I’m an engineer. I use all of it. I use it whether I’m writing technically correct and accurate forensic reviews or doing math in my head (or on paper) to analyze a condition in real time or checking a complex finite element model to ensure that there are no improper assumptions or invalid boundary conditions. AI/ML is really useful for some things, and deadly for others.

Rote memorization may seem unnecessary, but a mental catalog - whether it be quotes, body parts and systems, equations of natural phenomena, or even manufactured parts and specifications - is the hallmark of someone who can work independently in a real time industry. It may not matter for some jobs, but it’s make or break in others.

On the contrary, it will raise the floor of required credentials. When everyone has a HS education, an undergrad degree is needed to stand out. Now that a bachelors is the de facto education level, a masters degree is necessary. If it gets easier to get a MS degree, we’ll be requiring a PhD for entry level positions.

Yet. Infrastructure on this scale moves slowly and the transparentness of pricing changes on short time lines in physical stores is hard to track. It exists in emergency economies - we call it price gouging - but that’s usually quite obvious. The idea of dynamic pricing has existed forever - hotels, airline flights, movie tickets, taxi rides, even electric rates. As technology advances it offers the opportunity to use the technology to shorten the time window for pricing changes more and more. An extra two tenths of a percent profit seems like a trivial amount. Amazon and Walmart combined for more than a trillion dollars in sales last year. 0.2% is a very non-trivial $2 Billion. If it becomes available, it will be exploited.

o7

Fly safe, cmdr

Five years? Why did Biden let them in!!

(/s)

The use of the term backlight is common, but even Amazon refers to it as a “front light” (it’s edge-lit, of course, as you say). Bit like using a floppy disc as the “save” icon, or walling wireless networks “wi-fi” despite having nothing to to with “fidelity”. We all know what it means.

This is like people abandoning a stick shift and rigid frames/chasses for modern automatic/CVT and and unibody with crumple zones. The latter are complicated, expensive, and inefficient - but substantially more forgiving to the average driver who merely wants to get from A to B with the minimum amount of effort. Linux will be there for people who choose to dedicate hundreds of hours a year to the hobby of computers. For everyone else who doesn’t want to open their laptop to replace the keyboard, update their wireless card, and clean or replace the system fans and solder in a new power connector, buying a new laptop with the extra horsepower (to overcome the code creep) will offer them all those things at a price cheaper than even taking them to the corner repair shop to get the mechanical failures fixed.

I enjoy using one of the most carbon-intensive and nearly-non-recyclable materials(concrete) available to build my green future. Look at me, I’m so high tech!

It doesn’t matter how good a secondary product is, most users will stay with the default out of a mix of (lack of) expertise and apathy. What this tells me is that the average user makes Google substantially more than this amount after all other expenses are added in.

Google (well, Alphabet) is worth over 1.5T dollars. They could have paid this and made the search engine better. You imply that Google is a poor (general purpose) search engine, but Google became Google by being a better search engine than all the others and, afaik, hasn’t really lost that position. It’s been enshitified by the increase in advertising volume and by the natural language model which benefits non-technical users at the expense of more syntactically exact power users, but neither of those speak to the core algorithm.

So Khashoggi gets murdered on Trump’s watch and Trump’s response about MBS is - and I quote from Woodward’s book - “I saved his a**,” “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.” And then, after Trump leaves office MBS gives his son, who has no hedge fund management experience, a $2B investment for his new hedge fund. But Biden is blamed for betrayal based in his desire to engage the country and not “walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran.”

Did Putin ghost write this story for the Guardian himself, or is it run of the mill, mid-level Russian propaganda?