Yeah, the first Mac I bought I only ever bought Snow Leopard as an upgrade, skipped other versions and then upgraded to Mountain Lion or whatever was the first free version. That’s basically 30ish spent over the entire almost 20 years I’ve been using Macs on actual software.

The comic is kind of dumb because it’s Microsoft who’ve typically made tons of money on software licenses, everyone knows that Apple makes their money on hardware.

It wasn’t updated every year. Major paid versions came out every 2 years or so. They became free when they started updating major versions annually

100%

Heh I was just going to block the user myself for the same reason but I thought I’d check the comments to see if anyone had any better ideas!

I’m still going… Some of the cryptic stuff is a little too much so for me in places though (asd here)

Because it’s sensationalist reporting that is capitalising on existing anxieties in society.

The MELD score for liver transplants has been used for at least 20 years. There are plenty of other algorithmic decision models used in medicine (and in insurance to determine what your premiums are, and anything else that requires a prediction about uncertain outcomes). There are obviously continual refinements over time to models but nobody is going to use chatGPT or whatever to decide whether you get a transplant.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hep.21563

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hep.28998

There is an implicit assumption here that models are being ‘trained’, perhaps because LLMs are a hot topic. By models we are usually talking about things like decision trees or regression models or Markov models that put in risk probabilities of various eventualities based on patient characteristics. These things are not designed to mimic human decision makers, they are designed to make as objective a recommendation as possible based on probability and utility and then left down to doctors to use the result in whichever way seems best suited to the context. If you have one liver and 10 patients, it seems prudent to have some sort of calculation as to who is going to have the best likely outcome to decide who to give it to, for example, then just asking one doctor that may be swayed by a bunch of irrelevant factors.

Sigh. Unfortunately there’s a lot of misinformation around this topic that gets people riled up for no reason. There’s plenty of research in healthcare decision making since Paul Meehl (see Gerd Gigerenzer for more recent work) that shows using statistical models as decision aids massively compensate for the biases that happen when you entrust a decision to a human practitioner. No algorithm is making a final call without supervision, they are just being used to look at situations more objectively. People get very anxious in healthcare when a model is involved and yet the irony is humans alone make terrible decisions.

Yeah first thing I thought too

I feel like for that, at least for me, I have to care about what the other person thinks because I have some responsibility and I don’t want to let them down. It wouldn’t work for me to have a complete stranger doing it.

I buy CDs and rip them into lossless myself unless it’s not available and then I’ll sail

There is no problem… in theory. You can show mathematically that profit maximisation and utility maximisation can distribute goods effectively. In theory, on paper, where everyone follows the rules and so on. That’s true with any system really.

Often, when you solve these models in economics, you implicitly make the assumption of ‘benevolent dictator’. You need someone outside the system that has nothing to gain by interfering in the system, that can move stuff around at will, that regulates every single agent/firm to behave in ways only permitted by the system etc.

The problem is humans are human. None of these things work if someone decides to not play by the rules. People can blame the system sure, but if the system isn’t even being employed properly in the first place, I think it’s the wrong argument to be having. It’s a bit like ignoring or modifying half the rules of a board game and then saying the game is broken because it leads to weird outcomes.

The problem is that in theory the workers also are supposed to own the factories and get a slice of the profits. This is what shares are for. Unfortunately, in practice, a larger and larger chunk of people seem to be getting excluded from that bit.

I’m my case it was an autism diagnosis but otherwise yes.

Most sources suggest 1100s

Hanging on the wall of my local guitar store about 15 years ago.