LOL. Since I'm the one who actually implements the solution as well, we don't actually have the Jump to Conclusions guy in our company.

Don't forget the other end of the equation: has the time it takes for a customer to get their support issue effectively resolved decreased?

It may be the other way around: that the industry's idea of what "practical skills" means is changing faster than the universities' ability to keep up. By the time the Unis have adopted a technology, come up with a curriculum around it, found professors to teach it, and taught it to a graduating class of students, that technology is already considered obsolete and is no longer of much value to anyone looking to hire.

Dunno what the solution to that is, other than teaching the fundamentals and leaving it up to the students to apply them to technology stack du jour after they graduate.

Most of my job isn't typing lines of code into a computer screen. It's gathering requirements from the real world (and the people in it) and then inventing/designing a system (or a modification to an existing system) that will actually accomplish the goal. People have an innate advantage over an AI because we live in the world where the problem exists. We understand both the problem domain (the world) and the solution domain (what a computer program is capable of doing) and we're imagining a solution, and even imagining what it would be like for a human being to use that system.

That's even assuming that the AI hype is real and that they're going to reach AGI. I don't see any evidence that LLMs are going to lead to AGI. The current crop of LLMs don't even come close to what an experienced programmer can do. And no amount of simply adding CPU and memory is going to get them there.

You can all avoid getting a CS major if you want. That's great news for my wages when companies can't hire anyone who actually knows how to program, and their vibe-coded solution erases their database and nobody knows why.

Seems like everyone is already carrying a wearable in the form of their cell phone. If there's something to be gained here (which is debatable), they should provide it in the form of a free app, and/or add any necessary hardware to future cell phones, rather than trying to get everybody to remember to keep a second device charged and on their person 24/7 for the rest of their lives.

A big reason why health care is more expensive in the USA than in other nations is because the USA has a for-profit healthcare model. That means that the US healthcare consumer isn't only paying for actual healthcare, he is also paying for:

- "Increasing shareholder value" (read: funneling as much money as possible from sick people to Wall Street investment bros)
- Huge salaries for CEOs of healthcare and pharmaceutical companies
- 24/7 TV advertising of questionable drugs to people who aren't even remotely qualified to determine if they are appropriate or not
- Free lunches and treats for the staff of doctors' offices 5 days a week (because it gives the pharmaceutical rep a chance to promote their products to the doctors, and capitalize on the conflict-of-interest introduced by the doctor's satiated stomach)
- Huge numbers of full-time Congressional lobbyists (to help bend regulations towards what is more profitable and away from what helps patients)
- Large campaign donations every election (ditto)

If we switched to a non-profit model we'd be able to repurpose all that money towards providing health care. Then the USA could afford a single-payer health care system, like most other countries can, because our per-capita spending would be similar to theirs.

I'm certainly not saying you can take a product with a lead acid battery and drop in an LFP battery and be done with it. I just mean the use cases where you are using a lead acid battery (automotive batteries, UPS, emergency lighting, electric wheelchairs) could start using LFP batteries because the temperature ranges are similar, and LFP is just better overall, particularly with longevity. Of course you'd need to change your product a bit to make it work with an LFP.

I thought there was a study on wearables (like the fitbit) a few years ago that says they don't seem to have any significant impact on a person's health. Are you sure JFK Jr. doesn't own shares of fitbit?

I'd think it wouldn't be too difficult to ship an EV with little or no charge in the battery. That doesn't make it fireproof, of course, but then again an ICE car with no gas in it is not fireproof either.

What Linux really needs is a native port of the MS-DOS prompt, complete the ability to select an arbitrary rectangle of text, copy-and-paste via context-menu, 8.3 filenames, 255-character path-length limits, and full support for executing all your favorite .BAT files.

Manufacturing is returning, albeit slowly, and in a highly automated way. As someone who's been in automation for the last 25 years, and also done a lot of desktop app development on large LOB applications, I have a hard time seeing AI completely taking over. It's a tool to help with certain problems, but the fundamental day-to-day issues aren't going to be solved by AI. Much of the day involves fabricating and gluing together simple stuff to make a solution. May times in the physical world. I don't see an AI being able to realize that we need to fabricate a little spillway to prevent drips off the machine from falling on the material and soiling it, and then going and doing that. Or swapping out a robot control board. Or shortening a cable so the forklift operator stops running over it. The ability to truly understand a problem and make a solution is still firmly in the realm of human beings. And the dexterity of robots is still nowhere near the dexterity of humans. Don't buy into the AI hype. There's a lot of smoke and few actual flames.

Every bad actor is looking for a zero-day exploit to keep in their back pocket; why would you provide them with one for free, and assume they'll never use it on you?

I recommend a separate document printer and a photo printer. For the document printer you can get by with a standard black & white laser printer from Brother (never buy an inkjet) or go for a color laser if you've got the money (never buy an inkjet). The toner lasts a long time, and it's good enough for any schoolwork they have. But for nice photo prints I recommend a dedicated photo printer, like a Canon SELPHY. They produce excellent quality prints.

For those who aren't familiar with LFP batteries, traditional lithium batteries (such as nickel-manganese-cobalt, or NMC) have good energy density and last a long time if you pamper them, but have this problem where they burst into flames if you puncture them. And the metals in them are very expensive.

LFP is lithium-iron-phosphate. They have less energy density (CATL's LFP have 205 Wh/kg compared to 260 Wh/kg or even over 300 Wh/kg in some NMC battery cells). However, LFP are much safer and less likely to explode if they're punctured. LFP also contains no nickel or cobalt, which is a huge advantage. LFP also has better longevity, supporting 3000 to 10,000 cycles vs 1000 to 2300 cycles for NMC.

So LFP is not the highest performance battery cell, but it has a lot of advantages (safety, cost, longevity) that make it a winning product. You're already seeing them in "solar generator" products (basically a fancy UPS box, e.g. the EcoFlow product line) and my understanding is that Tesla's Standard Range Model 3 vehicle has used LFP cells for a while. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw LFP replace most usages of lead acid batteries in the near future since the cell voltage is 3.2V nominal, and you can stack 4 cells to get a 12.8V battery, which would be a drop-in replacement for most lead acid applications.

Sounds like copium to me. Nuclear fission has lost the PR war, the economic war, and the tech war, and now you're hoping you can bring it back from the dead by slagging the competition with baseless hyperbole. Well, good luck with that; but it sure looks like that race has already been called. I still have hope for nuclear fusion, FWIW.