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The whole "refunds will be complicated" thing is a red herring. Despite all the rhetoric, tariffs are paid by one entity: the importer. However they may choose to carve up that responsibility from an internal financial perspective, there is only one entity per-shipment paying the tax...

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The problem I see here is that it WILL work, right up until it doesn't. The mob-like influx of retail investors since the pandemic (and Robin Hood) has proven that it can move markets. It just can't move them sustainably or predictably, nor can it pull the same trick on experienced traders...

I'm likely to be downvoted to heck for this, but I think this is more complicated than folks want to make out. The privacy violations are a problem, the lack of oversight is a huge problem, and the sloppy police work is a disaster. Those constitute huge arguments against use of the cameras...

You would be shocked. Google actually held a call with their Education "partners", and basically put an engineer front-and-center to berate University admins about how they had better get with the times, or the technology was going to steamroll them. To someone's credit, after that call, they...

Disclosure: I'm on the board of a US research university... The AI problem is a complicated one, with a multitude of both benign and nefarious actors. It's hard to blame students 100% when, for instance, Google just launched (then revoked, then re-launched) its "Homework Helper" function that...

Consumer Electronics are, of course, a popular item -- and tend to be higher-priced than many other imported gods, so the tariff impact stands to be larger. But the overall impact is already occurring. My company works with food & beverage importers, and you're already seeing this type of...

What a lot of the non-US commenters above miss is that pricing in the US is, broadly, based upon expectations of volume. It is a HUGE consumer market, and US consumers have repeatedly proven themselves susceptible to advertising and FOMO. Things that drive a significant portion of consumption...

Social engineering is still social engineering, and any attack that relies upon it anywhere in the exploit chain isn't magically revolutionary. Regrettably, humans are still the problem, and will always be the problem. The moment someone deploys an un-phishable, un-discloseable...

This blog entry is particularly interesting, because you can see the forecast ensemble and both what it got right, and what it got wrong. The question I can't seem to find an answer to is "how queryable is its prediction rationale?" A lot of newer AI models are mostly (or entirely) opaque as...

Sure, but the point isn't to use the dryer outlet -- in fact, if you did that and tried to charge and dry your clothes at the same time, things would not go well. The point is that nobody has ever posited that the barrier to washer and dryer adoption is running a 240V line to the laundry room...

Something feels off here. 240V / 30A is pretty much the same requirement for an electric clothes dryer, and we don't see articles popping up like "20 million households could dry their clothes if only they didn't store stuff in the laundry room and it wasn't so expensive." 30A is not that...

There's clearly a bell-curve of "the right amount of information" for society to function well. Too little, you end up with quacks selling cure-alls and snake oil because nobody can effectively do any research. Too much, and you end up with quacks selling cure-alls and snake oil because...

If history is any teacher, it's going to take enormous numbers of dead people, many of whom were publicly executed (or beaten nearly to), to punish the "offenders". Look to the Chinese Cultural Revolution for what happens when populism and autocratic revolutionaries gain power. Academics...

It's certainly not a fix-all solution, especially for non-technical consumers, but given that there's almost no scenario where any device can be supported indefinitely, there should be some requirement that firmware and app code be placed in Escrow or something. If a device is discontinued, the...

Ah. Define "better". Because this is demonstrably not the case. Yes, it might give you a DIFFERENT answer. But it does not guarantee better, by any objective standard. In fact, if you read the release details on the latest Anthropic Claude Opus 4 model, they touted how long it could run...

This argument is funny to me. You're 100% correct that the term could be considered appropriate. But I'll argue it's also 100% correct that an appropriate term could be "rationalizing". Which is also something that humans do... Take a preconceived result based on our personal experiences...

To some extent, the newer models being released are starting to feel like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Which isn't to suggest that LLM-based AI tools are going to rapidly go away anytime soon, but the seismic shifts in capabilities that were the norm for several years are now...

I'm not suggesting that all Trades are equal. Certainly there are jobs out there that people take because they're the only job in town, etc... But skilled trades like plumbing, electrical, welding, HVAC, automotive or aircraft mechanic, even truck drivers, and on and on. There are a LOT of...

I'm going to teeter on the brink of making this a political discussion, and hope I don't cross the line, but... Your statement that society is not a zero-sum game is no longer one that is shared by a significant majority of society. In fact, it could be argued that the US has the...