I don’t need to guess. I know from having been to China and having talked to people.

It’s mostly a combination of 3 things:

1. Tons of infrastructure. If you decide to start manufacturing some random thing you can easily get all the stuff you need to get started.
2. Regulations are generally very favorable to small startups and businesses. This is partly why so much of the stuff on Temu is crap.
3. A huge population. That’s the main source of ultra cheap labor. Farmers in rural China can still make as little as $1.90 per day. All a factory owner needs to offer is more than that and they’ll have a line of applicants.

The thing is that it’s not PURE crap.

It’s kind of like going to a flea market. Most of it is crap and you can still find some decent and good stuff that’s way cheaper than it should be.

Do you consider yourself these people’s friend?
If you’re completely disinterested in their milestones, that sounds more like an acquaintance.

But to your question, yes. I actually care about these things for acquaintances and random people too. There are limits to how much I care but it’s not zero.

There’s an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, “nepo baby”.

Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather’s grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.

Elon’s father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn’t get you recognition from old money families. Buffet went to public school.

They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.

I pulled this same thing in college. I was a CS major in the late 90’s and I took a class from the writing department on changing discourse in a new digital era.

The professor was really good at literary analysis and knew next to nothing about computers. He was spot on that big changes were afoot but he was as wrong as anyone else on what those changes were (spoiler: we all thought we would have an alternate universe in Cyberspace TM).

We had the option of creating a website as our final project and we realized that if we just put in every possible feature we’d get an A. Animated backgrounds? Moving fonts? Music? A goofy mouse pointer? No feature was too dumb. If it was something you couldn’t do on a piece of paper, we added it to our website.

We got our A. It was a dirty A but we took it.

It kinda looks like your arguing that voting doesn’t work.

strains credibility

Not sure why.
Security professionals are constantly complaining about insiders violating security policies for stupid reasons.
Security publications and declassified documents are full of breaches that took way too long to discover.

The Navy may have great security protocols but it’s full of humans that make mistakes. As they say, if you invent a foolproof plan, the universe will invent a better fool.

The original article says there were over 15 people involved https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

With that many people, it’s only a matter of time before someone spills the beans.

There are several steps they could have taken to make it much harder to discover. I expect more and more people will take those steps and we’ll never hear about it.

There’s a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they’ll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.

That sounds just fine. I’m pretty suspicious of someone who claims that being able to save 30 seconds typing that post would make you more tech savvy.

I think that true “tech-savvyness” isn’t really a generational thing.

Some people are just really curious about how stuff works. When they see something they aren’t satisfied with, “Just do it.” or “Shit just works.” They want to know how and why it works. When you hand those people a computer, machine or flower they’ll poke at it and try to understand it better.

It’s not clear that typing skills are actually needed for that.

I max out at around 80-100 WPM but I only sustain that when I’m transcribing something. When I need to learn about technology, it’s much more about reading than typing. When I actually need to do some coding, I spend much more time staring at the screen and looking up stuff on Stackoverlow than I do actually typing.

Most of Z is not savvy at all, just like with every generation. And just like with every generation, some of them will push the envelope of technology. I doubt that lack of typing will slow those folks down.

You’re right. They’re not LLMs and they’re not particularly new.

The main new part is that new techniques in AI and better hardware means that we can get better answers than we used to be able to get. Many people also realize that there’s a lot of potential to develop systems that are much better at answering those questions.

So when people ask, “Why are companies investing in AI when customers hate AI.” Part of the answer is that they’re investing in something different than what most people think of when they hear “AI”.

A lot of people have come to realize that LLMs and generative AI aren’t what they thought it was. They’re not electric brains that are reasonable replacements for humans. They get really annoyed at the idea of a company trying to do that.

Some companies are just dumb and want to do it anyway because they misread their customers.

Some companies know their customer hate it but their research shows that they’ll still make more money doing it.

Many people that are actually working with AI realize that AI is great for a much larger set of problems. Many of those problems are worth a ton of money; (eg. monitoring biometric data to predict health risks earlier, natural disaster prediction and fraud detection).

No.

It’s actually worse than that. Very few borders are straight lines. We have to approximate the border when calculating land area.

Finding plot holes in Harry Potter is like shooting fish in a barrel. There’s no challenge to it.

Rowling took “a wizard did it” as far as it can go.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=a+wizard+did+it#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:2884189e,vid:sVgVB3qsySQ,st:0

Yeah. It confused me at first too.

It’s not too bad when they use some word that we never use at all. I had no trouble figuring out what a “bellend” is.

It’s more of an issue when they use a word differently.
Me: “Yo blondie, that’s not how you’re supposed to wear condoms.”
Nigel Covington III: “You git, I most certainly do wear rubbers on my feet.”

That’s just the name.

In the UK, “public school” just means that admissions are generally open to the public. They’re still very expensive, are often boarding schools, and tend to have a lot of castles on their campuses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)

That’s one of many many plot holes in Harry Potter.

There’s really no depth to the world building beyond, “What if British public schools taught magic?”

It doesn’t make sense in any context beyond that because the author never considered it from any context beyond that. Whenever you run into some crazy crap in HP and wonder, “Why TF would anyone do it that way?” The answer is almost always, "Because that’s how they do it in British public schools.

That’s a great use case. Splunk does something along those lines. Logs are particularly nice because they tend to be so large that individual companies can often have the AI trained to the specifics of their environment.

This is all true if you take a tiny portion of what AI is and does (like generative AI) and try to extrapolate that to all of AI.

AI is a vast field. There are a huge number of NP-hard problems that AI is really really good at.

If you can reasonably define your problem in terms of some metric and your problem space has a lot of interdependencies, there’s a good chance AI is the best and possibly only (realistic) way to address it.

Generative AI has gotten all the hype because it looks cool. It’s seen as a big investment because it’s really expensive. A lot of the practical AI is for things like automated calibration. It’s objectively useful and not that expensive to train.