You can easily reduce the cost of coffee and drink much better coffee. A relatively inexpensive home setup can easily get you to $.75-.50/cup and that's using good beans.
Instead of a naive dense matrix, you can use some implementation that allows sparsity. If element does not exist, gets a non-zero value which can still be sampled. Which theoretically enables all outputs.
You're describing "temperature". That is usually done using the softmax function which cannot output zero for any element. In fact zero temperature is special cased, or they do exactly what you just said (add a teeny tiny epsilon to everything) in order to avoid having to treat zero temperature as a special case.
Yes it is, there's no rule saying you can't manually mess with the state transition function while designing and building the chain. It's still a fixed function at runtime. It's just that you don't need to do so in the first place, because this is done already after the markov chain has been evaluated, if temperature is set to nonzero (and some systems don't even really allow you to use zero temperature, they only allow you to make it really small)
It's a herd mentality for both. AI may be the next big thing. And the old things need realignment.
So the "market" demands sacrifice basically and there is cover when everyone else is doing it. You can be contrarian but your stock may get punished. Intel may not have a good plan anyway. The reason the market demands sacrifice is likely because of predicted unfavorable economic headwinds (etc... so signs of recession or what not). These predictions could be wrong though. Companies do constantly realign though, product initiatives fail etc...
