Just to be clear: in 2025, -- their "worst margin year in a decade" -- they still made $8 billion dollars more than they needed to run their business. That's on top of all their expenses (taxes, materials, wages, etc.)
On top of that, 2021 through 2024 were their MOST profitable years in the last decade. (By absolute amount and, except for 2024, also by margin (profit per $ of revenue)).
None of that is correct.
Regular non-ai brute forcing can do billions of guesses per second on a single machine. But that's still not helpful because your estimate of "millions of possibilities" is off by several orders of magnitude. For a 128 bit key, there are 2^128 (~ 3.4 x 10^38, or 340 billion billion billion billion) possible keys. You're not brute forcing that.
Additionally, modern crypto is not susceptible to known plaintext attacks (implied by your "if it's a message, not that hard..." statement.) It doesn't help you guess the answer if you know whether the encrypted message you're attacking is a password or an English phrase.
The nightmare toaster has about the clown fireman chasing him was legitimately scary. The way the clown says "Run." is still fresh in my mind decades later.
Then, when the Canadians are in line at the border, just about to cross back into Canada, ICE beats, detains, and deports them to El Salvador!
"Universes Beyond". It's the collection of sets where they feature other companies' IP (e.g. Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Fortnite, etc.)
For those curious, the restaurant is "Sobrino de Botín" in Madrid.
We're getting close! EUV is currently ~13nm, and soft xrays start at ~10nm (but go all the way down to ~0.01nm for hard xrays.)
Sadly there a lots of challenges in transitioning to smaller wavelengths. For example, to get the EUV light in the existing process, we're already resorting to, essentially, exploding tiny droplets of liquid tin using lasers.
Ah, Perfect: the eternal nemesis of Good.
For those interested, you can read that issue of Twin Cities 128 on the Internet Archive.
It's pretty cool stuff if you like hardware/retrocomputing ^^
The artist is Joe Ekaitis, who has a page on WikiFur