Snark aside (and apologies), there's absolutely nothing wrong with the "no new ideas" take and nobody should think there is. Humans tend to work collectively, try as we might to do or appear otherwise, and often come to the same conclusions through reasoning and logic. No one-person truly invented the light bulb, etc, when really all inventive thought is branches of derivative thought as we build our collective knowledgebase. A better question would be how many novel ideas are the logical conclusion of branches of derivative thought and how many are tangential brought about by the injection of our irrationally.

Leading with this dubious claim is fine comedy. Microsoft can barely build a useful conventional computer that runs its own platform and associated products. The Surface Book 3's being used at my job all launch Teams, Excel and Outlook like they're perpetually struggling to get out of bed. The Surface Pros have display issues minutes out of the box. This foolish Dash to Quantum will result in a lot of disappointment as unreliable rushed-to-market hardware is tauted by companies like Microsoft that are historically fond of doing just that.

And no, I don't think quantum computing is all hype. There is definitely meat on the bone, even if it only returns us to the somewhat annoying days of time sharing that most HN readers are probably too young to remember. But these idiots are fueling the hype train for the sake of quick-buck valuation, puffing for an audience that is increasingly tired of over-promising and under-delivering to the point where we will finally have an actual quantum computer and nobody will give a shit, especially after this whole AI circus has continued to prove itself an expensive pagent full of mummers and gimmicks.

Can I ask why you want 2-in-1? I've personally never found the convert-to-tablet useful, and I have to imagine only visual artists might. I bought a nice case with a keyboard for my iPad Mini thinking I'd use it as a tiny laptop on the go, but in all honesty, I forgot the keyboard existed until I started typing this.

Not knocking your needs, just curious what kind of user those are for since I am obviously not the market

15", sure, that's a bit big, but smaller models are available.

I'm not entirely dismissive of doctors, be they European or American, as most I've encountered do have the patient's best interest at heart. But they are also human, and it is very easy to stick with the safe and easy answer rather than do the work to find the real answer. So when I hear claims like that, I immediately doubt them, assuming it is placeholder information because we do not know the actual answer. Unfortunately, a lot of our media in the US considers such "placeholder information" to be actionable, and ends up convincing the public (including doctors) of its veracity.

Without concrete verifiable findings, the best we can do is learn to pay attention to our bodies and drink maybe a little bit more water than we think we need to.

Which could also result in a B movie, I guess.

These days, I just navigate away from anything that demands I use Chrome "for best results." One of the sites for a local utility company does this, so instead I just call monthly and pay or manage my service by phone. I'm old enough to remember when that was the preferred way after mailing personal cheques went the way of the dodo, so it does not feel that inconvenient to me, but I can see where it might for other people. Still, nobody said the fight to regaining our agency online would be easy. Or convenient.

The word "thinking" can be a bit nebulous in these conversations, and critical thinking perhaps even more ambiguously defined, so before we discuss that, we need to define it. I go with the Merriam-Webster definition: the act or practice of thinking critically (as by applying reason and questioning assumptions) in order to solve problems, evaluate information, discern biases, etc.

LLMs seem to be able to mimic this, particularly to those who have no clue what it means when we call an LLM a "stochastic parrot" or some equally esoteric term. At first I was baffled that anyone really thought that LLMs could somehow apply reason or discern its own biases but I had to take a step back and look at how that public perception was shaped to see what these people were seeing. LLMs, generative AI, ML, etc are all extremely complex things. Couple that with the pervasive notion that thinking is hard and you have a massive pool of consumers who are only too happy to offload some of that thinking on to something they may not fully understand but were promised that it would do what they wanted, which is make their daily lives a bit easier.

We always get snagged by things that promise us convenience or offer to help us do less work. It's pretty human to desire both of those things, but proving to be an Achilles Heel for many. How we characterize AI determines our expectations of it; so do you think of it as a bag of tools you can use to complete tasks? Or is it the whole factory assembly line where you can push a few buttons and an pseudo-finished product comes out the other side?

Obligatory link to Forest Mims' book: https://archive.org/details/555-designs