I’ve never heard anyone say Macron was decent.

People ignore this a lot.

The problem with pensions is very temporary, it’s all just a question of when Boomers start dying off. And it’s even more aggressively temporary because the generation after is much much smaller.

It was done because he couldn’t get it past the legislature, not because of the economy.

Fact is, Macron has acted anti-democratically and it’s time for him to go.

Filthy Monacans.

Oh for sure.

Analytically, security is vastly improved. Higher standards all around.

Constructively? I don’t know. There are more devices and more users, which means a larger attack surface and more targets.

Maybe buy a better laptop?

My 2012 MacBook Air was used for a decade, five years by me and then five years by a friend after I switched to using the iPad for everything instead for a while.

Pretty much.

The market for upgrades in every product area is limited to enthusiasts and business. It's just not worth doing, honestly, unless the device is hideously expensive and the market is fast-moving but inconsistent like PCs in the 1980s and 1990s. Otherwise either upgrades don't give enough value to be worth buying an upgrade or you basically need to upgrade everything anyway.

Battery life is a solved issue with a lot of things, now, though. Because phones and laptops aren't increasing in capability as fast, manufacturers have started to offer free or nominal cost replacement services for those components.

Marketing is wildly expensive. Companies rely heavily on their flagship products bringing people in to learn more and word of mouth from those who have learned more.

There wasn't any such thing.

The issue was that, a decade ago, companies were adding smart features without really grokking the implications of a sensor which can halt operation. This led to lots of products becoming useless because the sensor had failed.

This can be counteracted in some systems with a hard reset. The machine will sometimes have code to mark a sensor as bad when it runs the first-run diagnostic and will ignore the sensor thereafter. Other times the issue was just a routine that wanted the user to perform some maintenance task years later, long after they'd lost the manual, and they would not know how to reset the flag. (E.g., by powering on the coffee maker while holding the brew button or whatever.)

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to be your source for the cause. I work in IOT and this sort of stuff was among the war stories told by coworkers from the early days of the market.

That's a problem with your warranty laws, not the products.

These kinds of failures are common because most failures are from a bad draw, i.e., a part that has a defect because some percentage of parts does.

Searching around, it looks like it wasn't planned obsolescence but malfunctions in various sensors. This was pretty common a decade ago as "smart" was just starting; it was a slapped-on feature that wasn't engineered well.

Televisions were way more expensive back then, though, and advances in CRTs was really slow. So you needed it to last a long time to justify the purchase, even for a middle class family, and you could expect that it wouldn't really be behind newer televisions for many years because it took a long time for any significant changes to arrive.

You can’t just present evidence to a jury.

The court has to accept it first and, if there’s a serious question about whether the evidence is simply fake, the court will not accept it.

Nothing was stopping them.

We’re still watching the effects of their exercise last year. It will be at least a year before that is done, especially if China keeps up the hostile rhetoric toward literally everyone.

China spent 30 years diplomatically isolating Taiwan, Xi has undone it with a single 11-day exercise.

This is a pretty common conflation, honestly.

I think people assume that, because computers struggled with it once, there's some deeper difficulty to language. There isn't. We've known since the 1950s that language has a pretty low entropy. So it shouldn't surprise people that text prediction is actually really really good and that the real barriers are ingesting and efficiently traversing.

ETA: arguing with people about this on Reddit does make me want to bring back my NPC Theory of AI. After all, it's possible that a Markov chain really does have a human-level understanding because the horrifying truth is that the people around you are mostly just text prediction algorithms with no real internal reality, too.

No; I mean that what they do, fundamentally, is actually pretty limited.

Recall that GANs were the big thing until they hit a plateau.

I think you grossly overestimate latent diffusion models and their long term potential.

On a curmudgeonly note, I've always hated calling this stuff "AI" rather than "machine learning".

Yep! Also, don’t underestimate the value of deterrence or of, well, advertising for the MIC! Unit costs are cheaper when you have more buyers.

Why would you think that?

The US military has always been shockingly open about what they’re working on, in large part because they need Congress to give them money for it.

Weird. You never know what’s going on.

You probably blocked someone or was blocked by someone up thread.

You should try it sometime.