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It's one thing to discontinue selling the product.

It's another to discontinue service (i.e. Music) to the product.

Did the hardware generate a lot of support requests?

Does it require too much engineering to keep secure with updates, etc.?


Seriously.

I can't repeat this enough: there needs to be LEGISLATION against this.

If a product needs cloud functionality to operate, there needs to be a legal minimum number of years (5?), and the company should be required to prominently advertise the length of time (so they can compete to guarantee for longer periods of time, like 10 years).


I think the courts are much better suited to resolving this kind of issue, because it's very product and advertising specific. Courts could easily rule that e.g. Spotify breached the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, or possibly civil fraud, or something else, by failing to prominently disclose the minimum number of years / bricking the devices too soon.

A judicial solution would be much more measured and flexible.

Unfortunately, lawyers and courts have a undeservedly bad reputation which is often created by poor legislation which is beset by political motives and disadvantaged by having to draft prospective rules that can apply to a broad set of differing circumstances.

Edit: Why don't court do this more? Often because of terrible, over-reaching legislation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Arbitration_Act


There is legislation against this in many places. I don't know if this product was offered for sale in New Zealand but if it was Spotify is in violation of the Consumer Guarantees Act and must issue a refund to all customers who request one.

That's like a minimum wage law. The flip side is that companies will be more guarded about releases. Can you live with that?


Absolutely, just like I can live with minimum wage.

And companies can still stop selling the thing. They just need to keep the cloud servers running and maintaining their integrations with the rest of their code.

If maintaining servers for 5 years is the tipping point for them to judge that the product won't be profitable and therefore won't release it, then yeah it doesn't sound like it should be worth selling in the first place.


I can live with companies not turning my 2-year-old device into a doorstop, yeah.


Minimum wage laws work great. I live in the country with the highest minimum wage in the world, every country should be like this.


I'm seeing about 19% on Medicaid and about 12.5% are on Food Stamps. In theory that could be up to 1/3, but there's presumably a lot of overlap... so maybe 25% give or take?


I think this makes sense to the extent that an understanding of the differences between language helps separate out language from the underlying meaning. However... the models that are used receive input (i.e. translate from language), and to learn / understand, and to output information (i.e. re-encode into language), do not all have to be the same.


Fair, but there may be overhead that doesn't need to exist. Certainly - for the limited compute my brain can accomplish - I could gain a deeper understanding of physics, if I focused on learning physics and didn't also have to simultaneously learn French.


Wouldn't a better metaphor be if a child growing up in a bilingual household would be worse at physics as an adult? My guess would be growing up bilingual would have no impact.


This hypotetical kid would have the same size of brain/number of neurons anyway. In case of LLMs one could create a model that could be smaller thakns to not including the knowlegde about unecessary languages. A problem though could be with lacking traing data in other languages.


In the short term. In the longer term you'll understand concepts better when you're multilingual.


Human is not limited by computational power of brain (or rather, it is not the limitation we encounter). We are limited by time and the fact that our machinery degrades with time (aging).


You can have contracts within a company.


I surprised Apple approved the add, because it depicts the brand as a soul-crushing industrial force. The machine is a beast of steel and hydraulic pressure, which constantly bears down against a variety of fun and inspiring things. I don't really care about the particular items that were destroyed, but the theme is clearly one of destruction. We don't see the iPad being made. We see what is literally depicted as a remanent. That's not how Apple should want their brand or their products viewed.

Edit: What's concerning is that Apple is smart. People watched this ad and I have to assume they thought what I thought. So... what's the psychology of deciding to convey this message? Is it a threat? Is it narrative-forming? Is it subversive admission (canary) from within the company? I mean... it's very reminiscent of the 1984 ad, except with Apple being the machine. Of course, it's also possible that they just made a mistake of judgment and missed the mark, as they say. IDK


Yep. It's not particularly hard to determine which people will sell others out for a good paycheck.


For anyone in a middle management role, the struggle is real.

I don't have a day go by without senior leadership treating me like I'm failing the company for putting my employees' needs over the "needs" of management.


True, but there's a major difference between who leaves. A well-implemented RIF would eliminate many of those who prefer a Return to Office. So - for them - this is a better alternative.


Big-government is also an aspect. Both the federal and state governments in the US have a tendency to form wholly-owned subsidiaries to conduct businesses that could otherwise be run by co-ops.


It wasn't exactly random. The topic of the article is that light is eternal, and the commenter shared a quote from over a thousand years ago stating the same thing. So, the idea of light having an infinite lifetime is apparently not new... even if the mechanics of light are better understood these days.


This is in line for me with the moment of "creation." For most of the history of science as a thing, the scientific view held that the universe was infinitely old cosmos without a beginning or end. The greek model. It was only in 1900s that big bang was theorized (by a catholic priest) that science now views that there was a moment before which the universe didn't exist and after which it did.

The fact that someone reading Genesis would have had a more accurate conception of the origin of the universe, prior to big bang becoming popularized very recently in the grand scheme of things is noteworthy.


Broken clocks...


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