I bought the original AirPods Max when they came out a few years ago. They hurt my ears if I wear them for more than an hour or so and the software is garbage - constantly losing one channel or just failing to connect at all - to Apple devices.
Apple has not done enough to fix glitchy software problems, which continue to occur even on the latest AirPods Pro devices. I won’t touch the Max headphones until I start hearing that the software has been fixed.
The issue is that mobile is easily overloaded if those around you are also failing over onto it. There are only so many channels available per sector. In my experience, when one of the two incumbent carriers in my area goes down, mobile is immediately useless as a backup.
Starlink seems to provision capacity by locking your service to one address at a time; presumably, this means they have enough capacity for the customers in each physical area. By contrast, mobile networks have to contend with highly mobile terminals and highly volatile demand.
I would wager that today’s Starlink is better able to cope during a fixed line outage in an area simply because they at least have already provisioned capacity for the subscribers in that area, whereas mobile operators operate closer to capacity limits at all times and do not have the ability to scale when everyone is tethering suddenly.
I don't think mobility matters during a broadband outage. The problem is people failing over to cellular. (If anything, mobile terminals may require cellular providers to provision extra headroom, which helps during an outage.)
Starlink will have the same problem unless it provisions extra capacity for users on standby plans. The plan is so cheap that I can't imagine they're provisioning much.
It’s the business cycle, mostly. During the pandemic, low interest rates drove a boom in risk investing that flowed downhill into tech company balance sheets. Of course everyone used the money to hire lots of developers and engineers - probably more than were needed for the business opportunity they were exploiting.
I think AI is being used as an excuse for layoffs rather than the cause. Companies don’t have the cash and times got a bit too rich. This is the cyclical pull back that has been going on for decades.
There is never just one cause, but I do think AI is one of them.
Not in some AI "dey took er jerbs" kind of way, but because businesses are turning their investment focus towards AI-related ventures, like building data centres, and away from investments that require tech workers. Non-residential construction jobs, for example, have surged.
Well yes, Meta even said so explicitly about their upcoming layoffs. They're offsetting the capital expenditures into data centers, and "preparing for greater efficiency brought on by AI-assisted workers".
So who is getting that money then? Contractors building sites? Is it going off to the silicon manufacturers? Is Nvidia getting a large part of the pie?
Also, whether Covid is to blame or not, all these layoffs (not just the Meta one) contradict some of the most common rationalizations I've seen for how AI won't destroy the labor market but rather expand it.
If there really is all this latent untapped need to drive a Jevron's effect software explosion that will keep developers employable, why would so many profitable companies be laying off so many workers into the transition?
I have an explanation (or rationalization, if you wish) for this.
The AI caused the developer productivity to increase (similar to other two big SW engineering productivity jumps - compilers and open source), which gives them more leverage over employers (capital). Things that you needed a small team to build (and thus more capital) you can now do in a single person.
In the long run, this will mean more software being written, possibly by even larger number of people (shift on the demand curve - as price of SW goes down demand increases). But before that happens, companies have a knee-jerk reaction to this as they're trying to take back control over developers, while assuming total amount of software will stay constant. Hence layoffs. But I think it's shortsighted, the companies will hurt themselves in the long run, because they will lay off people who could build them more products in the future. (They misunderstood - developers are not getting cheaper, it's the code that will.)
I see this view very often being pulled into the debate but demand is not only driven through a (low) cost. Demand obviously cannot grow infinitely so the actual question IMO is when and how do we reach the market saturation point.
First hypothesis is that ~all SWEs will remain employed (demand will proportionally rise with the lower cost of development).
Second hypothesis is some % of SWEs will loose their jobs - over-subscription of SWE roles (lower cost of development will drive the demand but not such that the market will be able to keep all those ~30M SWEs employed).
Third hypothesis is that we will see number of SWEs growing beyond ~30M - under-subscription of SWE roles (demand will be so high and development cost so low that we will enter the era of hyperinflation in software production).
