It's the same in the UK vs Southern Europe and Japan where I've lived before. People complain about the wet weather, but it's not that IMO what really gets to you, it's the dark winters with so little daylight compounded with the abundance of cloudy days.
Temperature-wise, most of the UK is actually quite moderate compared to central Europe. It's winter darkness that gets to you.
always used my own encryption and cyphered any sensitive data/communications, but the problem is that most people won't and you're often compromised by them
simple solutions like Whatsapp, Signal and ADP brought this to the masses - which some governments have issues about - and this makes a massive difference to everybody including those who wouldn't be caught dead using an iphone anyway
if we could go back to the early 1990s when only professionals, Uni students, techies and enthusiasts used the internet I'd go in a heartbeat but that's not the world we're living in
the steel core made it possible to made full glass facades, but it didn't make it necessary
it was even more so of a conscious decision not to use any ornamentation that they weren't limited to stone facades (btw many steel core buildings had stone facades until recently, among other materials like precast concrete - in the financial district of London most buildings pre 2010 are not glass, and most post 2010 are)
it just seems to be the case that the ruling elites like those buildings, and that's the main reason they are pervasive across skylines
even if the tech didn't improve one iota in the next 10 years, the low hanging fruit that remains for the taking in application is just staggering right now
expanding to a high revenue but small niche is very challenging, and most importantly it's slow
if some company is going to use a GPT version to do critical work, they'd be insane to jump on it before testing the solution and gaining confidence for a long time, while also evaluating how to exactly incorporate in their workflow without creating total dependency and other such ancillary issues
you would pay 1000x more for the certainty, which you can never have right away - together with the legal liability of the service provider
it's going to be awkward in consumer hardware either way
if you segregate AI units from the GPU, the thing is both AI and GPUs will continue to need massive amounts of matrix multiplication and as little memory latency as possible
the move to have more of it wrapped in the GPU makes sense but at least in the short and medium term, most devices won't be able to justify the gargantuan silicon wafer space/die growth that this would entail - also currently Nvidia's tech is ahead and they don't make state of the art x86 or ARM CPUs
for the time being I think the current paradigm makes the most sense, with small compute devices making inroads in the consumer markets as non-generalist computers - note that more AI-oriented pseudo-GPUs already exist and are successful since the earlier Nvidia Tesla lineup and then the so-called "Nvidia Data Center GPUs"
the main reason the masses don't have privacy and security-centred systems is that they don't demand them and they will trade it away for a twopence or for the slightest increment in convenience
a maxim that seems to hold true at every level of computing is that users will not care about security unless forced into caring
with privacy they may care more, but they are easily conditioned to assume it's there or that nothing can be realistically be done about losing it
I assume Red Lobster preemptively lowered the food grade and the service labour costs to avoid raising the prices in their menu drastically. We've had a wave of very strong inflation pretty much worldwide - or at least wherever there have been covid lock-downs and huge government payment schemes - and for many businesses, especially those that already operated at the margin of profitability, this has been their death knell.
I'm not so sure that Red Lobster would have survived if instead of lowering the quality of the product they'd have just raised the prices by say 80% overnight. I mention 80% because that's how much many hospitality businesses have raised prices in my area in London since the pandemic.
I've seen businesses go bust here that have tried both things:
- lowering quality and raising the prices by less than the average
- maintaining roughly the same quality and service but raising prices drastically
Plenty of examples in my area of businesses just collapsing with either strategy. People simply would not accept the new prices in many cases.
A business that is sort-of a luxury business like those specialised in oysters, shellfish in general, high-end cuisine etc only a very select few have survived. Those that are large chains have suffered the most, because they are not seen as so much of a special expenditure and people would just stop going.
Red Lobster perhaps would have fared better by not reacting and simply raising prices. Who knows, it's easy to make the counterfactual scenario in the abstract.
whatever capital they've accrued, it won't hurt when the market prices are lower