Valmy here. I work for a consumer justice nonprofit analyzing public policy related to consumer products, practices, and government intervention in the consumer market.
QuickTime and FaceTime are useful but I never thought of them as especially innovative. HyperCard, OSX, the phones, those really moved things forward independently of the rest of the industry. Perhaps I don't appreciate the software side enough.
My experience at a research university, albeit 12 years ago, was that many of my professors loathed teaching. Some openly expressed disdain for the time they wasted teaching when they could be researching. I think a better framework in the future would be to have researchers, and lecturers/teaching professors separate. One is to teach, the other is to research.
I think that dormant accounts, where someone has not logged in for, say, 2 years, does not post, does not engage, should be repurposed - with given notice. It's kind of the equivalent of cybersquatting. Also, technically, a platform is within its right to do this. I think the better course of action is to utilize the account. Gmail has made this clear that if you don't log into an account after some time they will repurpose it.
Related: Please don't make me talk to your AI pretend-human complete with Asian accent and background call center sounds. That's even more insulting that a chat bot.
I'm not sure I would agree in totem. Freeing the minutia allows for a higher cognitive load on the bigger picture. I use AI primarily for research gathering, and refining of what I have, which has freed up a lot of time to focus on the bigger issues, and specifically in my case, zeroing in on the diamond in the rough.
I agree, Tim Cook is a businessman, Steve was someone who constantly put himself in the customers shoes. Apple needs a visionary like that, a dictator to demand a specific user engagement, and a design team able to carry it out. IMHO Tim Cook has never filled this role, and needs to step aside.
AI might just extinguish the entire paradigm of publish or perish. The sheer volume of papers makes it nearly impossible to properly decide which papers have merit, which are non-replicate and suspect, and which are just a desperate rush to publish. The entire practice needs to end.
I am happy to see this and hope it spreads. A lot of us, IMO, would pay more for physical buttons - which is really a way to go about this, even though logistically it's problematic. If you want physical buttons, pay for it, if not, go with digital capacitive touch. I think cars should be like airplanes - physical controls, able to be felt and pushed without taking eyes off the road. The digital buttons far too often require my attention to be diverted, or pull over.
Alexa was abandoned bout 5 years ago and has continued to wither on the vine. This smells like nothing more than a money grab. The device and its services are little more useful than turning on the lights. Amazon has abandoned Alexa and there's zero reason to put more money into it as a consumer.
Ostensibly Microsoft has a goal, and they realize that the public is adamantly opposed to the way they are going about that goal. So the calculus for Microsoft management must be either: 1) We are right, doubters be damned; 2) This will be profitable and people will go along with it whether they want to or not, we're Microsoft, what are they going to do, use Pages?; or a total uncertainty as to the future but really hoping this path pays off for a variety of reasons.
I hate the future of Microsoft. I hate the future, and current iterations of Outlook and Word. I hate AI. I don't want CoPilot. What I WANT is competition in this space so Microsoft has to actually care what the consumer think.
This is precisely how I felt. Being obese is not, nor ever, ok. The body positive movement around obesity should have been to help people to 1) nto feel ashamed at being obese, but also 2) to reduce the negativity around it and turn that into positive reinforcement for healthy eating. Instead it became a dogmatic, self righteous movement of encouragement to continue to live that way because others judged it negatively.
No one should be harassed or made to feel bad by the way they look, but at the same time, it's not wrong to want others to be healthy.
I think this is a good thing and do not understand the negativity in the comments. We should want systems to function more efficiently, regardless of how that comes about or who does it.
I think the US is giving up control willingly and turning more isolationist. It has been building for some time but I do not thing it is forced. It is a deliberate policy shift turning away from trying to control and police the world. America is pushed in and on to other countries and societies that a retraction might be the best thing
This is so interesting. I remember as a child my family would go to S&S Cafeterias, and Piccadilly. It was like the lunch line at school. Regrettably the closest I've gotten to an automat was when I taught in a prison, the classroom had vending machines of sandwiches, desserts, etc.
I think we still have automats. Ikea cafe for example, the cafeteria in the basement of the Natural History and Science Museum in Washington, D.C., any number of places where you get food, checkout, sit, eat, leave without interacting with anyone.
This is deeply worrisome and brings to mind when Russia attacked Chernobyl, and then their soldiers got radiation poison digging latrine trenches etc. Let us dangerously hypothesize that if Confinement begins to fail catastrophically, who will step in to fix it? Russia? Is it.. possible Russia will allow the leak as a form of weapon?
Agreed, and I am reminded that Putin once called Russia a "managed democracy." I may not always agree, but I am very glad America has the first, fifth, sixth, and seventh amendments, among others. This tactic by the British government is absurd and offensive to freedom. What I find more baffling, but perhaps I am narrowly thinking about it, is how much the British people are letting it happen. I am not political, but if anyone tried to take our rights under the Bill of Rights, or declared an emergency to cancel elections, I will be in the streets with, I hope, literally every one else.
Some things are just too critical to a free and fair nation, and jury trials are right up there.
I loathe copilot and have reverted to using an old version of Outlook desktop, which I then had to regedit to remove copilot buttons etc. It's a horrible product being shoved down our throats.
But what if Target security cooperates with the government, and they share capabilities, so that a facial recognition inside of a Target location would notify law enforcement who also has an interest in that person? In such a scenario.. Target would freely give its data but not necessarily acting an agent of the government.
I wonder if this is a portend to an American social credit score, like where China uses facial recognition to identify criminals at concerts[1], and jaywalkers, etc. which severely impacts a person's ability to get a job, housing, etc.
I can't help but assume this is already being used at retail establishments, but now it could be tied into law enforcement databases, and .. communicate..
I sat through a briefing last week about quantum encryption and the threat that quantum computing poses to encryption in use today. It was stressed that nation states are hoovering up encrypted data now in order to decrypt later with quantum computing. Much the same way America decrypted old soviet encrypted data. I wonder if it will take as long and if anyone will still be alive to make use of that data.
I feel like they've always been doing this. For a long time, until I had to just through hoops to break it, Word consistently defaulted to OneDrive saving of documents.
What are thoughts about broader issues of a fixed-term legislature, versus one that requires the confidence of the legislature and could be created.. and collapsed very quickly? The constant teetering on the edge of deadlock and collapse seems to create a lot of instability.
A more specific question: Is the design of the French legislative system to blame for this?