From what I can tell, much of the recent layoffs by Amazon and other large companies has been relatively surgical, focused on specific projects or silos within the company. According to the WSJ, part of these layoffs are directly tied to the shutting down of the Fresh and Go Business. Looking back, in October 2025, there was Gaming division layoffs. Echo division in 2023. Meta laid off VR reality employees a couple weeks ago.
These layoffs don't seem to be driven by "productivity" gains of AI (yet), more so shifting out of failed business experiments. I wonder if this will act as a signaling mechanism for employees to avoid "novel" projects to avoid getting laid off or being associated with a whole division getting shutdown.
The cuts in this round appear to be widespread. One of my good friends is an AWS account manager for a large account and she was impacted this morning.
From what I can tell, much of the recent layoffs by Amazon and other large companies has been relatively surgical, focused on specific projects or silos within the company. According to the WSJ, part of these layoffs are directly tied to the shutting down of the Fresh and Go Business. Looking back, in October 2025, there was Gaming division layoffs. Echo division in 2023. Meta laid off VR reality employees a couple weeks ago.
These layoffs don't seem to be driven by productivity gains of AI (yet), more so shifting out of failed business experiments. I wonder if this will act as a signaling mechanism for employees to avoid "novel" projects to avoid getting laid off or being associated with a whole division getting shutdown.
> The new AirTag is designed with the environment in mind, with 85 percent recycled plastic in the enclosure, 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets, and 100 percent recycled gold plating in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards. The paper packaging is 100 percent fiber-based and can be easily recycled.
I'm no material scientist, but this seems pretty impressive to me that Apple's economy of scale can pull this off, and upgrade the device capabilities, for less than $30 USD.
The fundamental issue preventing keyring aperture integration stems from the AirTag’s reliance on inverse-phase magnetic reluctance in the structural substrate.
You see, the enclosure maintains a precisely calibrated coefficient offramular expansion. Introducing a penetrative void would destabilize the sinusoidal depleneration required for proper UWB phase conjugation. The resulting spurving bearing misalignment could induce up to 40 millidarkness of signal attenuation.
Apple’s engineers attempted to compensate using prefabulated amulite in the magneto-reluctance housing, but this only exacerbated the side-fumbling in the hyperboloid waveform generators. Early prototypes with keyring holes exhibited catastrophic unilateral dingle-arm failure within mere minutes of deployment.
Until we develop lotus-o-delta-type bearings capable of withstanding the differential girdle spring modulation, I’m afraid keyring integration remains firmly in the realm of theoretical engineering—right up there with perpetual motion machines and TypeScript projects that compile without any // @ts-ignore comments.
The technology simply isn’t there yet.
Indeed, LLM's still suck at the cultural nuance required for humor. It's like they're writing for an audience that's too generic, so the joke doesn't truly "land" for anyone in particular.
> attempted to compensate using prefabulated amulite in the magneto-reluctance housing, but this only exacerbated the side-fumbling in the hyperboloid waveform generators
Wrote my PhD dissertation on this. It would've been in the literature for Apple's engineers to find, but unfortunately I lost institutional support to get this into a journal after my college (Mailorderdegrees.com, an FTX University^TM) folded mid-process.
Most people don't even realise the original AirTags were designed by Ria Paschelle, inventor of the statiophonicoxyogeneticamplifiergraphaphonerdelaverberator.
I think the point is to make the smallest unit of functionality possible and then people can integrate that into their use case using attachments, casings, etc. in a way they see fit. It's a good approach for this product in my opinion.
I think this argument would work better if the AirTag in its minimal form wasn't so teardrop-shaped. It feels almost like it was designed to be difficult to integrate into other environments because it lacks any edges or openings. It ensures that anything that could hold it must be at least as big as the AirTag itself. It really confuses me why they couldn't even allow for a single small hole in its edge - it would still leave attachment up to the user, but make it far more flexible by letting people just hook it onto things. Is it because design had overpowered functionality in this product? Is it because this shape is somehow mandated by the hardware within it? It confuses me.
> I'm a little confused by this, aren't AirTag basically circular discs pretty much just big enough to house a CRT2032 battery?
Kind of. It's definitely the intention, but an AirTag is still considerably larger than the CR2032 within it [1], so they're not at a shortage of space in the shell.
