Another issue is the lack of affordable public charging. Especially here in Europe with our sky high petrol excise, an EV might be a bit more expensive to purchase but a lot cheaper to run than an IC car. If you can charge at home, that is. Charging at a public charger can be twice as expensive, and if you're forced to use a fast charger it's even more. That changes the economics of EVs rather a lot.

I hope that doesn't mean the modern game system experience.
80s console: Turn on, 5 seconds later the game is ready to play.
Modern gaming conveniences: Turn on, wait 30 minutes for the console to patch, then another 30 while the game pulls in a 1 GB update.

The EIAJ standard barrel jacks (usually yellow tipped) are designed to fit only in the corresponding size socket and in none of the other sizes. Each size is for a specific voltage range, the different plugs are supposed to save you from accidentally over-volting your devices.

Reset copyright to 14 years, one time renewable for another 14 for a hefty fee, worth it for blockbusters and bestsellers, not for anything else. And no more "moral rights"; derivative works should always be allowed if they are not blatant copies. If some Star Wars or Harry Potter fanfic book or movie is shitty, then the market will take care of that. And if is not shitty but good, then the public will be well served with new content they will enjoy. That was the purpose of copyright, once. Let's make it so again.

While major media companies are wiping their arse with the social contract that is copyright, I do not feel one tiny bit of obligation to uphold my end of it, and I will turn to piracy when and where I can. Screw them.

The only thing that's getting pegged are the people who buy them. This incident, and the crash or loss-of-peg of other stablecoins (Luna, Terra, USDe, Tether, Titan) shows that these things are only weakly attached to the underlying currency they are supposed to be pegged to.

Though some central banks have plans to issue stablecoins of their own, which will probably be actually stable.

AIs are getting a lot better. The current generation of "AI" support I get on the phone or an online chat can barely make sense of my question, usually responds with "can you word that in a different way to help me understand". I'm already happy if they understand the phrase "I would like to talk to a person" and put me through to one, and that's a pretty low bar. But the latest AI support systems that are beginning to be rolled out are surprisingly helpful.

The newer ones promise something new: they can act as 1st and 2nd line of support at the same time, solving more complex issues without having to kick it up the support chain. That's probably why SalesForce claim such a large reduction in ticket resolution time. And offering a similar service with human support staff would probably be way too expensive.

That's: "Shouldn't be".

I do see you point about big and small players: the danger of looser copyright rules is that the big players are in a better position to steal your work and then just bankrupt you in court. But that is a failure of the court system rather than copyright.

That depends on how similar the movies are. There is more than one "work" in play here: the script / story, and the movie made from that script. Even if the new movie is in a completely different style than the original (a cartoon instead of live action, perhaps), different enough to make it a derived work rather than a copy, there's still the matter of the script / story being almost the same. The bar for something being a proper derived work of an original story should be rather high, it should be a new story... but it most definitely should be allowed to incorporate characters and lore from the original... Or write a similar story but with different characters in a different setting. The criteria for when something is a copy rather than a new work are not so easy to define... but the line should be where they are now, where you get copyright strikes for using a tiny sample of someone's song in your own, or for showing a brief clip of a movie in a review.

They are not appropriating anything, they are remixing and creating derivative works, something that people have done since the dawn of civilisation, something that has expanded the abundance of culture, and something that the original form of copyright was not meant to put a stop to (since copyright was invented to serve that abundance, not the creators). Why on earth should content creators get to control derivative works and levy a tax on them? It's absurd. You get paid for your own work, which is what copyright exists for. You should not get paid for someone else's work, even if that other person re-used some of your ideas. Even if (god forbid!) they make a buck with their work?

Screw these entitled content creators; copyright (and moral rights) have been preverted beyond recognition, and need a reform. Not gonna happen though... but I feel not a shred of remorse for authors whose work now gets remixed in AI.

Same. I am still subscribed to Prime, for the delivery perks, the free Twitch sub, and the content I guess. But I'll get that content on the High Seas from now on.

The I stands for Intranet. Don't buy crap that relies on the cloud.

There are some devices that phone home and/or are cloud enabled, but do not require the cloud to function. Though in a lot of cases that does mean you have to set up an alternative app to control it, for instance something like Home Assistant or Apple HomeKit; it's pretty rare for the vendor's app to work locally without access to the cloud (Philips Hue used to, for instance, though I'm not sure if it still does).

AFAIK the Ecobee WiFi thermostat works with HomeKit or whatever Google's equivalent is. Should be able to isolate it on a VLAN, and as long as your phone can see it, you can control it locally.

If Mr Beast is peak YouTube, then bring on the AI already.
I should say that I watch plenty of content on YT, but most of it is small and mid-sized channels. The small ones do it as a hobby, the larger ones as a business, and I'd hate to see them disappear or lose their income. But it seems that this was already happening before the rise of AI slop, revenues getting squeezed or the algorithm playing them false.

Absolutely. P&R lots as well as parking near offices are great places to charge, during to day so you can take advantage of cheap excess solar power. It's also a great way to make EVs viable for those who do not have the opportunity to charge at home. But here in NL that has been slow in coming as well. Many offices installed a mere handful of chargers that are invariably all occupied. That is where we need to scale up... as well as bring down the price of public chargers. Here it usually is 50-100% more expensive than at home.

Wondering about possible consequences. The reason I don't use cloud services like Google for anything except transient stuff, is that they can pull my access in case they decide they don't like me anymore. What happens if MS pull my account or they have a screw-up in their data center?