> to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name
I see you have an uncommon name.
My first+last are shared by about 20,000 people in the US. From 2005-2020 I was unable to check-in for airlines online or even at the kiosk at the airport. I had to wait on line for baggage check-in despite never checking a bag, and they'd take my ID into the back room and delay me for 15 minutes and whisper and glare at me the whole time. Thankfully I can finally fly like a normal person again.
When I worked at a large company, there were four other people with the same first name, middle initial, and last name.
There is nothing surprising or rare about two customers having the same name.
This starts from a false premise. Ideas aren't cheap.
Good ideas are expensive. They're expensive because you have to weed through all the bad ones to identify them, find a market, and turn them into a product. You don't know that from the start, which is why the landscape is littered with millions of dead projects from thousands of dead companies.
Even if the execution were cheap and implementation were perfect, if the starting idea was bad, it's all been a waste.
Ideas aren't cheap, because bad ideas are expensive and good ideas cost money to vet.
> In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded
I don't expect this. I know that some companies install spyware on their devices, but I don't expect it, I don't accept it, and if they did it without disclosing it I'd be furious. I understand they're allowed to do it. I'd never work anywhere that did.
Yes, top and bottom at the same time, from the back or front. I have giant hands and that's a comfortable grip for me. Anything else feels like it's going to slip and drop one-handed.
I've never touched an Xbox controller—or really any console controller since the early Nintendo days.
What I find to require contortion is maintaining a grip on the Deck while operating the front controls without simultaneously squeezing the paddles on the back or having such a loose grip that I risk dropping the thing. The paddles on the back are one of my biggest problems with the grip ergonomics in general.
I hit it accidentally all the time. Any time I have to temporarily one-hand it with my right hand. The sides are rounded and smooth and there are buttons on the back and top of the side. The power button is very sensitive as well and doesn't require a hard press; it responds instantly.
Really tempted to sell mine. I have a 1TB OLED that I think I paid $649 for last year. It's a dumpsterfire* of a device and I hate it and never use it. Could easily sell it for more than I paid for it.
* Too big and heavy to hold without sitting and resting it on my lap, which is a horribly-unergonomic position with neck strain. Controls are widely-separated such that even with my giant sasquatch hands, it's hard to reach all the buttons. So many buttons on it that there's nowhere to hold it without accidentally pressing them (I accidentally turn it off every time I use it). Loud fan and hot air blowing out. Few games I like that work well without a keyboard and mouse. Even fewer that have readable text on the tiny screen. CPU/GPU too weak for many games. Almost no games targeting the platform so UX feels hacky. Honestly I don't know what the market for this is. I bought it to use in my RV and figured even if I didn't use it as a console, it'd be good connected to a proper monitor/keyboard/mouse, but a lot of titles don't work well under emulation, even after eliminating the hardware UX issues.
This article appears to lack any reason for "needing" this beast, or any real comparison with alternatives, both of which are required to answer the question posed in the title. It's a summary of how much they spent and some light anecdotal comparison to what they might have spent on cloud services, but clearly they didn't do an exhaustive hunt for value.
The real question is whether or not they could have done whatever it is they did with less hardware. Is there a business idea here that could have been proven on cheaper hardware that could be upgraded as demand increased? Is the expected ROI there based on future earnings?
Absent any indication that this was needed in the first place, I can only conclude that it wasn't worth anything.
I did address it: AI in the hands of the right people.
Random contributions to bug bounty programs or random PRs for new features come from all corners: expert engineers producing fantastic code; intermediate engineers trying their hardest but producing mediocre code; junior engineers wasting everyone's time with ill-conceived poorly-written code; and all of the above with varying amounts of AI assistance. And now also purely-automated AI, where the only human involved is pointing their AI at GitHub with no guidance.
You can't stop it on the inbox side. Either you turn the inbox off, or you leverage AI to help you separate the wheat from the chaff.
AI in the hands of the right people is incredibly powerful. A good team of engineers with AI doing their own bug-hunting on their own code is already far better than any outsider—human, AI, or human-assisted AI—could ever do. A good internal AI-assisted team is also the only thing that can vet all other contributions. It doesn't matter if those contributions are 100% human-written, 100% AI-written, or a combination. The problem is the same.
Unless you stop accepting outside contributions at all, there's simply no way to determine if a human was involved in the process. Any mandate that all contributions come from humans will fail because there's no detection or enforcement mechanism. You have to assume it's slop either way, and improve your ability to vet it. Only another AI can do that, because we don't have enough qualified humans to keep up.