As for "teardrop shape", I didn't mean to imply it had an elongated shape, but that it's rounded off on all sides, like a drop of liquid. The absence of any defined edges makes clip design harder and forces any AirTag enclosure to just act as a mini-pocket that contains the whole thing instead of having a simpler and less wasteful attachment method.
This might also explain why the first party luggage loop accessory seems to have been (unfortunately) memory-holed. I think third parties still sell them out of excess inventory, but they've been harder to come by in recent times.
My current carry-on doesn't have large enough attachment points to easily accommodate the Apple leather case's keyring, so an updated loop would have been welcome.
For some reason, people feel like this should be a replacement for traditional luggage tags.
I do not understand this mindset.
I’d prefer to have a dedicated loop for my bag and the inside attachment points just aren’t big enough. I’d feel more secure if it wasn’t loose in a pocket and could easily fall out or be removed by an unscrupulous (or inattentive) airline or TSA employee.
And the result is that for every oh-so-sustainable AirTag sold, a keyring doohickey is dieseled/kerosened from AliExpress' China warehouse to the consumer.
You're getting a ton of jokey replies, in true internet fashion, but the real answer is acoustics. For it to sound as loud as it can with no visible speaker grille, it needs to be that shape with no keyring holes.
I use quite a few varieties, including Apple's, and I have found Belkin’s to be an ideal one — small, secure, with a minimal footprint, and available with a keyring or a lanyard.
Hmmm! Nope, it was not. Checking the website again, it says $12.99 for one and $39.99 for the 4-pack. I remember picking up two of the 4-pack for less than the 4-pack of AirTags (including the sales tax in California).
For some reason, though, it is cheaper in the Indian Amazon. Right now, they are selling for roughly $9.70 (₹889) a piece (all taxes inclusive).
My father-in-law is a builder. It is difficult to get his attention in a magnificent space because he is lost in wonder. We were in an Apple Store together years ago and I asked him what it would cost to build an attachment point to the tag itself. I will never forget his answer… 'We can’t, we don’t know how to do it'
Its interesting to see "turbo encabulator" get love that "builder ... don't know how" doesn't get anymore, even though the former is a much more intrusive copypasta. Maybe its a function of recency and "builder" has had more recent use in various places than "turbo?"
Different people want different attachment types (or no attachment point at all), so it makes sense for that to be external. I've used other trackers with integrated attachment points, and because the attachment point has to be very compact it tends to be flimsy or hard to fit.. vs the Apple one where you can add a larger attachment point that makes sense to you.
Yes, the phone case industry should exist. People want different things. Plenty of people are willing to go without a case entirely. For those who want a case, they want different tradeoffs between bulk and protection. They want different textures. It's OK to sell something that isn't all things to all people.
Right? Nokias had the equivalent of today's "case" built right into the design of the unit, plenty of durable plastic around the vulnerable parts -- the phone would've been considered unfit for sale if it couldn't survive a drop in out-of-the-box condition.
By the time you stripped a dumbphone down to be as vulnerable as one of today's is, it'd be a bare PCB. Nah, probably even in that state, I bet it could handle a drop better than a new iPhone straight out of the box.
What you buy today isn't a complete phone, it's just the guts. One tumble to pavement and you're out a grand. Heaven help you if you fumble it while trying to install the case that should've been part of it from the beginning.
And yet, we still buy them, because the alternatives are from shady manufacturers who never provide updates, and there is no third-party hardware that can run up-to-date iOS. If there was, I'd buy an iNokia in a heartbeat.
I'm carrying my 13 Pro without a case, to see it's Alpine Green glory and feel the matte finish on the back. It's been perfectly fine for the last almost 4 years, some minor scratches on the steel edges I fixed with a sandpaper, there is one recent scratch on the screen and that's all. Otherwise it looks good, just a bit used. Has fallen multiple times from pocket when sitting, and a dozen times from tables, few times onto pavement (that's what needed sanding).
Almost every single one "case" for iPhone is a waste. Waste of material, waste of space, waste of your money, waste of user experience. You've already paid for a perfectly good phone, and then slapped some $[1]0.99 case on it to gain nothing but pain and vanity.
I only had one case on a phone, that made it better - original wooden case for 1+3T. Been looking for same experience on iPhone, but it's not possible due to shape -- they are all bulky. The closest thing is carbon-fiber cases, and I had one, which saved this iPhone when I dropped it onto slanted pavement, where it slid for a few meters screen down, ruining the case, but saving the screen.
