Then they start talking about the capsule wardrobe for minimalistic living. Every season, throw away half and replace it with the latest fashion. In the end you still buy a lot.

My clothes fall apart before I throw them out, and those that don’t will be used for gardening.

At 1.6 meter for the metric minded. If you really stretch out and can hit the tv with your toes it’s about the right distance.

Large corpos might set up fulfilment centers in USA and do bulk import. Small companies will just stop export to USA. Setting up manufacturing in USA is unlikely with all the volatility.

Netflix appeared, piracy dropped. And when the movie streaming market fragmented, piracy shot up. Like they say, it’s a service problem.

Idea

Lab tech <- the article is here

Prototype

Mass production

So, the usual Battery Tuesday message.

It always comes to a point where the only way to improve traffic is to flatten the buildings people drive to, defeating the purpose.

Nicely demonstrated here: https://youtu.be/Suugn-p5C1M

The law of the asphalt jungle dictates a strict hierarchy maintained by the current value of the vehicle. The rare and elusive hypercar at the top, Bentley and Rolls Royce after that, BMW, Audi, Mercedes claim their place after the big boys, then comes the rabble with the commoner brands like Opel, Renault, Peugeot, Volkswagen and after that the economy cars. Trailing all of them are the sort of cars that are officially quadricycles and hated by all. The right of way follows that order and no signaling is required for lesser cars. They are expected to yield and make room for their more noble brethren. It’s a stupid status game, all of it, and it endangers safety.

Now I’m wondering if Harmony OS is going to break out of China.

Then they do the calculation on the costs to raise the children and decide it’s not economically viable.

Every time some new measure is released “for protection”, the next day it’s being used to sniff out dissidents. That usually means journalists, activists (political, labor, environment, …) and sympathisants to give them a bit of pressure to straight up arrest them on some pretense.

Researchers at MIT published a report showing that 95% of the generative AI programs launched by companies failed to do the main thing they were intended for — ginning up more revenue.

Allegedly the remaining 5% that makes a profit is mostly specialized in spam and spam adjacent marketing.

Google did something similar. They made search worse on purpose so people would do more searches and see more ads, boosting revenue.

But yeah, diminishing returns means investor money drying up means squeezing customers and hoping all that putting AI into everything translates to lots of paying customers.

They had one trick: scaling. And that trick is getting diminishing returns.

Oh, it’s the old “Calculation is futile. You will be… approximated!”

In the end it’s a word generator that has been trained so much it uses facts often enough to be convincing. That’s its basic architecture.

You can ask it to give a confidence level to have an indication of how sure it is of the answer.

Almost all companies deploying generative AI don’t see their revenue change significantly. AI is not the money maker people claimed it was going to be.

That works for account to account transfers and in shop payment with your card. The online payment world is still a lot more fragmented.

They could, but in Europe each country has at least one local payment systems. It was just more convenient to provide a few global players instead of dozens local ones. Many online shops here too is just local player + visa/Mastercard. That might change now that the global players get too controlling. (Not speaking for entire EU, just the part I visited.)

That would require more logistics to get different modules, checks to make sure the right ones are installed and labor to install them. Somewhere there is a cutoff point where modularity is cheaper.