At this point, I am inclined to believe that the second hypothesis is the most likely one.
Many companies really got bloated during COVID. From what I can see online, Meta doubled their number of employees between 2019 and 2022. How long does it take to correct from that amount of hiring?
Some of these companies have increased headcount since their post-COVID cuts.
Some of this has nothing to do with COVID boom numbers. Some are bailing water as fast as they can (Atlassian, et al), some are treading water and betting on future returns from AI (Block), etc.
It takes time to correct 10 years of ZIRP, plus COVID overhiring that doubled the headcount of those 10 years in just 2-3.
The jig was up when social media like Reddit and tiktok during the pandemic was full of posts with big tech workers gloating about getting hired for six figure salaries to sleep in and play video games at home while putting in 2 hours of work a week, obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together that it was a too-good-to-be-true unsustainable bubble that's gonna pop and trigger a brutal reset on the job market.
Further reinforced with Elon firing 80% of Twitter and the website didn't stop working, reminding big tech CEOs that they can also start looking into trimming the overhiring fat in their back yard, with no operational loss.
Reinforce that with wall street rewarding mass layoff with share price going up, contrary to the pandemic rewards of shares going up with over hiring, and you have the perfect storm.
AI and the idea of it replacing jobs, has nothing to dow with this, it's just 10 years of ZIRP reawarding every unprofitable bullsit SaaS start-up, and 10 years of "just learn to code bro" where every shoeshine boy became a coder so now tech companies hiring are spoiled for choice.
Edit: Oh I forgot, add to that the increased of offshoring to places with cheaper labor thanks to the normalisation of remote work making it an even perfecter(is that a word?) storm on why an average programmer's labor has way less value.
> Further reinforced with Elon firing 80% of Twitter and the website didn't stop working, reminding big tech CEOs that they can also start looking into trimming the overhiring fat in their back yard, with no operational loss.
I would argue Twitter is in a worse state operationally, but either way it’s moot because one simply has to look at the company’s valuation since Musk took over to see things aren’t going well. Unless the goal is a very loud megaphone for conservative influencers and talking points, in which case things are going great.
X doesn't seem to be in any worse state operationally. The site's uptime is fine, and they've launched a ton of new features that were well received by the userbase. So: 80% fewer people, site remains operational, new feature launches have if anything accelerated. That is a success by any companies measure.
The left is now trying to rewrite history and claim the fall in valuation is because Musk took it over, but it's not. Twitter's valuation was already falling rapidly before Musk entered the game at all. Like many tech firms its price had a COVID surge. The valuations of multiple tech companies were fell sharply right as he was in the middle of the acquisition. The timing was unlucky and he overpaid. That's why he tried to back out of the deal and, if you remember, why the Twitter board went to court to force him to acquire the company against his will.
> There are other potential reasons why Mr Musk might want to pull out of the deal. The stock market price for large tech companies has fallen steeply in the last few months - did Musk offer too much?
The subsequent advertiser boycott says nothing about whether you can cut a company like Twitter by 80% and still have it function. That was caused by Musk publicly rejecting leftist claims as false. CEOs don't care about that because they can cut employees whilst claiming to be increasing diversity and the left will leave them alone.
>I would argue Twitter is in a worse state operationally
Is it because they lack coding manpower, or because Elon chased away all advertisers? Correlation != causation.
Bear in mind I was talking about functionality of the product, not corporate operation/valuation.
>Unless the goal is a very loud megaphone for conservative influencers and talking points, in which case things are going great.
Funny, I never heard the left complain about Twitter being a woke/democrat megaphone during the Jack Dorsey era. Or complain about the social media censorship during the Biden administration. Where were they back then?
They don't hate the propaganda megaphone, they hate not being the ones in charge of it.
>Is it because they lack coding manpower, or because Elon chased away all advertisers? Correlation != causation.
Didn’t say that.
> Bear in mind I was talking about functionality of the product, not corporate operation/valuation.