Would I drop it if I wasn't using a case, that has parts sticking out, making the phone more cumbersome to use and carry? Unlikely, because it happened in the first year owning it, and I've been going caseless since then and nothing similar happened.
I dropped my flagship Samsung S24U one time. I was running and it slipped out of my back pocket.
That 1 meter fall resulted in calls unable to be placed, USB charging and ABD does not work, and the microphone for the voice recorder does not work. All that indicates that the daughterboard cable was displaced. But the unworking rear camera indicates that there is a second fault in there as well.
Not to mention the alarmingly large dent in the corner, that shattered the screen protector and likely would have resulted in the screen itself having shattered if no protector were on it.
New phones are designed to break. Contrast with my Note 3 that I carried for 8 years without so much as cracking the screen once.
> For the initial disassembly, the AirTag is said to be the hardest to open to access the battery. Though all three could be opened by hand, the AirTag is suggested to be the hardest due to the lack of divots for grip.
Does the author lack thumbs? It’s easy to twist the battery open.
I get some AirTags opened easily and others are harder. We have more than ten AirTags in the family and I have experienced quite a range of torque and force required. This could be because of gunk over time, though, which wouldn’t be something these guys faced.
The lack of a divot prevents iFixit from selling an overpriced single use tool that exactly matches the divot shape for $50 USD that just so happens to be the exact same shape and material as a $0.05 guitar pick. Totally unacceptable, won't anyone think of the environment?!?!?!?!
There are third-party tags out there compatible with both Google and Apple's network that is roughly the same size and use the same battery, yet have a giant lanyard opening in the design to fit anything.
Apple could trivially have fit a usable hole if they wanted to. They just don't want to because they get to sell accessories with that now. Also, looking cleaner on its own helps sell even if that is an entirely useless quality for a tag tha tneeds to go into a bloody case.
Do the third-party tags have all the same features, size, capabilities, range, durability, etc.? Or have they made other tradeoffs instead of eliding the attachment point?
I don't know of any third-party AirTag-compatible trackers that have UWB right now, but this applies equally to tags that are much larger than the AirTag. The rest is identical - good battery life, range, loud speaker, ...
I have a few theories on the lacking UWB:
1. Given that UWB is also super slow to roll out to Google Find, with only the Moto Tag available, there might be a technical/regulatory hurdle that manufacturers don't think is worth it
2. Apple/Google might make it a pain to be allowed to integrate with their UWB stuff
3. Cost - maybe the UWB stack is comparatively expensive, with third-party tags aiming for price brackets as low as 1/0th the cost of an AirTag
As a note, I don't know if this is because of regional differences in spectrum limits, but at least with AirTag and Moto Tag v1 EU versions, I could never get UWB to give any meaningful directions until I was already staring at the thing. Once you were in range to even consider UWB, playing a sound would be way more effective.
I'm pleasantly surprised Apple allows third-party manufacturers to make trackers that work with Find My. I've bought a bunch for as low as $2 per tracker. The only missing feature, like you mentioned, is missing UWB.
Recycled metals have always been cost effective. Recycled plastic is much more expensive than virgin plastic, but it's a very small materials cost to start with, likely totaling only a few cents.
What level of materials recycling would be required for you to not consider it green washing?
It’s a genuine question, since I don’t like Apple and agree that we buy tons of stuff we don’t really need. That said, our bicycles can’t be insured anymore, but having AirTags at least alleviates some of the angst over leaving them in public places.
Recycled plastics actually produce microplastics more than virgin plastics do. Some studies on recycled polyester garments found that they dump an additional 50% more or so into the environment than non-recycled polyester fabrics. And those non-recycled fabrics already release enormous quantities over their lifespan into the water supply and open air (via your dryer exhaust) already.
Dumb example for the sake of discussion, you could understand why recycled plutonium would not be a healthy thing to weave a sweater out of. It's less about the recycling and more about the material itself.
I’m aware, which is why we don’t buy products with recycled synthetics fabrics for our baby. Ironic, since so many brands are hellbent on promoting the recycled fiber as more sustainable.
But: the AirTag is made of hard plastic (polypropylene?) through injection moulding. I’m not sure it leaks even a tenth of what fiber would. Just a thought :)
Recycled polyester is crap, just like virgin polyester. It's just a way for brands to make it seem like they're hip and sustainable, when you're basically wearing crude oil on your body.
