> the concentration of deaths and disappearances within such a small, specialized field as defying ordinary probability.
The best conspiracy theory I've seen online is that top-secret energy/weapons plans were sold by a traitor, and these scientists were kidnapped to be the worker bees.
Terribly dark and implausible, but also, we are living through a storyline that writers wouldn't even consider a draft because it's too on-the-nose.
I imagine it is difficult to get good work out of scientists at the point of a gun. With physical labour you can tell if someone is doing a good job, but with intellectual labour its much harder to tell if someone is intentionally being slow or if its a hard problem that is difficult to solve.
Now that's a fun one, where did you hear that from? Other ones I've seen include; tit for tat revenge for the assassination of Iranian nuke scientists; a global conspiracy of illuminati/masons/"jews" (defined so broadly as to be useless); chinese interdiction (kidnapping, a-la the reverse of the subplot in nolan's the dark knight film - that is essentially what you said); bankers who own everything and subvert everything to their interests (which remains stickily plausible to me); of course we can't forget our favorite: ancient aliens been doing all of this from the beginning. Anything to absolve people of confronting their own DNA and the predator/prey dichotomy that rules most life forms.
Theres a lot of awesome fixes to hiccups that actually work if you do them right. One thing I've learned over the years is that most problems have an obvious fix that some people figured out ages ago and the reason you're late to the party of knowing is that after everyone else figured it out they decided not to tell you because then they could make a buck off of selling you the solution. Applies to so many things in our world.
They assassinate truckloads of people all the time too though, Mossad operations in the west are usually not even investigated or reported by western media, they just quietly release agents back to Israel if they ever accidentally caught them. Some info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_espionage_in_the_Unite...
Given the '72 events at the Olympics, that's reasonable. Altough their colonialism, para-Nazism (Zionism) with tons of school brainwashing and the IDF war crimes are on par on the Islamic fundamentalism sickos with madrassas and the like. Different shades from the same turd.
Edit:, in '72, Munich attacks.
While everyone in the Mediterranean was trading, sharing and mating each other (especially under the Roman empire) boosting commerce, sales and culture -relatively speaking to what you could find in a tribe-, these backwards shepherds (both sides) want to bring the world back to the Bronze Age.
You've never been to a grocery store and had something incorrectly 'rung up'? It's happened to me more than a few times and I've never had a problem getting a "price check" and having the item adjusted according to the shelf label.
It's typically in-store policy.
Is Best Buy going to let you walk with a $10 Sony FX3 camera? Probably not. Are they going to fight you over a $10 difference in posted vs look up? Probably not.
From what I remember Connecticut laws used to require retailers to charge the lowest advertised and/or physically labeled price.
Sonnet in the Claude Code harness is hard to replicate out of the box. That vertical integration is not easily replaceable but by no means impossible...
OpenCode and their Go plan will get you close if you're willing to put in the config work.
For when you do need the larger models Fireworks has a pretty generous 'Pass' that comes out to about $7 a week for some of the larger bleeding edge models.
Other than that Codex's $20 plan is still somewhat valuable though they keep reducing usage. Google's $20 plan will get you some Opus usage in Antigravity and a generous amount of Gemini. Not sure how long that will last as they've been tweaking pricing and planning language recently too.
Max is next. He essentially admits to it in one of his tweets/posts. Explicitly citing it as an example of how they misjudged usage relative to pricing.
He mentions Max as another place that they didn't properly predict plan and pricing relative to usage. I'd bet the farm that it's the next to be 'A/B' tested.
Just as they pull the rug on $20 users. This is the most transparently nontransparent company in tech existence.
They always reveal their cards in the most clumsy ways possible. Their enterprise API numbers must be godlike for the way they are treating B2C customers.
Wechat is large enough to be able to negotiate requirements with Apple. They are the gateway to an entire continent and close to 2 Billion users. And since they are a 'everything app' the frequency of use and reliance is likely compounded.
Apple's not picking up the phone for 50 million users. So we shouldn't expect anything different here.
Luckily there are other phones and mobile os's to develop for.
They strategically use patterns that directly trigger the release of dopamine into the brain.
They've created algorithms that use slot machine like experiences that keep kids hooked to the screen.
These algorithms feeds users barely moderated content that feeds their worst instincts. With almost surgical precision when wanting to illicit engagement.
Then when research shows them the harm their causing they bury it, hire lobbyist, and double down.
Switch out a few words up there and you have the big tobacco playbook.
It's not just kids. My parents have spiraled in this way too. Why interact with each other when reels are more exciting? Why pursue friendships if you can experience it parasocially? This has been incredibly depressing, and it's a reason I make sure to value the people in my life. I have a lot of disgust for Meta and Google seeing what they've done to society broadly. All for money
Does it matter if the main difference is the OS? Chromebooks are way worse spec wise, and they’re still “phones with big screens” and a different OS. If someone made a windows laptop that was actually good without compromises in an ARM SoC, I’m sure it’d sell well too. The Qualcomm ones seem to have too many compromises today with the OS/driver layer unfortunately.
That last part is the stumbling block for sure - the Microsoft Surface Laptops are nice machines but damn if the driver thing doesn't continually piss me off.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt... but at $900, and the Neo literally just being a Mac and doing everything any other Mac does (except some hardware related limitations like driving a 6k monitor, but doing 4k is "enough for most") means you save $300 and don't run into annoyances like "can't install my printer driver".
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