Didn’t say otherwise. In fact I made it a point to separate out the discussion of how it is functioning operationally from its valuation.
> Funny, I never heard the left complain about Twitter being a woke/democrat megaphone during the Jack Dorsey era.
And the right isn’t complaining about the current state. You also don’t know what I said about Twitter back then. I’m not accountable for whatever general idea you have concocted “the left.”
I am simply saying that it clearly is a megaphone for the right now. If you think it is even somewhat neutral and balanced now feel free to say so, but I would be surprised to hear that.
Sorry I didn't mean to paint you as "the left", I was speaking in general sense.
And that's why I said "They don't hate the propaganda megaphone, they hate not being the ones in charge of it.", meaning I don't think it's a partisan issue, and both sides are equally guilty.
Maybe so but Musk’s whole promise was more neutrality and openness, which he has handedly failed to bring about. Twitter censors worse and more explicitly than ever. And don’t even get me started on Grok/Grokopedia. Like Trump it’s “accurate” if it reflects his worldview - same reason he puts his thumb on the scale with Twitter.
I am progressive. I understand Twitter leaned left. But it leans way further right now as exerted from the top than it did the other direction.
I’m not quite as old as you, but I am old enough to know what a COM component is and to have ready the Byte Magazine article that likely described this ancient stone tablet tech. Codex has me absolutely stoked again. I can finally have fun with the youngsters, knowing that the latest new hotness no longer has a learning curve.
Next time you’re using your favorite LLM as a therapist, try editing your previous input and getting it to regenerate its response. It’s a humbling experience to see your trusted “therapist” shift from one perspective or piece of advice to another just by modifying your input slightly. These tools are uncannily human-sounding, but as humans we are very poorly suited to the task of appreciating how biased they are by what we say to them.
Cool approach. So basically the part that needs to be realtime - the voice that speaks back to you - can be a bit dumb so long as the slower-moving genius behind the curtain is making the right things happen.
Yes exactly- one part I did not like is we have to also separately transcribe because it does not also provide what the person said only what the ai said
What gives you the sense that the piece was written by an LLM? I would agree that the diagrams have some of the artifacts common in Nano Banana output, but what tips you off about the text?
Em dashes in every other sentence. I've never seen an actual person do that. The language in general reads exactly it's written by an LLM:
"The blah blah didn't just start as blah. It started as blah..."
"First came blah -- blah blah blah"
"And now: blah"
It's a distinctly AI writing style. I do wonder if we'll get to a point where people start writing this way just because it's what they're used to reading. Or maybe LLMs will get better at not writing like this before that happens.
I'm sick and tired of the "No..., no ..., (just) ..." LLM construction. It's everywhere now, you can't open a social media platform and get bombarded by it. This article is full of it.
I get it, I should focus just on the content and whether or not an LLM was used to write it, but the reaction to it is visceral now.
Didn't AirBnB famously spam people in the Bay Area as a "guerilla tactic" to build the business in its early days? This kind of fast and loose behaviour seems standard.
I have several naloxone kits in my house and my kids carry them in their backpacks. I'm pro harm-reduction.
With that in mind, what I'm "actually trying to say" is that
a) any time we can make a medication less harmful, that's a good thing; and,
b) if this new molecule relieves pain as well as fentanyl does, it will surely be used by people who are addicted to drugs or who are using drugs recreationally.
The bigger question that goes way beyond the scope of Scripps' research contribution is whether our society can begin to accept that people use drugs like fentanyl to treat depression, trauma, anxiety, and pain of all sorts. And that criminalizing their efforts to treat themselves does not lead to any improvement in their wellbeing or the wellbeing of our society.
I don’t make them do that. They do it because they want to be ready to help in the seconds that matter if someone has an overdose. This is the sad reality they inhabit.
Apple has not done enough to fix glitchy software problems, which continue to occur even on the latest AirPods Pro devices. I won’t touch the Max headphones until I start hearing that the software has been fixed.
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