It's a PR exercise that makes both the companies and the administration feel good. Not more. There will be no or just cosmetic change.

I think Germany got infected by the shareholder value and privatization virus but doesn't really understand it.

Working for german medium-sized companies:

It's really that the upper management does not appreciate change over departments if it's not their idea.

There is always the mentality that "why fix it if it works" where you actually have to wait for people to go to their pension to really grab a process and drive change.

You then get partially digitalized processes where digital native departments are concerned but they always have to solve the problem of interacting with a bunch of legacy systems and workflows, which in itself is so much harder and more inefficient.

Whats funny is when its privatized by publicly traded companies it becomes this weird nationalized-kinda but not really thing that turns the economy into a bifercated class of first class citizens and second class citizens.

I think in both cases they should be held responsible. Same for casinos. They know that they are driving people into the abyss.

I am pretty sure if they invested just a small fraction of the hundreds of billions data center dollars, they could detect that the conversation is going off the rails and stop it.

That's actually an AI-hard problem, if you think about it. The LLM can go off the tracks at any given point. The correct approach is to go at this from the inside out, baking reasoning about safe behaviour into your LLM at ever step. (Like Anthropic does)

And mostly these numbers are made up BS. But management will eat them up.

Anybody who has observed somebody age over decades knows that there is a huge difference between being 70 and 80. And it’s another big decline when they approach 90.

The democrats denied this with Biden and now the republicans are denying it with Trump.

Maybe we should get people that are way beyond normal retirement age out of political Leadership?

Voters primarily vote for people that look and act like them, and retired people are a massive voting block. Chris Christie saying off-the-cuff that if young people voted in any significant numbers then he would care about what they had to say was a huge money quote. We get geriatrics because people moan about how our vote doesn't matter while not voting.

"If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers"

That's what sucks about these huge dominant companies. They suppress interesting products because they don't reach the huge sales they need to make a difference to a trillion dollar company. And smaller companies can't compete against these behemoths.

So I've never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why there aren't interesting niche phones that don't sell a ton (anymore: android used to be full of them, that was half the point), but are enough for a small company to make consistent (but small) profits. People who want niche phones are a tiny fraction of the market....but the smartphone market is enormous. A tiny fraction seems like it should be able to sustain a few small companies.

My best guess is that the kind of person who would found a company capable of making such a phone won't do it because they know it doesn't have potential to make them fabulously wealthy (just regular old wealthy) because it's inherently limited in scale. And the big companies don't do it because, while such a line could be profitable, in the absence of competition, it's more profitable to force their consumers to buy the "main" line and not make another product line.

My guess is they are only able to make the phones cheap if it’s sold at huge scale. If you make some niche small phone, the price goes way up and doesn’t look attractive.

Then you have to deal with the fact that the people with obscure requirements have a million other requirements. The person asking for a small phone then complains it doesn’t have a headphone jack, and AV1 decoding, and 16gb memory, and an unlocked bootloader, and whatever else.

While being more expensive even further decreases your niche size, it still isn't obvious to me that this should be enough to prevent the niche from existing. I am one of those customers you talk about who has a lot of obscure preferences (I can't call them requirements because literally not a single existing phone matches all of them and yet I still buy phones). A phone that met most of them would be something I'd be willing to pay a pretty good premium for.

Yeah, imagine being a small phone manufacturer today, trying to secure RAM supplies.

As usual in American politics the whole immigration issue started reasonable but now we are conflating illegal immigration with other immigration. The left wing now glorifies all immigrants, legal or illegal, and the right wingers increasingly hate all immigrants. And as always, there will be a lot of fighting and no result. And Trump as with almost everything else approaches it in the worst possible way.

It’s really frustrating how incapable of solving issues this country has become.

I think the ribbon is terrible. When you are looking for something, you can't just look in one direction but you have to scan up and down. Then it may be text or just an image. And the thing you are looking for may be on some other ribbon page.

I much prefer menus with toolbars that have only the most used functions.

You get the same when your company employs a lot of low to medium skilled offshore devs. Every morning or every week you get a huge pile of code that sort of works but there is simply no way to review it in a meaningful way. It's just too much. Thats how I feel working with Claude Code. It cranks out a lot of code really quickly but how do I know it's not creating subtle problems?