If you believe Hank Green (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=325HdQe4WM4), a lot of recycled plastics aren't recycled the way I used to think they were (by shredding them, melting them down, and extruding them into new shapes). Rather, they're chemically decomposed into what's essentially raw feedstock, purified, and then re-synthesized into new polymers.
That's pretty energy intensive, to the point that it may be better to just use new feedstock (which is produced as a byproduct of oil and gas extraction). There are obviously higher-order effects to think about, but for me, plastic recycling isn't an obvious win for the environment.
I think we’ve more or less debunked plastic recycling, as nothing more but a way to make consumers feel good about purchasing things made of plastic.
We have to recycle plastic where we live — and do so happily —, but I often joke with my partner about where the plastic will end up, since she insists on first washing the plastic.
This is a good example of how easy it is to fool people if they don’t have their own understanding of how things work.
Highlighting this has been a priority in my parenting. My child is having a great time trying to scare friends about the dangers of the chemical dihydrogen monoxide, which is found in a surprisingly large number of manufactured foods.
Nobody said it was. But it's not bad because of chemicals, because all bread is created with chemicals.
As for natural versus artificial - that's also bullshit. There's many natural ingredients that are poison, and many artificial ones that are good for you.
I mean, if I eat home made fried chicken everyday, you can bet your ass I'm not gonna live very long.
But that's total nonsense. Everything in our physical world (including water, air, food, and human bodies) is made of chemicals. They can be naturally occurring or artificially manufactured.
Is it really pedantic? Everything is ultimately a chemical compound. H2O is a chemical. Where do you draw the line between "chemicals" and "not chemicals"? Is it more about what you can find in nature? You can find acetone in nature.
yeah, this is kind of a definitional example of pedantry. you probably understand what people are trying to say when they talk about "chemicals" but instead of engaging with the actual conversation, you spin off a metanarrative to pick apart the word choice as if that's directly relevant to the point they're trying to discuss.
not trying to pick on you specifically, because sure everything's a chemical, and i don't really care to fight about that, but you asked :)
"Chemical" is just a really, really vague and poor word choice. I honestly don't understand what people are trying to say when they use it. Food and chemistry are inextricably intertwined. You can't even talk about food without talking about all of the various components food is made up of. Not a single food item out there isn't made up of chemicals. Some found in nature, some created in a lab or factory process. Some healthy, some not. Some with long names, some with short names. Some have effects on food taste, longevity, appearance. Some are inert. It's really a meaningless word to use in the context of one's food.
>I honestly don't understand what people are trying to say when they use it
Like, banana-flavoured milk product vs banana yogurt - seed oil and potato starch compound with artificial flavorings vs REAL milk yoghurt with REAL banana.
It tastes different, it has different nutritional value and overall "chemical" product feels scammy because it tries to mimic proper one.
This is all about words, like, why do we use "Artificial" in Artificial Intelligence?
What is real banana? How much processing is allowed for it to be still real? Considering the selective breeding of banana, is banana even still real?
Chemical is just a bad word choice. Artificial, or ultra processed get closer to the issue. They still are vague with a lot of grey area. If you cook at home, you're also highly processing your food. The fruit in winter is likely also artificial, in some sense: Grown against the will of god/nature with pesticides, in a tent, in a climate that doesn't naturally feature them, devoid of flavour because they were artificially bred for yield, color and size, etc.
>What is real banana? How much processing is allowed for it to be still real? Considering the selective breeding of banana, is banana even still real?
This is arbitrary subjective qualifier, goes somewhere between "isoamyl acetate" flavoring chemical and organic wild forest bananas. I would subjectively say that any grown bananas is REAL while isoamyl acetate made by rectification of amyl acetate is not REAL banana.
> you probably understand what people are trying to say when they talk about "chemicals"
My understanding is that when someone complains about "chemicals" in their food, it's because they've seen something they don't understand on the ingredient list and are scared of it.
I think it's actually a great example of very very important non-pedantry. The entire crux of their argument/issue is dependent on their definition of "chemicals". I would even go so far as to say it's just the nature fallacy in disguise.
With the nature fallacy, the definition (or more like the lack of) of what is natural is the entire crux of it. In both cases (natural and "non-chemical") it's the very non-defined-ness that reveals the problem with it: You cannot create a sensible definition.
For nature, what's the definition that puts "rape" and "artificial insulin" on the morally correct side?
For chemical, what's the definition that puts "fortification with iodine, flouride, or whatevers in flour" and "arsenic" on the right side?
