I started using startpage a while ago, never looked back. Google search was already going to sh*t before the AI slop, with all the sponsored links and fake stuff.

So no one will want these obsolete PCs, so they will end up in some landfill, but lots of money will be exchanging hands, to make sure we're "saving the planet".

It's a slop generator. Most of the "content" nowadays is a slop of a mess, these "AI" consumer features are absolutely worthless and are only good to generate creepy emojies or whatever. When I can ask an AI to find a slot in my calendar and book a meeting with someone else in my company, now that would be useful. Unfortunately not even that simple use case works as expected.

That's the thing, AI is the kind of tech that we invest for the long term. 5, 10 maybe more years. It's the kind of "we will land on the moon before the decade" thing. However, our world is addicted to short term satisfaction and profits. "what, a tech that can potentially replace humans? I want if nowwwwwe!". Next quarter should be amazing! And the next! And the next! For the moment, AI is little more than a parlour trick. Sure, AI can generate articles, texts, images, videos, music, but guess what, we already had lots of human generated trash floating around in those categories. Wake me up when AI solves (or helps to solve) one of the outstanding problems in math, and then I'll pay attention. Or when AI solves, or helps to solve, a unsolved medical problem. Until then, it's just a generator for stuff we already have tons of.

.. And I readily trimmed them with uBlock Origin. Good riddance to useless icons and tabs to stuff I'll never use when I'm checking my email.

Not sure if it fits, but maybe the target for this law are all the millions of USD that all the... ""artists"" are making from simps, sorry, fans on Onlyfans and similar platforms. If that's the case, what about Patreon? ðY"

Yeah, it's called science. Build a model, test against it, if it fails, adjust or build another model, until your model is useful and can predict some real world data. Previous covid models failing is not reason for laughing, is exactly what is expected from the scientific method. Our hope is that we can get to a more realistic model soon, so we can better adjust preventive measures. That's what got us here, you know, to the XXI century, talking to screens made of melted sand and minerals, and not loosing mothers and kids at birth like crazy, amongst other small things like that. It was the scientific method, building models, again and again, testing and failing and learning what works. I can imagine the ridicule and laughter that the first person that suggested we should wash our hands before eating or before doing surgery got... "what?! Wash our hands? Ahahah what an idiot sheeple, I do whatever I want with my hands! "...

Well, I don't know about you, but I still want to live as long as I possibly can.

Now that's the perfect opportunity to fight the evil capitalism that is killing our planet! I'm sure that those ships and those planes are only carrying superfluous goods peddled by the big capital and are completely unnecessary, and think about how much emissions we could save!!!!1!! We need to embrace a simpler life in the countryside, away from our capitalism big cities!!!1! Now excuse me while I complain to this big online retailer, because my Xmas gifts delivery will be super delayed! (I'm being sarcastic)

Agreed. On Android, I use Youtube Vanced or NewPipe. On computers, I use uBlock Origin and Ghostery. Haven't seen an ad on YouTube ad in years.

The Aliens M577 APC, of course :D

Why is the Surface Book due to a rehresh? Does it strain under the typical workloads of 2019?
And the Surface Go? Apart from a few design decisions (bezel size for example), does it need a big refresh?
How much performance do we need after all? I struggle to understand how a Surface Book 2 might need a refresh, given the behemont it is.

If you want to prevent tracking, on Firefox,Ghostery and uBlock Origin are your friends :)
That and a nice hosts file will keep you out of a lot of trouble :)
This new Firefox feature sounds really sweet, this makes a lot of sense. If all the Operating Systems can support "multiple users", why can't our browsers, in 2016, support segregation of web sessions?
Make the frontier the Window, the browser instance, the tab, I don't care. Just give us the option to have multiple identities when connected and that's a huge step forward.
The "incognito" or "private" mode was a step in the right direction, but that makes the total number of simultaneous identities to 2: the incognito window and the normal one.
I believe this is a good step on the right direction, decoupling the sessions from all the "infrastructure" (cookies ,history, etc.) is the foundation to later add all the customization and segmentation we might want. Again, on any modern OS, you will get your own "partition" of the system configurations (registry or configuration files), so in essence, the browsers must go the route of the OS: enable multiple identities, running segregated on the same machine, without interfering with each other.

Yes, Avatar was a big hit, a technical breakthrough, but IMO the time window as passed.
9 years for a sequel to Avatar is a bit too much, I doubt it that Avatar 2 will be anywhere close to Avatar in terms of success. Maybe one sequel would be interesting and work out somehow, but 4? Yeah that's some cow-milking right there, except the cow already went home.
The reason why big franchises like Star Wars, the MCU or even Fast and the Furious keeps drawing people in is because we are invested in the characters, in the stories, in those universes. That could have happened to Avatar, the potential was there, but the time passed, people moved on, there was nothing there for 9 years to sustain the "love". Cameron trying to jump-start a "true epic saga" with 4 sequels to a movie 7 years old is more or less the same as DC trying to catch-up with 8 years of MCU movies with just one single film. You can't compensate for a gap of 8 years and at least 12 movies with 1 single movie, and you can't create an "true epic saga" by creating 4 sequels to a movie who's flame has notoriously faded away.
So Avatar will have 4 sequels? Who really cares these days?

To be honest, securing email is not that hard, unless you want to "manually" set up a structure to check messages for weird stuff.
You can "outsource" an email hygiene service, to handle the inbound of your email, clean it, and deliver it to your own server (either Exchange or some other thing). You can do that for outbound as well, so your Exchange (or some other thing) will only send and receive SMTP on port 25 from a very specific group of know IPs (the ones from your email hygiene service provider). This alone will take away a huge chunk of the on-premisses worries with email security (no need to worry about spam attacks, bursts in email messages, workload increases, etc, etc). You just pay other guys to handle that for you.
Of course, you can do that with spam assassin, a couple of linux boxes and such (and your email hygiene supplier will most likely be doing something similar). The difference is that they are payed and specialized in keeping an eye on email security and the latest trends, and for you, usually, this is just one of the many "hats" you wear as an IT administrator.