OnePlus 5 here! There is a sucking void attached internally where the battery used to be.

There are definitely examples of US military boondoggle projects that didn’t result in high end military equipment getting made, but I think it is safe to say there are quite a few individual military tools and vehicles, supply chain notwithstanding, that are amazing triumphs of technology that have no equal.

You can definitely make the case that the volume and overall scale of our military production are excessive in the extreme, but I think to remain intellectually honest, we must admit that they are good at what they do, even though what they do is not always good.

They’re going to have to walk a tightrope to pull that off. There is so much choice in the video game market now that its like drinking from a fire hose, so if some games start to not work due to sabotage, while many others don’t, that could backfire on them.

Especially since Valve is one of the only large companies with a positive public image, while Microsoft and its countless subsidiaries are basically regarded as Voldemort, its not hard to imagine a public pissing match not going their way.

That monkey better not dare curl one of his fingers up for that “wish”! Nothing was changed. 😂

I don’t think the poster meant that a Russian civil war will be nice for his online experience.

There is substantial belief in the western world that Russia is using these “troll farms” to destabilize foreign governments. If true, that would be considered by many to be an act of aggression that he and many others would welcome the end of. The fact that a period of strife in Russia is what caused would be unfortunate, but the fact remains.

That wasn’t anyone’s cat, though. It was a denizen of the neighborhood with no owner. The point you’re trying to make has no target.

I don’t have any firsthand experience with the cameras, but I knew a guy that lived in a trailer park where they put in these particularly obnoxious speed bumps. They were always all vandalized in under a week, after which they would be replaced after increasingly long periods until they eventually stopped.

Companies and governments have budgets that can get overrun and force their decisions regardless of their desires.

Those caught on because they’re basically addictive drugs. Furthermore, while it may be hard to remember at this late stage of the game, those services did have genuine value to some users at the beginning. Today’s versions of those products have gone through countless iterations since then, each one reducing value to the end-user and increasing value to the data buyers and advertisers, like the proverbial “slowly boiling the frog”.

I think it is that its not useful for the end customer. Every anecdote I’ve heard about LLMs helping someone with their work were heavily qualified with special cases and circumstances and narrow use cases, resulting in a description of a process that was made more complex by adding the LLM, which then helped them eliminate nearly as much complication and effort as it added. These are the stories from the believers.

Now add in the fact that almost nobody is on a paid service tier outside of work, and all the paid tiers are currently heavily subsidized. If it has questionable utility at today’s prices, the value will only decline from there as prices rise to cover the real costs to run these things.

If it doesn’t do anything useful, I don’t think any amount of shoving in front of people is going to amount to much uptake beyond some cursory fiddling to determine its uselessness.

People hand out flyers to every passerby too, and nearly all of those end up in the nearest trash bin.

But there’s almost always a small seed of truth they build the crazy off of. Like how every pearl starts as a tiny piece of sand.

This reminds me a lot of chiropractic medicine; there is a core of validity too it, but many modern practitioners have hidden it deep inside a boulder of manure.

I can’t tell if that was a joke, which makes it even funnier.

I think that Microsoft will continue in some form regardless of what happens with this bubble because they have huge amounts of physical assets and cash on hand.

That said, their market position in any given sector they’re in might not be as invincible as it seems. There are corporations that were titans of their industries, including technology, that either don’t exist or are ghosts of their former selves all in far less than a lifetime.

Kodak, Xerox, Bell Labs, IBM, and Yahoo all looked like unstoppable juggernauts when I was a kid, and my own kids haven’t even heard of some of them.

One of the initial promises of capitalism included the alignment of altruism and profit, like providing a good or service to the community that they need and did not otherwise have, and they all pay you enough to live, meanwhile they all do the same with other goods and services, creating a big virtuous cycle.

I know that has largely broken down and been perverted as more and more market segments collapse into monopolies like black holes, but I think you can still see some of that “making money doing something good” spirit out there, even on YouTube. The first YouTuber that came to mind was “Dad, How Do I?” for example. I am pretty sure that guy’s getting monetized and he’s wholesome as hell.

If they’re still using the computer then they’re still paying with their data, just like if you subscribe to Netflix, you’re still a customer. The fact the you already conceded to paying doesn’t negate your ongoing payments.

I can’t speak for a company of 30,000, but I know tons of companies with a couple thousand employees or less that could, without a doubt, write their own tools in house to do the bits and pieces of SalesForce they actually are using for far less than they are spending on SalesForce. As they grow, their SalesForce costs grow linearly or worse, while an in-house tool’s grow at a decreasing rate.

Any company that size or larger already has some kind of technology division that can be grown to accommodate the development.

For those really big companies, I imagine their SalesForce bill is so high they might have potential alternative options I can’t even imagine at those prices.

At first I was concerned about these huge tech companies stealing all of human knowledge and using it to make a fortune and drive everyone that created the knowledge into poverty.

Now I see that they are stealing all of human knowledge to make LLMs, giant digital babbling talkers. It can’t work how they want the way they’re doing it, so it doesn’t matter what data they consume. They seem to lose money on every LLM query, even if you’re paying for the highest tier.

When they stop subsidizing the cost to cash in, the already lukewarm interest in LLMs will cool further as costs rise.

Shower response: I don’t like that they’re gobbling my data, but at least they’re choking on it.

Nothing more.

You are buying it with your personal data and granting them access to your computer. Even if you don’t think that’s not worth much, it is still not free. You’re just paying with something other than money.

There are billions of us. We can do many things at once.

This may not matter as much as nuclear disarmament, but it matters to everyone that owns one of these cars.