Everyone here is reading the comments page of a Slashdot article, speculating about what will or won't happen at an upcoming Apple WWDC.

I think we can take 'incredibly dull lives' as a given.

That seems like short-term thinking. A better approach would be to figure out how to do the future-prediction optimizations in ways that malware cannot exploit, so we can reap the benefits of the optimizations.

Hell, what stops one of these rich people from using his money to take care of those who need it now? The only one who tries is Gates, and he gets routinely villified for trying.

I guess I'm confused, how is a technology with a decades-long service life and is basically a capital investment subject to the same sort of label of 'bubble' compared to the explosive growth of something using a commodity model with obsolescence measured in years?

In 2020 I had to occasion to have some OS1 singlemode fiber installed back in 1994 terminated into splice cases and put into use. That fiber sat for basically a quarter century and was then usable when I needed it.

Where I work now I no longer have primary responsibility to deal with cabling infrastructure, but we still light up metro-crossing fiber between locations that could well have sat dormant for decades. Costs to install pathways right now are RIDICULOUS, like upwards of $1000/linear foot for underground conduit work. Stuff installed for a tenth or less that price 20 years ago is paying for itself now even accounting for inflation if I'm not having to spend $50k to go fifty feet between buildings. And unlike point-to-point wireless shots there's no recurring licensing fees to the FCC, there's no service-subscription costs to the wireless equipment manufacturer, and there's basically no lifecycle costs to regularly replace the connection.

If there was any sort of fiber bubble, it was that those looking to profit off of it weren't thinking like a utility, where the ROI takes awhile to see, but the investment in the installation lasts for decades, not months or years. It's only a bubble if you're not a long-term thinker.

The difference is that tech companies used to feel like they had to at least maintain a polite fiction that they were ethical and in some way serving a greater good. Now we're in the Trump/Musk era, where being unethical is considered morally superior to being pointlessly encumbered by ethics/morals/empathy/etc, so there's no need to pretend.

So reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic?

sounds like the sham nonsense isn't limited to the school kids.

I could see that happening.

And to be fair, I don't hate USB-A like I used to, or frequently disconnected and reconnected cables/dongles/ports I like it. It's not as durable as I'd like, but it's physically big enough that if junk makes its way into the port or plug I can clean it out. If the outer housing ends up bent I can bend it back. I can put micro-SD card readers into the socket that are nearly flush with the socket itself.

USB-C is more fragile than USB-A, if something gets into the connector it'll probably damage it. I've seen this happen to phones, and to cables, I could see it happening to computers as well.

True, but when I've been on committees to help make decisions, I tend to play east-german judge, and sometimes this helps steer things away from techbros that don't actually know the tech part of their business and are basically overgrown salesmen who've risen too high in the corporate ladder.

My field is networking rather than software, and while every vendor is usually pushing some new hotness when they do their bring-the-customer-to-the-experience-center, I'm the skeptic asking what they're using for themselves. When Cisco, for example, was leaning hard into their Software-Defined Networking replacement for Trustsec using what they were calling at the time "security group tagging" to basically add tokens that all access-edge and forwarding switches and routers needed to pay heed to in order to enforce end to end security for traffic, I asked them what they were using for themselves. Turns out despite them pushing SDN and SDAccess they were still using Trustsec and the SD- features weren't even functional for an org our size, it couldn't handle the number of endpoints. It couldn't even handle half of the number of endpoints that we saw on a regular basis. And it required basically full vendor lock-in for all access switches, distribution switches, routers, and firewalls to truly work. If you adopted it you were stuck with them basically completely until the end.

I've heard horror stories from other orgs that implemented it too. DNA/Catalyst Center problems, ISE problems, problems when working with endpoints that are not part of the SD- zone, etc.

Or as artists call this, "Mixed Media."

So what exactly are these three Rs that you feel so strongly about?

Isn't a lot of the business use case intended to replace the armies of code-monkeys churning out mediocre code for commercial products? Wouldn't promoting AI in this sense be the org pushing to make itself obsolete? The previous story is literally, "Morgan Stanley Says Its AI Tool Processed 9 Million Lines of Legacy Code This Year And Saved 280,000 Developer Hours."

(Okay, I take that back: there's one version in which I'd be okay with them lionizing Sam, but it'd have to involve actual lions)

I just hope they're not going to lionize Sam. That's the last thing we need. He pulled a classic sociopath-style manipulation to retain his position in the face of legitimate concerns about his abuse of power in the company.

It also has some rather significant security implications if the company sold that it had sandboxed customer accounts where customer data was only supposed to be exposed to the customer or to an AI system, not to human beings.

But starship after nine missions has yet to complete a single orbit of the Earth. They then have to perfect unmanned on orbit fuel, transfers, etc., etc. Musk seems to be good at taking existing established technologies, branding them and scaling them up, not so much on the new things. Which really points to sending robots instead of humans. If he wants a vanity project, let him fund it himself.