Afraid that the Iranian people finally rise up against the Mullah regime? Control of communications is high on the dictatorship 101 list.

It isn't really about the money, it is about the principle. "We pay nothing, ever"

Also, I recall working for a similarly sized company that almost ended up in court over tonnage fees (basically taxes on feed ingredients) in half a dozen different US states. There had been a couple of reorganizations and responsibilities for receiving the invoices and paying the fees bounced around to a couple of different people. The person they ended with saw dealing with those products as "not my job" becuase her job title had the name of a different business unit (Pharma) from the business unit incurring the fees (Animal nutrition).

fast forward 2+ years, and I'm looking into bringing some new products into those states, and I get told by the state level folks about these threatening letters they had sent to our offices. I asked who they went to, and when I went and talked to the recipient, she handed me a folder with threatening letters from half a dozen states, with increasingly emphatic language and threats. I asked why she hand't done anything with them, or about them, and she said something to the effect of "not my job". I pointed out that the threats would affect her business because her business unit would be caught up in the seizures of inventory, and she just blinked at me. "but that's your business unit" she said. To which I responded "the name on the building is the one that matters to the lawyers. They will sue the entire company, not just one business unit, and since you are the recipient for these, your job will the the first to go for incompetence". She just shook her head, and told me to deal with it if I felt it was important (which a member of my team did from that point forward).

Never underestimate the incompetence or short-sightedness of a moron manning a desk.

This whole presidency has just been one big grift. Being a US senator has been widely understood to be a very profitable position, but this is really the first time we've seen the oval office get turned into a money-printing machine for the sitting president.

Other presidents have suspended control of their businesses while in office to eliminate even the appearance of conflict of interest. But this one, every decision he make seems to revolve around figuring out how to funnel more money into his family and businesses.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do any good to try to "expose" him on it, he has NO shame and doesn't care what anyone sees since his appointed buddies aren't going to hinder him. He's just going to keep doing it and throw a tantrum anytime he gets blocked. And that isn't happening nearly as much as it should, since in the past even the congress-critters maintain very relaxed laws to give themselves a wide berth to grab some money. But he's just going all-in on those weak laws (and lack of willingness to enforce them) and is going to wring every penny he can out of the country and its taxpayers.

On the bright side, he's made American History class a lot more interesting. And I'm taking bets that we get a whole rack of new laws on limiting presidential abuse as soon as he gets done robbing the bank.

"Then you do this "battery swap" and get a *used* battery pack that's been god knows where. "

This is what ISO documentation standards are for.

"How many of you made a working drone at 17?"

We were making fly by wire RC planes as pre-teens in the 80s.

If it can do the 4 basic operations of arithmetic without using much of any power, you could have a simple solar calculator that pretty much never ever needs batteries and can run in some of the lowest light conditions possible if you just gave it a few caps to charge.

A lot of the 'headline' announcements, pro and con, are basically useless; but this sort of thing does seem like a useful cautionary tale in the current environment where we've got hype-driven ramming of largely unspecialized LLMs as 'AI features' into basically everything with a sales team; along with a steady drumbeat of reports of things like legal filings with hallucinated references; despite a post-processing layer that just slams your references into a conventional legal search engine to see if they return a result seeming like a pretty trivial step to either automate or make the intern do.

Having a computer system that can do an at least mediocre job, a decent percentage of the time, when you throw whatever unhelpfully structured inputs at it is something of an interesting departure from what most classically designed systems can do; but for an actually useful implementation one of the vital elements is ensuring that the right tool is actually being used for the job(which, at least in principle, you can often do since you have full control of which system will process the inputs; and, if you are building the system for a specific purpose, often at least some control over the inputs).

Even if LLMs were good at chess they'd be stupid expensive compared to ordinary chess engines. I'm sure that someone is interested in making LLMs good at chess to vindicate some 'AGI' benchmark; but, from an actual system implementation perspective, this is the situation where the preferred behavior would be 'Oh, you're trying to play chess; would you like me to set "uci_elo" or just have Stockfish kick your ass?" followed by a handoff to the tool that's actually good at the job.

Why do we even consider it a story when there are a couple of CEO quotes to mash together?

Even leaving aside the notrivial odds that what a CEO says is flat out wrong and the near certainty that what the CEO says is less well informed than what someone at least a layer or two closer to the technology or the product rather than to vague, abstract, 'management'; unless a C-level is being cleverly ambushed when away from their PR handlers with a few drinks in them or actively going off script in the throes of some personal upset, why would you expect their pronouncements to be anything but their company's perceived interests restated as personal insights?

Surprise, surprise, the AI-company guy is here to tell us that the very large, high barrier to entry, models are like spooky scary and revolutionary real soon now; even if you wouldn't know it from the quality of the product they can actually offer at the present time; while the AI-hardware guy is here to tell you that AI is friendly and doesn't bite but everyone needs even more than they thought they did, ideally deployed yesterday; because the AI-company people need to hype up the future value of throwing more cash and more patience at money-losing LLMs; and the AI-hardware people need to juice the total addressable market by any means necessary.

This seems like it radically increases the (historically quite low) risk of steroid abuse within network engineering. We don't ask how "Tank Coreswitch" is preparing for the move from 100Kg/E to 400Kg/E; but apparently it involves more endocrinology and dodgy sports medicine than most other networking standards.

so now we're going to go through that again? I know, change can be good, but sometimes Apple just seems to want to change things "just because they can".

I just don't think APFS has had enough time to "stew" in the field to get a proper large list of changes and enhancements to make for it yet. They need to sit on this a few more years before making us all reformat our drives again. I want more "bang for the buck" when it comes to inconveniencing me.

Also totally OT, slashdot scrolling my window up and down while I'm typing a reply (because it wants to load a new ad) is SUPER obnoxious behavior. We spend less than 1% of our time on the Reply Composition screen - you don't HAVE to display an ad there, nobody's going to click it.

Perhaps you idiots should make yourselves aware of the dangers of the products which you buy before you whine about them doing things THEY DO BY RAW FUCKING NATURE.

Go back to school and learn about fucking lithium chemistry.

I suspect that finding out the hard way would suck; but I'd honestly be a little curious what the breakdown would be between "it's been decades since we sold this stuff with the expectation of more than toy use; it's bad for margins to have more than bare minimum service techs and spares" where you'd basically be screwed; and "we jerk you around because we can; but if you just conscripted our contractors and Defense Production Act-ed our production priorities it would actually work fine".

If the problem is basically just 'because we can' contract fuckery a real war would probably sort it out; because the DoD can also 'because we can' in a pinch. It's if the system looks rotten because, deep down, it's been at least two generations of people selling cool toys that we all know are just going to be used against pitifully inferior non-state or pariah-state actors to people buying cool toys who know how to talk about 'peer adversaries' but can't forget that their entire career has been more or less discretionary and recreational uses of force that we barely bother to call wars.

There are definitely upsides to not having spent prolonged periods of time in hot wars with existential threats recently; but I suspect that it's hard to keep deep cynicism from creeping into the supply chain when it's so hard to pretend that you aren't just going through the motions.

"They 'trust' me. Dumb fucks."

Good point. I'd never thought of it that way.

There's an important thing to keep in mind about 'cultural diversity' in this context.

Under typical circumstances valuing cultural diversity gets to be more than enthusiasm for novelty because it's also a desire to protect (at least some, you don't have to deem them all equally desirable) people from being leaned on more or less aggressively to stop doing what they are doing. That changes if you get too close to the line of advocating more hosts be thrown at the problem in order to keep the show going so it remains available. Goes from being a matter of treating people as ends to treating them as means fairly sharply.