The weather stone is rubbish. Mine has been gone a week, and yet, there has been no tornado.

Plus working hard is not necessarily correlated with being paid more, or being promoted.

The company could easily refuse you promotion if you’re considered irreplaceable.

Yes, it’s that thing what 4-chan hackers known as Anonymous use, isn’t it?

It’s particularly bad now that it’s forcibly embedded into every computer, and at the forefront.

You can’t hit Win-C by mistake any more, since Windows will instead open a window to “chat with friends and family” by trying to install Teams. (Which makes it particularly bad on my end is that the install broke, so it will randomly pop up later with “Cannot install teams at the moment. Please try again later.”)

And never try to deal with dates and timezones.

Or anything that looks like dates.

Gene scientists had to revise their whole naming scheme because Excel would see MARCH1 (Membrane-Associated Ring-CH-Finger Type 1), and ‘helpfully’ convert it into a date, rendering it useless (since it uses timestamps on the backend).

It’s bad enough that my data science course recommended against opening CSV files in Excel, because it would edit the file to do the conversion, even before you explicitly saving, mangling your data before you could process it.

Though little compares to the seeming magic that is pirahna solution obliterating a chicken drumstick. It’s just gone.

You can turn it off, but the fact that you have to go into the settings and toddle about is ridiculous.

It’s a notepad, why does it even need settings to twiddle?

Enterprise would riot if they did.

They might do it later, but as it stands, this isn’t the old notepad, and gets used by a good bit more than just Enterprise users, so they can stick their AI into it.

People also forget that YouTube ran at a loss for well over a decade.

And any new start up would have to compete with YouTube and their massive audience, and all the other sites. There’s a reason that Vimeo never made quite the same height, for example.

Or reprise their old assistants from XP.

At least a “computer Wizard” would make them stand out compared to ChatGPT in a funny box.

Excel definitely has its flaws though. For example, in science, it will mangle your data in its attempts to be helpful by reformatting the file if you so much as open it.

The genomics committee had to change their naming scheme for some genes because excel kept converting them into dates (for example, you had a MAR-10 gene, it’d be converted into a timestamp or 3/10) and destroying the names, even if the file wasn’t saved.

CPUs have multiple cores now? Amazing.

The split might leave a monopoly still, if it’s the only major browser.

If Mozilla does become defunct, it does raise the question of whether Chrome would be considered a Google monopoly, and therefore subject to antitrust legislation.

I can’t imagine any governments would look kindly upon internet access being guarded behind a single company’s product.

Plus he’s proven that having a cult of personality works, and caused a notable shift in the US Republican party.

For all we know, that might be a permanent change, rather than a temporary one.

A surprising amount of technological development is for pornography. Video-casettes won out because pornography used them over laserdisc or betamax.

That, and people don’t know how to adjust them, or are unwilling to. My parents’ cars have a dial to adjust the headlight angle for when carrying weight in the back of the car, or when towing, but they never touch the setting.

Does he think that the demand for AI-accelerating hardware is just going to go away? That the requirement of fast, dedicated memory attached to a parallel processing/matrix multiplying unit (aka a discreet GPU) is just going to disappear in the next five years‽

Maybe the idea is to put it on the CPU/NPU instead? Hence them going so hard on AI processors in the CPU, even though basically nothing uses it.

The parallels between Musk and Stark seemed perfect on paper. Both are billionaire tech innovators with a flair for the dramatic and dreams of changing the world.

They’re not, though. Stark is a rare engineering powerhouse who personally pushed past a lot of engineering boundaries, and Musk is an investor/programmer who mostly puts his name on existing things.

I might change my mind if Musk personally invents AGI, nanobots, and a previously-unknown clean energy source capable of powering a 1/3rd of NYC with a room no larger than a foyer, like Stark did, but I’m not holding out much by way of hopes.

They’ll be boggled by hiccough and gaol.