I have my 2010 Kobo and it still works fine, you can copy books by usb to it.

Well, even these AI companies cannot manage to replace these workers themselves.

There's never going to be 65$/user/month, they already struggle to move past 5% of paying users with the current pricing.

I have the same opinion, these AI companies can't even work financially with the cheap ram prices, they certainly won't with high prices.

And ram producers are betting on it, they will just milk the AI companies until they collapse.

In the US for sure but in the EU, that insurance is still relevant.

The site pirates games that are still being sold by their original devs, like “Ports of Call”. Even for some games published by bigger companies, some of the original developers get a small cut on lifetime sales. So I don't need to “pretend” anything.

That can happen yes but it's rare, usually they just got their salary and the rights were sold/re-sold/sold again to larger media conglomerates merge after merge.

I think they lost against (or gave up) fighting spam somewhat around 2010 so they really don't have any modern experience on page reliability anymore. Presumably they thought that they didn't need to care as they got their money from paid top results and had an enormous market share.

All the engineers of the golden days are gone and the web changed so much from back then that I don't think they really have a leverage in this area anymore.

Google stopped fighting spam when they realized paid ads made more money than organic relevance

Yeah that's also my analysis, they got paid regardless of the results so why would they care? If anything, better results would cost more and eat the bottom line.

Now we're 15 years later and suddenly quality matters again as the competition is fierce in the LLM world. However they have been out for so long that they lost their edge.

It's always the same with the US, the US always overestimate raw military power and underestimate local and strategic conditions.

All the previous wars got lost the exact same way.

Trump is losing the same way the US lost in Afghanistan, Irak, Vietnam, Korea... Just faster than any anybody else.

If anything, those were lost (I'd argue Iraq was a draw of sorts and Korea was more-or-less a victory) due to lack of raw military power.

This is a country with enough nuclear warheads to end intelligent life on this planet. It has bombers that, even with conventional payloads, could wipe most cities off the map once air superiority is achieved - and it almost always is.

Instead, there's a tendency to try and move the nation into the American sphere of influence and let it defend itself under its own power, and that's where things fail, because that requires lots of ground troops over a period of years while the local allies in the conflict get ready to do the fighting.

The interesting wrinkle with Iran is that The World's Best Negotiator(TM) has essentially painted himself into a corner. Could the US do more to break Iran? Of course. Would those things be politically popular in the US or receive the support of the international community? Hell no. So he has to keep puffing his chest up. It'll be interesting to see what happens post-midterms.

There's some truth here as well, there's a very large political asymmetry at play here.

On Iran's side, no death will really matter to the regime, it's a political hydra which is capable of doing and sustaining lots of damage to stay in power.

On the US side though, the war is highly unpopular, every single death and every single side effect of the war is politically painful.

But I don't agree about the first part, there's definitely a "we're the biggest military in the world, we will win no matter what" mindset in the US military, which is the reason why they lost so many wars.

Having a military so large is a blessing and a curse, they are too confident and then trip on strategy.

Because they just ban US tech and then the local companies don't have any choice beside building something themselves.