512 Gb of storage is a sick joke in 2025. Single programs sometimes require more than that. The most expensive possible configuration they announced which has 512gb of storage costs about 3k. For 3k you can build a desktop server computer with more than 512gb of RAM, with a 1-4tb ssd depending on what kind of gpu and quality of ssd you want. Its not a terribly useful configuration for most use cases because you are spending almost all the money on an obsolete server platform and a ton of ram, but the fact you can do it is insane.

I don't have any smart crap in my house, but ordinary bluetooth speakers routinely have a very noticeable latency between when a command is given on a connected device and when the speaker responds, often around 1-3 seconds. Its more of an odd quirk than anything to be concerned about unless you are constantly changing what is playing, then the cycle of input, wait, input, wait, input, wait could be annoying. (Or more realistically someone doing this loses patience and starts giving multiple inputs faster than latency allows the speaker to react, then gets upset when they inadvertently give the wrong commands)

I've got a win 10 system and zero enthusiasm for win 11. I don't really want to airgap it so I suppose when actual eol comes I'll see if tpm is turned off in the bios and then decide between converting it to a Linux box or downgrading to windows 11. Till then windows 10 is meh but works well enough for my current needs.

My computer monitors, cd drive and all the hdd I'm still using are all 10 years old or older. 2 tv's we still use are over 10 years old, as is our blueray/dvd player. My phone is an 8 years old design, although the actual unit is only 3 years old since apple broke it and had to replace it for free trying to do a battery replacement. Half my kitchen appliances are over a decade old. There's probably more stuff that doesn't come to mind instantly. Many electronic devices have a useful life well over a decade.

In regards to your second question, this will do nothing for any processor which is already unstable, all damage done prior to patching the processor is permanent.

you're forgetting about stock splits. Still even accounting for splits the stock was at 18.25 in 1986. Further it was 12.76 in 2009 so the article is just wrong. The longest chart I can find only goes back 44 years, so I don't know about the 70's either. According to one internet source the ipo was at 23.50 in 1972. If that is accurate, its very nearly flat for the entire 52 year history of public trading, and strongly negative once you account for inflation.

if this actually goes live it'll work the same way their no cashier store "ai" did - hundreds or thousands of people in some country with very low wages will actually be writing the code behind the scenes.

From what some other posters are saying, amazon may have been a lot more egregious about trying to trick people without a membership into signing up than blocking cancellations. I haven't experienced that because until recently I had a membership and since canceling I have only ordered one thing. Canceling was quite easy, although I'm sure it is much easier to sign up.

This really seems like a nothing burger case. Maybe its illegal and maybe the ftc can prove it. I'm not a lawyer much less one specializing in consumer protection law. Maybe I overestimate the average person but I doubt there are many people who don't want prime and can't figure out how to cancel it. I'm sure amazon makes it much easier to sign up than to cancel as that is in their financial interest. I've only signed up once, years ago and I remember it being easy to do. The shopping experience and shipping benefits of prime have degraded to the point I was already questioning whether I should continue my membership or not. Amazon pushed me too far with adding commercials to prime video and I canceled mine with minimal effort in under a minute. I wish the ftc would do something more useful like go after gym memberships or roku with their "Press the ok button to agree, or read a bunch of dense legalese to find that to disagree you have to send us a physical letter containing 12 different kinds of information you may or may not have we aren't specific about." crap. That is something egregiously asymmetrical absolutely designed to harm consumers.

