Tax bills are congress, the FCC is the executive. So, one requires bipartisan support, the other can just be decreed.

No, just a typo the article says 600,000 or 600K

It took Google a year to sell over a million pixels when they released, they didn’t even hit 600,000 sold in their first 3 quarters (looking at all of North America) - https://coolest-gadgets.com/google-smartphone-statistics/

So 600,000 people putting down a $100 deposit for a terrible phone is definitely suspicious.

I guess I was thinking of companies with an international presence, or did Worldcom exist outside of north America?

Damn, I didn’t realize it was still that high. I know that yahoo finance was big for a long time, but figured that had finally passed.

I guess I wouldn’t count that as dead then.

Risks are only for those who play fair. I’m not sure if there is anything Trump and his family could do that would make them actually face consequences, besides maybe loosing the midterms.

Anyone else find it hard to believe that there were 600,00 orders for this. That feels like another money laundering situation.

Edit: 600K

Worldcom was more than 20 years, but I also don’t know how “big” they were.

Gateway and Compaq might count, although just around the cusp.

Yeah, I was kinda considering the phone part a separate business and it definitely died after MS bought them.

Yahoo and MySpace come to mind. Probably could count Nokia and Blackberry, although they were more phone/hardware.

Possibly AOL, but their “death” may have been more than 20 years ago.

And while technically some of those companies “exist” in some capacity today, I don’t think we’d consider any of them except Yahoo as anything but a name/brand at this point.

Besides using the term “shrinkflation” which is arguably a “clickbaity” term in this context, I don’t think the article is terrible. It’s a bit of a nothing article, as it’s something that’s been called out for a while, but a lot of new devices on the horizon are providing less (RAM/storage) for the same/higher price.

Its not the most interesting article, but at least uses real examples demonstrating the effect, which is sadly better than most articles I’ve read on this topic.

It’s stated in the second paragraph:

This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users’ machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.

Its a separate file (as any 4GB download would be).

Yeah, I don’t understand how so many companies whiffed on the one vs two thumbstick design. Sony with the PSP, Nintendo with the 3DS, and Valve with the original Steam Controller.

Maybe my memory isn’t right, but I thought the big deal with the 08 crash was that few people saw it coming as the bad assets were bundled together with okay assets hiding their real risk. If AI takes down the economy, it’s not going to be surprising to most people as many people are calling out how overleveraged some of these companies are.

Reading further into, it’s a mixed bag. There are people calling it out, but some of the movement of funds is to free up more lending.

Eh, if they’re actively talking about it, then it’s a lot better than the housing crisis. The big issue there was no one was actually calling the garbage assets garbage. Here they seem to be calling out the risk.

There is no way to know someone is connecting to you via a VPN. They just blacklist known IP addresses, so there isn’t really a way to implement this. Sure, you can blacklist well known VPN providers, but anyone can rent a PC in another location to VPN through.

So, you’re okay with insider trading as long as there is no trading?

You don’t hire interns for productivity. If you’re intern program is any good it’s a time/resource sink. However, it’s a good recruiting pipeline and provides young people an opportunity to get real world experience.

I mean that’s kinda the whole point.

Companies are looking at AI to replace people. Either it’s ready or it’s not.

If you need to treat it like it’s an intern, then it’s not worth the expense. Anyone hiring interns to be productive doesn’t understand why you hire an intern.