They don't remove the physical wires. Their "shutdown" is merely disconnecting the equipment in the switch building from the wires. The wiring remains in the ground (or air) until copper thieves decide to harvest it for themselves.
17,057 karma · joined September 8, 2010
They (the AI companies) are sitting on piles all right, but not "assets like dragons". Rather, what they are sitting on is piles and piles of debt that eventually will come due to be paid back. The "bet" their CEO's are making is that some "profit angle" will materialize at some point that provides the funds to pay back that debt when the bills start coming due.
> If they haven't saved any money
They have not "saved any money" (not in the sense of a "saving account" in a bank). They are leveraged as far into the future as one can see, and betting that before that lever starts to move they will have a revenue stream sufficient to pay it back.
With no codec for a new compression algorithm, it does not matter if the browser can read the container, you still see the "broken image" icon on your display.
So that's why the site text reads as AI slop.
But what the Japanese makers did was they analyzed the failures and rolled the findings back into the manufacturing line so that they continuously improved the product. After quite some time at this, they took the "quality built" mantle for themselves.
My father, mid to late 70's, worked as an auto-mechanic for a local Datsun dealer (Datsun is the company we know today as Nissan). Datsun corporate wanted every failed part on every car repaired returned to them for analysis as to why it failed. The other Japanese brands all did the same.
The big turning point seemed to have been Adobe adopting JpegXL as an approved image compression algorithm for the upcoming PDF spec. update. With that, since all browsers seem to also want to be PDF renderers, meant they had no choice but to include a JpegXL decoder. The win, if there was one here, was that the decoder they have to ship anyway now was exposed for use by <img> tags as well as by the PDF renderer.
Whether that was a cover story for additional spying by the NASA SR-71 is unknown to those of us without the necessary security clearances.
"Enterprise" is still very much in the camp of "using Oracle". Which is likely how they survive despite being so customer unfriendly. "Enterprise" users are simply using what "the enterprise" purchased and have little choice in the matter.
That is directly the result of the evil pull of advertising. "Logged in" users are more valuable than "non-logged in" users to advertisers (because logged in ones are identified) and so what you are seeing as "nagging" is Shitter (formerly X, formerly Twitter) desperately trying to increase its ad revenue at your expense. You are watching enshittification right before your eyes.
I suspect that eventually, the browser makers that are reluctant to add JpegXL support will do so, even if reluctantly, and so it will eventually "become useful on the web".
The reason why is Adobe added JpegXL as a compression format for PDF's, and as every browser maker wants their browser to also be a "PDF viewer", this means they must include a JpegXL decoder to be able to support PDF's going forward. If they must have a JpegXL decoder anyway, it is not that difficult to also add it as another supported format for the <img> tag.
Not six months or so ago we had multiple different AI CEO's, and other big company CEO's, publicly exclaiming how many jobs AI was going to replace in short order. What did they expect when they told the masses (i.e., the voters) that a majority of them were going to be unemployed soon because of AI? This is simply the folks they told they were going to lay off fighting back to prevent those layoffs from happening.
Couple that with the electricity bill price increases because of the load from the AI data centers and you have a perfect storm that crosses party lines and aligns the vast majority squarely in the "opposed to AI" camp.
So long as the changes produced (to their belief) increases in advertising revenue, they didn't care. More ad money was all that mattered.
But they do not remove the panel cover to look inside, nor do they open up any receptacle box anywhere to look at any of the wiring inside. So they wouldn't know (nor discover) if the wiring job was done well or done in a shoddy manner.
1) not all camera bodies include those fine tuning options in the camera firmware;
2) lenses that include additional buttons beyond that which the camera maker programmed the body to understand can't be tweaked by a body that was never programmed to know the button exists;
3) in the specific case of some Tamron zooms, the Tamron focus fine tuning is at up to five different distance figures, while most camera body focus fine tuning is a single global setting for that one lens;
4) for camera bodies that do include focus tuning in their firmware, they also usually have a limited number of slots for a limited number of lenses. For professionals they very well may own more lenses than the camera has slots, so being able to "tune the lens" via "the lens itself" means each can be fine tuned, even if the camera body cannot store that many different adjustments;
5) an adjustment the camera maker never thought to include (i.e., one example quoted in the repo where the focus ring direction can be reversed) can not be tweaked by the camera body. This is useful to photographers who mix lenses from different makers on the same body as Canon builds their focus rings to rotate one way when focusing towards infinity while Nikon builds their focus rings to rotate in the opposite direction towards infinity.