Steam isn't an evil monopoly, instead I would argue it is a "natural" monopoly because they provide an excellent service without treating their customers like cash cows to constantly butcher for an additional buck, unlike some other competitors and businesses in general.

If you can force a company to agree to and normalize such winks, then the next step is to expand the protocol to communicate additional information. It's basically a step towards forcing companies to provide intelligence.

Yup. You can either pay the full 100k to the US Government or instead pay a portion of that 100k (or an equivalent favor/gift) to Trump.

This is the problem with a single idiot making up the rules on the fly. You can't trust the rules won't change based on the last person he talked to, the last bribe he received, the latest opinion polls, or whether his drug regime was changed.

Another reason for having actual laws passed by Congress* is that Congress is slow to change them and doesn't like to do so willy-nilly.

* Not to imply that the GOP Congress is actually capable of passing laws or pushing back on the Executive or standing up for America in general.

So, training LLMs on the sum of human knowledge wasn't enough to make a human equivalent AI? The human brain runs on ~20 watts of power; OpenAI/Oracle/SoftBank are building five data centers that will use ~10-gigawatts of power, which is ~500 million of those 20 watt human brains. Guess it's back to the drawing board on how to create a human level AI?

The "common people" are going to learn about the importance of testing the hard way...

Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets. This result places Agent Mode above Shortcut.ai, ChatGPT agent with .xlsx support, and Claude Files Opus 4.1. It’s still behind the human accuracy of 71.3 percent, though.

My kid's high school just implemented Yondr (after successful trials at other local schools.) It's a joke; collecting phones at the beginning of class in a cardbox box is more effective.

Kids have bought the unlocker online. Kids have figured out how to "close" the bag without it actually locking. Initially the bags were unassigned (you just picked up one at the entrance to the school) but kids would cut open the bags and/or never return them. So the school had to assign everyone a bag in order to charge for damage or loss. Even then kids cut the stitches and use tape to make the bag appear sealed. Burner/decoy phones are common. And so on.

Not having phones between classes means kids cannot coordinate clubs, e.g. notify of time updates, if someone can't make it, communicate issues, can only communicate after school gets out, etc.

Another fun problem is that a lot of kids use their phones to pay for things at the school's cafe. Because the phones are locked up when they enter school, the cafe has seen a drop off in morning customers.

Overall my high schooler says the "collect phones in a box at the start of class" is far cheaper, more convenient, faster, and more effective than Yondr.

Or, and hear me out on this, 'LA Fitness' can "do business" with Trump about how to make the FTC case go away. It worked for Intel and Apple after all.

LLMs are like the game Mad Libs except you know the sentence and then try to fill in the blank with the most fitting word/phrase.

Twitter/X is 76% bots. So...

So we're now fixing the grades instead of fixing the actual problems?

russia's casualties in its continued invasion of Ukraine have also been a contributing factor in the decline of world wide alcohol consumption.

The upgrading for upgrading's sake mentality might still prevail, but is there a real reason to upgrade to a faster, more powerful personal computer nowadays? You can only run Office or a web based office suite so fast, and most PC games are designed with consoles in mind which means gaming PCs don't require extreme power for most games.

"reducing the need to walk around the store to change paper tags by hand and giving us more time to support customers in the store."

Translation: Less employees are needed to keep the same level of customer service.

Given Texas' power grid issues, building a reliable stock exchange may be tricky...