doesn't take minutes for response (light appears) to occur.

Capacitors intrinsically have sub-microsecond response time. So make a hybrid system: supercapacitors for the first few seconds, with batteries for the longer period fluctuations.

In case you never took that course, the classical economist David Ricardo figured out that if you were a tenant farmer choosing between two lots of land, the difference in the productivity of the lands makes no difference to you. Thatâ(TM)s because if a piece of land yielded, say, ten thousand dollars more revenue per year, the landlord would simply be able to charge ten thousand more in rent. In essence landlords can demand all these economic advantages their land offers to the tenant.

All these tech companies are fighting to create platforms which you, in essence, rent from them. Why do you want to use these platforms? Because they promise convenience, to save you time. Why do the tech companies want to be in the business of renting platforms deeply embedded in peopleâ(TM)s lives? Because they see the time theyâ(TM)re supposedly saving you as theirs, not yours.

Sure, the technology *could* save you time, thatâ(TM)s what youâ(TM)d want it for, but the technology companies will inevitably enshittify their service to point itâ(TM)s barely worth using, or even beyond that if they can make it hard enough for customers to extract themselves.

If I'm understanding the article correctly, the conference room window mitigation wouldn't work against this. It doesn't rely on vibrations of the windows. Instead, you'd just need a piece of paper inside the room, lit by ordinary lamps. As long as the light reflecting off the paper could pass through the windows unmodified (i.e. the windows provide clear visibility) the white noise vibrations of the windows would have no effect.

On the other hand, lightweight curtains that blocked the view through the window would stop this technique, but probably wouldn't significantly reduce what was detectable from a laser bounced off the windows (assuming no white noise).

I think we're talking past one another. I'll try to be clearer.

Sure, but that's not the point. The point is that Android does prevent most users from using anything other than Play. Not by actually blocking them from using other app stores but by simply not offering the option. And that's a good thing, because most users have no idea how to decide whether or not something is safe.

I think perhaps the confusion here is because you and I are looking at this from different directions. You seem to be looking at it from the perspective of what you or I might want to choose. I'm looking at it from the perspective of an engineer whose job is to keep 3B users safe, most of whom have no idea how to make judgments about what is safe and what isn't. Keeping them within the fenced garden (it's a low fence, but still a fence) allows them to do what they want without taking much risk. The fact that the fence is easily stepped over preserves the freedom of more clueful and/or adventurous users to take greater risks. I think this has been a good balance.

I'm pretty sure that the ability to allow unknown sources is required by the Android compliance definition document, and that a manufacturer who disables it is not allowed to call their device Android, or to pre-install the Google apps or Play.

Until Epic decides that they want their store to be able to install and update as seamlessly as Play can, and gets a court to order that. Still, your point is valid, there is still some friction for other stores. Is it enough? I guess we'll find out. Will it be allowed to remain? I guess we'll find that out, too.

goo.gl links are a significant abuse vector, so Google has to maintain a non-trivial team to monitor and mitigate the abuse. I'll bet there are several full-time employees working on that, and that the total annual cost is seven figures.

Even if it weren't an abuse vector, the nature of Google's internal development processes mean that no service can be left completely unstaffed. The environment and libraries are constantly evolving, and all the services require constant attention to prevent bit rot. A fraction of one engineer would probably be enough for something like goo.gl if it weren't abused, but that's still six figures per year, not pennies.