You want to go to an event at a venue controlled by ticket master. You go to the venue website and look at tickets and see you can get the ticket you want for $50. Sounds great. You click it, you are asked to create an account and put in your name, address, email, phone number, maybe some other information. You are then asked to check a box saying you agree to 65 pages of dense legal jargon which is spread across 4 different documents, 2 of them on 3rd parties sites. You check the box without reading it because you only have 11 minutes left before your hold on the seat you choose expires and lets be real 99.999999999999999% of the public is never going to even skim the legal bs. Finally you get to the shopping cart. The price is now $149.73 from fees, plus your local sales tax if applicable. If you knew it was going to cost $165 up front you might not have bothered, but well you already jumped through all those hoops so maybe just this once its ok. Maybe you do walk away but you've already "agreed" that ticketmaster and the venue can share or sell your personal information that you entered in step 2 with anyone they want so either way they come out ahead. Thats the issue with ticketmaster's current business practices, and a lot of other US companies.

That depends on your definition of illicit. That 1% figure is a best case number. We have evidence beyond reasonable doubt that all those transactions are criminal in nature. There is credible evidence that a great many more transactions are illegal, but only things which have been proven illicit within a very narrow range are considered illicit by chainalysis. Even most known scams are excluded by their methodology. If I look at web3isgoinggreat, it has 9.7 trillion in known losses to crypto scams and crime in 2023, vs the ~20billion figure from chainalysis. My understanding is the web3 site just takes the most recent valuation of whatever is stolen at the time of the crime as the "value" of the scam/theft, even if the cypto is so illiquid that it likely never could have been redeemed for its nominal value in a real currency or used to purchase real assets with that valuation. So the 9.7 trillion might be an overestimate, but its much closer to correct than 20 billion, and it doesn't even include the underling ponzi scam nature of crypto in general. I'm much more interested in what % of transactions could be tired to payment for a legal tangible good or legal noncrypto service. Those are the only ones that should be considered legitimate usage as a currency. Best estimates I can find online using that metric is about 1-2% of transactions are legitimate. Crypto to buy crypto to buy bad jpgs to buy crypto is just a ponzi scam with extra steps and electricity consumption. Crypto to buy a house/car/pizza would be using it as currency.

My spouse had a simple outpatient surgery done about a decade ago. The procedure went perfectly and there were no complications. Total time was under 2 hours, mostly recovery from anesthesia. The fair market cost of the procedure at the time where we lived was about 7k. According to the terms of our insurance at the time we owed a 1k deductible, then the insurance was responsible for 100% of the remaining costs. The hospital attempted to bill the insurance company 22k, which they quite properly refused to pay as it exceeded the contracted maximum rate for the services performed and was objectively unreasonable. They went back and forth and I think eventually the insurance company paid them the contracted maximum of ~12k. We paid our deductible at the time of the procedure, and they sent us various bills for random amounts between a few hundred dollars and the 10k they wanted the insurance wouldn't pay. We told them to get bent and eventually they just gave up. This leaves out a multitude separate bills for various doctors, labs and the anestheoligst, which mostly were correctly paid by insurance without any squabbling and weren't billed at 3x the going rate for no reason. US healthcare billing is beyond messed up. Having been through endless similar lesser versions of this in the years since, I'm at the point if you can't tell me the cost I should expect in advance don't be surprised if I can't be bothered to pay when you bill me. There's probably enough people like this at this point that the no pay rate is crazy high.

I had a friend concerned because their computer was overheating while gaming who made the mistake of taking it to best buy. They charged a fairly high fee to "diagnose" it then tried to sell him a motherboard and psu replacement. He brought it to me for a second opinion. whoever built it had done all the cables with zero slack anywhere, and the rear exhaust fan had come unplugged from the tension on the power wire. I plugged it back in and redid the cable tie so it had a little slack and would stay plugged this time, overheating problem went away. Someone brings you a computer thats running hot, maybe you should look at the cooling fan that isn't spinning?

No Etsy was already ruined by a multitude of other problems long before ai came to the scene. You can't kill a dead horse.

There is at the least a legal distinction as ai produced materials are ineligible for copyright protection. In a commercial context this could be very important, especially if you want to prevent other people from using the assets you purchased. Probably not many people going to etsy for that kind of thing, but beyond objecting for the sake of objecting to "AI" this is a problem for the buyer when the product is misrepresented by the seller.