I doubt it ever even got close to a boardroom, because it was probably a pretty easy decision made at a far lower level.
“I was talking about Winnie the Pooh, and my phone autocorrected Tigger into something much worse. We probably don’t want iPhones to autocorrect towards some words, even if they’re legitimate words. Do y’all think it makes sense to bias autocorrect away from potentially risky subjects?”
You can still type that word into your phone. You can still send it to anyone you wish. Autocorrect just isn’t going to suggest it to you on accident. Not autocorrecting to potentially embarrassing, uncomfortable, or sensitive subjects is probably a good idea that’s—at the iPhone scale—probably saved quite a few people’s jobs by not fat fingering something that would have gotten someone fired.
Replace every reference to “tackle football” in this comment with a sport we haven’t traditionally let kids participate in—like full-contact MMA—and you’ll realize how ridiculous it sounds.
> Even if you only save $500/store/year, you can see that it really adds up over a chain of 1000 stores.
People always say stuff like this, but it never tracks for me. If you’re a chain with 1,000 stores, $500,000 is barely a blip on your budget sheet in exactly the same way that $500 is barely a blip on the budget of a single store.
Plus there’s no way this remote management stuff doesn’t cost at least $500/store in operating costs.
> Plus there’s no way this remote management stuff doesn’t cost at least $500/store in operating costs.
Going by the number of companies that still can't grasp having to pay for ongoing maintenance for and IoT system, even with CRA and NIS2, some still selling stuff running on 12+ year old software, I wouldn't expect them to pay much for this service or to even properly maintain it.
Don't compare it to the entire balance sheet, compare it to how much you'd have to pay someone to optimize it.
At $500/store/year times 1,000 stores, you can pay an entire team of experts for a year to come up with a way to save that money, and come out ahead. That team's manager can then go to their boss and say, look, I saved the company half a million dollars a year, and they'll get a nice bonus from it.
The pricing isn’t extortionate. It’s literally just them having to pass on the insane price of RAM (itself priced due to the massive demand and supply shortage).
And you’re right that Apple is hesitant to change prices on models. But that cuts both ways. Apple notably held off of bumping prices across their product line for a considerable amount of time, very plausibly eating the cost of RAM price increases.
It would definitely be atypical but given the unique and extreme nature of the current situation, I wouldn’t be shocked if they cut prices somewhat once the RAM situation relaxes.
Right up to the launch of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro in mid 2023, Apple would still happily charge you early 2019 prices for the 2019 Xeon processors in the previous edition, 2019 prices for memory and flash (I ordered mine with 32 and used OWC to go to 192GB, because for the exact same chips, spec, timings, OWC wanted $1,050 for 192GB, and Apple wanted $3,000 for 160GB, i.e. minus the 32GB already rolled into the price. Similar $1K to $3K margin for 8TB of SSD - I bought a PCIe card with 4x2TB Samsung Pro drives).
Shallow or misguided criticisms of Apple—of which there are countless—get shredded on this website. This is not a shallow or misguided criticism of Apple. It is clearly and obviously unacceptable.
> Why aren't you excited for pushing the frontier of knowledge.
In mathematics specifically, having answers to open problems is often not inherently all that useful. The value of open problems typically comes from new theories and techniques that mathematicians produce attempting to drive towards solutions. The open problems themselves are a means to an end.
Suddenly having the all the air sucked out of the room by having all of math’s open problems solved—without producing fruitful new areas of research—is not inherently a win.
About the only general lesson I can extract so far from these announcements is that apparently we underestimated the extent to which major open problems are amenable to known approaches (possibly from very disparate fields), if they are combined judiciously by a virtually omniscient search engine. Frankly it's a little disappointing to me that these problems didn't require major new creative advances (e.g. the invention of new subfields) for their solution. And arguably that's a loss, if humans, with their inferior search and recall capabilities, would have been forced to resort to more creative solutions.
It's still possible, and I suspect likely, that many more problems will require new creative advances. Creative advances that may have arisen in the regular course of attempting to solve these problems that were nevertheless amenable (often in a very alien brute-force way) to combination of existing techniques
Maybe this is too pessimistic an attitude, but we may be ten years from it not even mattering.
I’ve heard Grant Sanderson’s take. But I suspect math is going down a dark road where humans have little reason to pursue it any more. We’ve crossed a threshold where computers are regularly solving problems that have remained open for decades. Humans barely stand a chance today; ten years from now we’ll be irrelevant in terms of pushing the field forward.
AI might be around to produce new techniques for other AI. But will it be relevant for humans? Will humans even need to be part of the loop? Will the new techniques be presented in ways that are intended to be conveyed to humans? Will there be humans interested in or capable enough to use them? I have my doubts.
We seem to still be a long way from an AI equivalent of Grothendieck (i.e., creative system-builder). Maybe AI is close to replacing a problem-solver like Erdos.
Any sufficiently complex set of principles is going to have situations where two principles conflict with one another. This exact situation is one of them.
That's always the case for a novel exploit. There isn't a lot of value in popping somebody's PHP blog, so people who've invested time and money into a zero-day exploit have little incentive to use it for that purpose.
The white hats want to extend the time before an exploit is in the hands of the masses who might do so just for the fun of it, and the black hats want to use it on high-value targets.
I think the point is that this is completely the opposite of the narrative that was pushed about this bug - that there would be thousands+ of AI agents actively compromising every vulnerable site automatically regardless of value within minutes of the fix being released into the wild. Well, now it's 3 days after, and this has been up for 3.5 hours, and nobody has taken it yet.
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