OK for vanilla, however most of the fruit artificial flavors are compound that have nothing to do with the elements from the natural fruit but at some point, someone in the food industry decided it tasted "similar" to the natural fruit.
For some of them, like cherry or coconuts, the artificial flavor tastes nothing like the natural flavor.
To my knowledge benzaldehyde is the most common cherry flavor, and I agree it doesn't taste much like cherries. It's also a naturally occurring compound we produce from cassia oil, and it's naturally contained in almonds, apricots, apples and cherries.
As for coconut there's Lactones, which - you guessed it - occur naturally.
> OK for vanilla, however most of the fruit artificial flavors are compound that have nothing to do with the elements from the natural fruit but at some point, someone in the food industry decided it tasted "similar" to the natural fruit.
It’s never possible for things to be good with people like you. It’s not 100% recycled, which would be better. But surely, this is better than 0% recycled??
Ironically, it's worse. I just wrote another comment about this. Recycled plastics carry more toxic load and shed more (and more fragmented) microplastics into the environment. Recycled plastics only win out on carbon emissions.
Moral of the story: plastic is just not good. Avoid buying things made out of ANY kind plastic if you are going to regularly wash and mechanically agitate them. You won't eliminate 100% of washed plastic in your life, but it's surprisingly easy to get rid of 80% of it without sacrificing quality of life.
That's good to know. My understanding though is that they don't use 100% recycled plastic to prevent that? I thought the ~20% non recycled plastic was kinda "stabilizing" the whole thing but maybe that's not true
Apple rarely offers direct discounts of closeout or excess merchandise. Instead to clear out back stock they’ll work with partner retailers (Amazon, Best Buy, etc.) who don’t mind the brand perception associated with offering deeper discounts.
First-gen AirTags have been on sale on Amazon frequently over the last year, and they’ll probably drop the price again soon.
> They are then combined with scrap from select manufacturing sites and, for the first time, cobalt recovered through this process is now being used to make brand-new Apple batteries — a true closed loop for this precious material.
Do they disclose who the manufacturers are and what standards do they adhere to when recovering cobalt from scrapped batteries?
Just stating the obvious that not buying one of these things that we never seemed to need until they told us we needed it is the only way to have "the environment in mind".
Just stating the obvious that not buying one of these thing that we never seemed to need until they told us we needed it
I never thought I needed one until my wife lost her car keys, and the Fiat dealer charged $1,200 for a replacement.
And it's not even the electronics that makes them so expensive. Modern car keys aren't like the 1970's where it's just a piece of metal with the edges shaved off. Those little key cutting kiosks at Home Depot can't cope with today's complex engraving.
This feels like a good tradeoff as far as gadgets go. It doesn’t take finding that many objects for it to make up the energy cost to manufacture the AirTag.
They do require periodic battery replacements but I imagine it’s still a net savings or pretty negligible cost. I’d love to see a more formal analysis, though.
I'd be a little wary of these numbers as regulation around advertising these kinds of figures normally permits mass balance systems[0] (which imo is tantamount to straight-up lying).
Mass balance is better than nothing I guess, & I understand the practical challenges with going further, but ultimately it's not what's implied by the marketing.
Why do individual European countries seem so obsessed with blocking Pirate sites? I assume the majority of IPs being pirated are likely from outside their own country, so the harm is negligible to the individual country's internal revenue streams, no?
Media & Entertainment Services are overrepresented in a number of European countries like Italy, Spain, and France. Tier 1 Football/Soccer is a massive revenue generator, and one of the most pirated products globally.
> I assume the majority of IPs being pirated are likely from outside their own country
Ever heard of Ligue 1, home to teams like PSG, Olympique de Marseille, Olympique Lyonnais, and AS Monaco, and superstars like Mbappe, Dembélé, and Hakimi? French viewers also watch Spanish, Italian, Belgian, German, and English football/soccer as well.
In Czech Republic you are automatically assumed to be a pirate and thus paying fee from size of empty memory device (USB, SD, HDD, ..) by GB. So lot of people will justify piracy by "I have already paid for it".
Czechia also doesn't have a major entertainment revenue the same way France does. Ligue 1 generates around $3B a year in revenue, while Chance Liga is in the $10M-50M, and most Czech language media remains owned and distributed by state-owned CT, so rights have already been paid. And private sector CME/Nova (formerly owned by Ronald Lauder of "let's invade Greenland" fame and now owned by Petr Kellner's family) and Prima (owned by oligarch Ivan Zach) are used by their owners as political tools.
