Just bear in mind that nothing involved in “refurbishing” a drive removes the wear it has already experienced. That may or may not matter to you. The mean time between failures for a particular model is a meaningful statistic, but it doesn’t tell you too much about any individual drive. You may get lucky or unlucky with the lifespan.

If you check and monitor your drives, as various people have recommended here, you are less likely to be surprised by a failure. If you keep them backed up you won’t be out anything more than the replacement cost of the drive when it does happen.

Exactly. The rich will be able to buy privacy, while the rest become ever easier to exploit.

I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.

What scares me is that con men and delusional idiots are the ones making the decisions about AI. Like biological weapons development, this is an area where unintended consequences have the potential to destroy mankind. And it is in the hands of people who have demonstrated that they will fire anyone who wants to slow them down by examining the risks and the underlying ethics of what they are doing.

Altman is the most obviously terrible example of someone who should never be allowed near this technology, but his counterparts at Google, IBM, Apple, and the other tech giants are nearly as bad. They want the fame, money, and power this could bring them. None of them are looking out for the good of humanity as a whole.

I firmly believe that our best hope, at least for the moment, is that general AI is going to take longer than they think. We are not going to achieve it by building more powerful versions of what we have now. It will require something new and different. By the time that breakthrough happens, we need to have responsible people managing it.

Paper tape would probably work, as long as you could find a reliable reader for it. I’m actually old enough to have used it and the readers often had problems. Getting rid of the mechanical aspects of the reader and replacing them with light sensors would go a long way toward fixing that.

Magnetic tape only lasts for a decade or two.

This could be considered a trojan.

I love the idea!

The biggest problem with corporate governance is that precedent in US law is absolutely clear that the only financial responsibility is to the shareholders. If we expanded that to include employees and customers our world would look very different after a while.

The sad thing is that the corporate sociopaths who made the bad decisions all made huge amounts of money doing it. The fact that they destroyed the company means nothing to them. And it will not mean anything to the next corporations that hire those same people as executives.

I love this image, but you know that Clippy would be holding the gun sideways, gangster style.

The earlier generation of tech leaders were just as bad as the current ones. Bill Gates was willing to do almost anything to hold onto his near monopoly and to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Larry Ellison has made a life’s work out of taking over software projects that benefited everyone, then brutally killing them. I actually met Steve Jobs several times and he was an awful person who made his fortune by exploiting more talented people. And so on.

There were plenty of decent tech innovators, as there are now. Then, as now, they did not end up running huge corporations.

I’m sure there were others, but the only exceptions I can think of were from the generation before that. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP and made it a great place to work, a center of innovation, and a very profitable company, until they retired. And it all went to hell rather quickly.

I’ve just been looking for something to replace One Note. The timing of this announcement worked out really well for me. :-)

Thanks!

Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.

That seems to imply that Facebook and Elon are not terrorists. I could make a reasonable argument for Facebook. Elon, I think, has already established his credentials with multiple acts that have led to riots and other violence.

Thank you! That was very useful.

My sister lives in Alaska. The locals say that you can tell if you’re in grizzly territory by checking any bear poop you find. If it contains bells and smell like bear spray, you know there are grizzlies nearby.

Polar bears will most likely hunt you, even if they don’t immediately attack. They are terrifyingly good at it.

Company that makes Mice: Hey, what if we actually built a good mouse!

Titanium and carbon fiber, not iron. This isn’t the middle ages.

I try very hard to buy everything on physical media. I subscribe to a few streaming services, but I never buy non-physical media. You don’t really own anything that can suddenly disappear because a company changes policies, get bought, or goes out of business.

Everything I buy is then ripped and stored on my local media server. That makes them more convenient and allows me to store the physical media out of the way. If something goes wrong, I can always re-rip.

It is worth noting that optical discs age and can become unreadable over time. If that happens, I can always go in the opposite direction and burn a new disc from my digital copy.