> Why do individual European countries seem so obsessed with blocking Pirate sites?
Ask the Disney Cooperation.
A facetious, but true, remark that describes the influence the large American media companies can have in combating piracy over here. Sir should recall the pressure the USA put on Sweden to close down the Pirate Bay; a Swedish site running in Sweden.
To play the devils advocate, does that take into the "cost" to the government if pensioners are living longer because Alzheimers was cured? I could easily see this turning into a debate behind politicians closed doors of
"If "x" % of the population has their life is extended an average of "y" years, how much more does that cost in pension payouts over the life of the individual vs the medical savings from curing Alzheimers?"
While I am all for the free market, making disposable battery companies label the estimated MAH on batteries would be a win-win in so many ways. For consumers, the environment, waste management, etc...
The alkaline discharge curve slopes dramatically, so those batteries provide dramatically different voltage when new vs used. Devices may or many not work at lower voltages so any battery life is difficult to estimate.
Rechargeables provide a very flat discharge curve, providing mostly the same voltage, so the steep drop off clearly signals the battery life end.
Its C. the market doesn't follow traditional models anymore.
The whole profession was basically centered around putting a dollar amount on risk.
For example, lets say I give you a chance of either taking $1k now, or playing a game where you have 1 in 10 chance to win $200k. What would you do? The right answer is "sell" the risk to someone. For example, on the average, if I "buy" the game from 10 people, at a price of $10k each, I can realistically win twice what I spend.
Repeat that over x number of steps and more complex games, and that is what the PhDs worked on in terms of pricing.
For most of the time it worked ok. In a few instances (most notably the Gaussian Copula that was a large reason for the subprime house market crisis in 2007) it didn't.
The problem is that now, its impossible to predict whether orange man is going to throw a hissy fit and cause the market to go up or down, or if large investors are going to artificially prop up stock like they did with Tesla.
You're right that the orange man has been a big factor, but not because of his effect on the stock market. The stock market isn't the economy, and most Econ PhDs are not working on modeling stock prices.
As the article indicates, a huge portion of the market for hiring PhDs is directly or indirectly dependent on federal funding. Universities are freezing hiring and reducing PhD cohort sizes, institutions like the IMF and World Bank are in crisis, and US government agencies have been reducing staff sizes. There was hope that the tech industry would provide another big source of jobs for PhD economists, but that hasn't panned out.
Source: the article, and my wife works in the UChicago economics department.
In the end, the need for a certain job sector drives demand. Its the same reason a new grad in CS in US could go get a six figure salary, because everyone was racing to monetize the web.
PhDs werent dealing with stock prices either. Nobody was trying to predict the stock market. The goal was to price volatility and sell volatility to the end party that would actually roll the dice.
There was an electric vehicle stock I was watching for awhile (WKHS) hoping for a good time to short. All their reports showed what I believed was an unviable vehicle, there was simply no way to produce it that was anywhere near gross margin positive and they didn't have the money nor access to capital to lose hundreds of millions proving that out. All the economics of the company was going to zero, and they had a ticking time bomb of debt they were about to default on.
Shortly before this debt time-bomb went off, Trump magically showed up tweeting in support of the company and alluded to a deal getting pulled off with GM. [] Of course, this ended up being spun off as Lordstown motors, a company that has failed horribly, including Hindenburg Research publishing a video of one of the few trucks they had literally catching on fire on the road while the CEO was simultaneously claiming they had hundreds of millions of dollars in solid orders (later fined by the SEC for that and barred from being an executive of a company for N years).
I still don't understand how Trump magically got involved with this penny stock at the 11th hour, but I can tell you I feel something very fishy happened there.
The man scammed his own supporters twice with crypto scams. He, of course, is not at all opposed to market manipulation or other types of financial scams
To the extent that a single person can cause economists' predictions to be off, those predictions were never good in the first place. We will always have unstable people in power, it's just human nature. If your predictions can't hold up in the face of that, then you need to refine them.
CS and DS people are getting more applied and gaining domain expertise, and can do a lot of economics work now. Academic economists, especially those who primarily do data science / big data, seem to basically be doing Masters-level data science projects for their Ph.D. The hard part in their Ph.D.s is collecting the data, which used to be a very manual job that relied on connections, but more of them are getting them or imputing them from public sources so it's not that impressive anymore.
Speaking as someone who has attended 3 economics Ph.D. defenses in the past two years.
Data science wasn't even a degree you could get 20 years ago. Twenty years ago if you were interested in what is now called data science, you were getting a degree with some kind of exposure to applied statistics. Economics is one of those disciplines (through econometrics).
No, I did stats as part of economics around then, and it's nothing like modern DS. It overlaps a fair bit, but in practice the classical stats student is bringing a knife to a gunfight.
The practice of working with huge datasets manipulated by computers is valuable enough that you need separate training in it.
I don't know what's in a modern stats degree though, I would assume they try to turn it into DS.
Data science is basically a marketing title given to what would have been a joint CS/statistics degree in the past. Maybe a double major, or maybe a major in one and an extensive minor in another. And it's mostly taught by people with a background in CS or statistics.
Like with most other academic fields, there is no clear separation between data science and neighboring fields. Its existence as a field tells more about the organization of undergraduate education in the average university than about the field itself.
The Finnish term for CS translates as "data processing science" or "information processing science". When I was undergrad ~25 years ago, people in the statistics department were arguing that it would have been a more appropriate name for statistics, but CS took it first. The data science perspective was already mainstream back then, as the people in statistics were concerned. But statistics education was still mostly about introductory classes of classical statistics offered to people in other fields.
No. Data science is different than statistics, because it is done on computers. It also uses machine learning algorithms instead of statistical algorithms. These advances, and the shedding of generations of restrictive cruft - frees data scientists to craft answers that their bosses want to hear - proving the superiority of data science over statistics.
yeah, we called that data mining, decision systems, and whatnot... mapreduce was as fresh and hot as the Paul Graham's essays book... folks were using Java over python, due to some open source library from around the globe...
essentially, provided you were at a right place in a right time, you could get a BSc in it
His work and department was very quant heavy. I'd say the majority of his students spend most of their time in Python/R cleaning datasets running models
I'm not disagreeing with you, and I also know political economists from that time who complain that their discipline is changing. It just has very little to do with what this article is discussing.
The note about economists and data science in the article felt weird, because data science as a title was invented to get non-CS PhDs to do analyst work because they wanted smarter people doing it.
The point of hiring an economics PhD in industry is largely not because they learnt something but because it's a strong and expensive signal.
I'm trying to hang on to my 13 mini until next year, when hopefully Apple will have figured out Apple Intelligence and upgrade the phone hardware to run it. But I'm worried my 13 mini won't make it that long. It's starting to struggle with even basic apps and lags just reading news articles. Battery is still at over 80% though
> It's starting to struggle with even basic apps and lags just reading news articles
Not my experience, but I tend to blame the web rather than my phone when things get laggy. I estimate that my 13 is about in the middle of its life, barring unexpected rapid deceleration events.
My battery is at 80% after 2 years. Mine is still on AppleCare+. I always do express replacement so I get a « new » one. Hopefully my battery reach 79% soon.
> the use of AI on the battlefield is also raising ethical concerns that machines could be left to decide the fate of combatants and civilians
This bears echos of the handwringing of nukes. Sure, we can all recognize the implicit moral qualms that AI and drones will bring. We will see news flashes of civilians being killed by drones, politicians parroting something about "poor safeguards for 'edge cases'", and NGO's yelling into the void about humanitarian issues under unjust regimes AI drones. We will wash our hands by way of virtue signaling that "we knew this would happen" or "I vote to stop AI drones" etc...
But at the end of the day, nations will utilize whatever they can to enforce their leader's aims. Drones are not the defunct landmines the UN "outlawed" nor the Nuclear weapons we merely banned from nations too weak to produce. They are cheap, and ever more accessible. Drones mark a fundamental change in warfare, not some temporary hiccup before return to norms. Ethical concerns will sadly remain just that, concerns.
I try to sample well-investigated news articles from both sides of the aisle, and it is unfortunate how often I notice the "omission" of key topics from headline reporting on one side or the other. Likely because the conclusion undermines their leanings in other areas. And rather than exploring exceptional topics deeply from their side, they just avoid it altogether.
These layoffs don't seem to be driven by "productivity" gains of AI (yet), more so shifting out of failed business experiments. I wonder if this will act as a signaling mechanism for employees to avoid "novel" projects to avoid getting laid off or being associated with a whole division getting shutdown.
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